Surveys on Microsoft Teams with notifications using Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Flow

The objective of this article is to demonstrate the power of Microsoft services available to create survey/quiz and automate processes without using any code.

Let us first create a quiz/survey on Microsoft Form, and publish it on Microsoft Teams. Login to Microsoft Forms and create a new quiz with appropriate points. Click on Share to get the response link to the created quiz. This link is posted on Microsoft Teams to get responses (This is explained at the later point of this article).

Creating Quiz/Survey on Microsoft Forms

Analyse and Enable Users to Adopt to Microsoft Teams early

As we are marching towards the transition phase from Skype to Microsoft Teams, let us look how you could enable/advice users to adopt to new technology early. The article helps you understand how you could automate the process of identifying users who are not of Microsoft Teams system, and sending them reminders to adopt to the latest technology. The approach explained here is one way of identifying and enabling users to adopt to Teams sooner. There are multiple ways to enable such adoptions.

Scenario

Let us first see how technically you could identify users and notify users on the usage. For this process, we will leverage Azure Logic Apps to create automated flows to identify the user pattern (usage and reports). The usage reports will be available on the Office 365 user activity reports. To access and manipulate the user patterns, we could leverage Microsoft Graph with necessary permissions.

As an example, we will consider logged in date as a parameter for this process. We will initially analyse the Microsoft team’s usage statistics on Office 365 report center and look for user logged in activity. If there are no activity present for any user, we will trigger an automated email for earlier adoption. Let us create a flow to achieve the entire process.

The below picture depicts the high level flow. In the below section, we will see each and every action in detail.

Azure Logic Apps Flow - To Identify Users not using Teams and Send Automated Mails

Automate Microsoft Teams Channel Creation Process with No-Code Configurations

The channels creation could be automated with the help of Microsoft Flow actions, and that is without writing any custom code. Microsoft Teams itself could be leveraged as medium for necessary user approvals.

As the Skype is sooner going to be replaced with Microsoft Teams, the necessary processes should be setup wherever required to ease the user and admin relationships.

Why do you need to setup such process? Let us consider a scenario, where your organization needs a process to create and setup channels in your Microsoft Teams tenant. Giving permissions for users/groups to create channels will end up with so much of test groups created. Instead, an approval process could be set to automate this process, to get necessary approvals for creating channels.

Configured Components

The implementation idea is going to very simple, with SharePoint and Microsoft Flow being used to automate this process. The following tools are being used for this demonstration.

• Microsoft Teams – Medium where this logic being applied 
• SharePoint list - an intermediate store for holding new channel registration information.
• Microsoft Flow – Configured steps to automate, 
• Send out necessary notifications to admins for approvals
• Based on approval decisions, create the necessary channels under respective team
• Send out an notification on channel creation

SharePoint/Teams Configuration

Set up the preliminary steps on SharePoint, for storing the requests.

• Setup a SharePoint list to get input of channel details form users. The input could be team name and channel name.
• Configure the list on any of the default teams channel tab.

The overall process is depicted in this picture.

Automate the Channel Creation Process - with no-code steps

Provide Anonymous User Access to Office 365 SharePoint Files for Specific Duration

In this post, let us look at giving the access to the files for specified interval. This requirement might be very useful in several aspects. Say for example, the scenario could be like the form/documents that needs to be filled within the specified deadline once generated.

Giving access doesn't mean working with file/item level permissions. This approach provides ways to generate links for SharePoint files with necessary permissions, that could be accessible for sometime.

In the previous article, we have seen ways to create and share links, which is scoped to users/groups/anonymous users.

• Create and Share Scoped Links of SharePoint Files to Users using Microsoft Flow

Microsoft has recently released an update, which has new set of actions. One such feature is stop sharing an item or file action.

Provide Access for Specified Time (Stop Sharing File)

From the previous post, we will go one more step ahead in revoking the provided access and sending out notification to user on the same.

Here 3 more actions are added.

• Delay: As per requirements, provide a delay/wait time for flow to pause.
• Stop sharing an item or folder: Revoke all the previously shared links.
• Send an email : Notification to say the permissions has been revoked.

Note: Stop sharing an item or folder, revokes/removes all the previously shared links, irrespective of any scope and target audience. So for example, let us consider previously two type of scoped links are created and shared for an item/folder. Executing stop sharing action will revoke/remove all the share links for that particular item/folder.

Create and Share Scoped Links of SharePoint Files to Users using Microsoft Flow

Assume a file is getting generated/getting created by users on the SharePoint online platforms. The business wants to share the file links with the targeted groups/users, which is view-able or editable. This business process is automated using SharePoint’s in-built sharing feature and Microsoft Flow.

SharePoint online has an inbuilt share feature, for creating links for items/files on it’s platform (At the end of this article, this OOB share feature snapshot is shown for reference). The scope of this feature is available in the following levels.

• Anonymous
• Organization
• Specific people

Microsoft Flow has a SharePoint action called “create sharing link feature for a file or folder”. At the time of writing, this action has the following scopes only.

• Anonymous
• Organization

Note: 

• The type of access could be either 
• view and edit
• or, view
• There is no scope for sharing it to specific people.