MicrosoftSo After about 2 hours I think I got it to work. It does take a lot of effort and the end result is not as slick as you would like. But it does do what it promises. For me however it's not yet the right fit. The main reason being that the current system we have (a Dutch made product you can find on http://www.aattendance.nl) does a much better job at bringing it all together.
My findings:
Pro's:
- Free when your school has the Microsoft office for education version with unlimited free licenses for students and teachers)
- Simple and easy to understand layout
- Integrates in Teams when and where you want it
- Once set-up it's easy for teachers to add it to their Team
Con's:
- You have to select the Team you want to take attendance from. Even if the app is inside the Team itself (no link there)
- You have to set the start time and finish time
- You have to initiate the attendance taking after setting up above information before you see any students
- Team owners (like Teachers, assistant teachers, admins and all other non student accounts linked to the team) also show up on the attendance sheet
- The design makes it so that the top half of the page is taken up by information that can easily fit in one small row leaving only the bottom half for the actual overview of the attendees.
All in all I would say it has potential and I'm sure that with further development it can become more slick and easy to use. For now I would say either let the Microsoft Teams development team take a shot at it or let the community continue work on it. The beauty of this application is that it was made with PowerApps and from what I can see you can change the layout as you see fit if you have the know how. My guess would be that even the automatic detection of teams combined with Team agenda's could create a beautifull end result.
But allas for now we are sticking with our outsourced (paid) system and simply use the add website option in Teams to integrate it all into Teams. That way students don't have to leave Teams and can see their attendance record and teachers can register with the same ease as they would with this application.
PS. To the developers of this app, my hat goes of to you. I would not be able to create this myself but would be very happy to give practical feedback and compare the system we use now to what you have created here. Just because I won't be using the app does not mean I don't see the potential and passion that has gone into making it.
