Power Automate in MS Teams

Introduction

Daily business activities and mundane tasks pile up to excessive workloads that restrain employees to work creatively. To resolve this, Microsoft designed Power Automate as cloud-based low code solution that allows you to automate workflows and streamline repetitive tasks. Power Automate offers myriad of benefits when used in conjunction with Microsoft Teams. There are thousands of popular or pre-defined templates that can be used to simplify flow and automate routine tasks instantly.

Example scenarios

Let’s take a look at some example scenarios to learn how Power Automate transforms the way Team works –

Improve onboarding experience

You can add a new level of governance to Teams when a new team member is added. For example, you can send a welcome message to the new user as and when they are added to a team or channel. To do this, simply create flow and set up a trigger which will perform the action automatically.

Simplify approvals

You can manage the approval of documents or processes across several services, including SharePoint, Dynamics 365, Salesforce, OneDrive for Business, Zendesk, or WordPress.

To create an approval workflow, add the Approvals – Start and wait for an approval action to any flow. After you add this action, your flow can manage the approval of documents or processes. For example, you can create document approval flows that approve invoices, work orders, or sales quotations. You can also create process approval flows that approve vacation requests, overtime work, or travel plans.

Convert chat into sales opportunity

In a sales process, customer opportunity is built on initial conversation. Hence, it is important to capture information right from the moment conversation starts.

Using Power Automate, you can build the flow using the “for a selected message” trigger, anyone in your team can easily create a sales opportunity just by clicking the “…” on the right side of a message in Teams and selecting “Create a Sales opportunity”.  Simply fill out a custom form right in Teams, and the information you enter is automatically sent to your CRM system.

Set a reminder

Sometimes you may want to get a reminder message from a co-worker or your manager at a later time, like after your Teams meeting, or before the upcoming meeting in a week.  With a “follow-up later” flow, you simply need to click the “…” on the right-hand side of a message to set a reminder and specify when you want to be reminded.  The flow bot will send a reminder and a link to the message right in Teams.

Follow up on critical conversations

If you are too busy to check your messages when they ping, yet don’t want to forget to follow up, use the template ‘Follow up on a message’ and create the flow. Get back to Teams chat tab and click on ellipses to the right of the selected chat, go to More actions and click Follow up on a message. You will get a list of actions to choose. All set, you are ready to receive a gentle reminder after the selected time frame.

Create your own Teams actions

To create a custom Teams message flow, choose the “For a selected message” trigger from the Teams connector. You can even configure the trigger to collect information from the user when its run from within Teams. For instance, if the flow is creating a task, you can use the adaptive card to collect information like the title of the task and the description.

Power Automate also comes equipped with governance features that help reduce administration complexities of Microsoft 365 environment and empowers admins to uncover the greatest benefits from Power Platform services. To learn more about it, please click here.