Sunday 27 October 2019

Building Organizational Chart with Office 365 data on Power Apps

Here, you will see how to build organizational chart on PowerApps.

Let us consider to have users list along with search box, to enable simple user search. On click of any user from the list, organizational chart will be shown.

Let us include following elements, to show organization structure on the PowerApps.
  1. Text box for search
  2. Gallery list for showing users
  3. Gallery list for showing manager information
  4. Gallery list for showing user reportees.

The following snapshot shows the preview of organizational chart.
Final Result: Organization Chart shown on PowerApps [Content Morphed]
Final Result: Organization Chart shown on PowerApps [Content Morphed]

Thursday 10 October 2019

PowerApps - App to Show Microsoft Teams members using MS Graph API


Microsoft PowerApps helps business/teams in building quick OOB apps. This post helps understanding, how to get access to Microsoft Teams data from PowerApps using custom connectors.

Why there is a need for custom connector? Microsoft has introduced lot of connectors on PowerApps interface to get access to the data. The Office 365 connectors included in Microsoft PowerApps are office 365 users, mails, etc. The custom connectors are created for the data, which is not exposed as connectors readily. The custom connectors are common for both Flow and PowerApps.

We are leveraging Microsoft Graph API as data sources for this app, and to be connected as custom connectors on Microsoft PowerApps. 

The following snapshot shows the end result, showing data from MS Teams on MS PowerApps using MS Graph API.
Demo App to Show MS Teams Data
Demo App to Show MS Teams Data

Let us look at step by step approach for achieving the functionality.

Sunday 22 September 2019

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
Creating Quiz/Survey on Microsoft Forms

Tuesday 3 September 2019

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

Monday 5 August 2019

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
Automate the Channel Creation Process - with no-code steps