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Microsoft Teams Blog
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Track projects and share news in Teams with two new Power Apps

Microsoft_Teams_team's avatar
Microsoft_Teams_team
Silver Contributor
Feb 09, 2021

Within the Teams app store, you’ll now find two brand new applications published by Microsoft: Milestones and Bulletins. With the Milestones app, you can seamlessly track projects across your company, and with Bulletins, you can quickly publish news articles to the rest of your company.

 

 

Both are deeply integrated within Teams, but what makes them unique is that they are built with Power Apps on top of the recently released Dataverse for Teams. By shipping them on top of Dataverse for Teams, we’re making it possible for you to fully customize these apps from top to bottom and to leverage them as inspiration to build your own apps!


Further customizing the apps to fit your needs
Like the existing Employee ideas, Inspection, and Issue reporting Teams apps, these brand new apps are built on top of Power Apps so that you can easily customize them to address your company’s specific needs.

 

With Power Apps and Dataverse for Teams, you can change things as simple as the branding of your app, all the way to what type of data you want to collect and the business rules you want to enforce.


Using Milestones and Bulletins as inspiration for your next app
If the new Milestones and Bulletins apps have inspired you to build your own apps on top of Dataverse for Teams, check out our documentation on how to get started.

 

In particular, these new apps take advantage of the recently released share with colleagues functionality. With the new share with colleagues feature, you can take apps like Bulletins and broadly distribute them to the rest of the company. The same feature can allow you to build organization-wide apps like time reporting, invoicing, expense reporting, and more, all on top of Dataverse for Teams.


Governing apps on top of Dataverse for Teams
Lastly, I would be remiss if I didn’t call out the powerful tools we ship to allow admins to govern apps like Milestones and Bulletins. In particular, we’ve shipped a powerful template as part of the Center of Excellence Starter Kit to manage Dataverse for Teams environments. With it, users within your company can provide business justifications for Dataverse for Teams so that admins can approve the usage.

Team owners can provide a business justification for their new environment within X days of creating the environment

 

Admins approve or reject the submitted business justifications, and optionally mark them for a later review.

 

We can’t wait to see what you’re able to build with Power Apps and Teams
We’re always excited to see what the community is able to build. To learn more about the Milestones and Bulletins, and to get further inspiration for what’s possible, check out the deep dive into these two apps by the Power Apps team.

 

Updated Feb 09, 2021
Version 3.0

48 Comments

  • bethpurnell's avatar
    bethpurnell
    Brass Contributor

    I'm also receiving the error message on both apps. I've tried to add it to a couple of Teams/Channels, same result. 

     

  • Could it be, that MS in fact does not have much of an idea about project management other than MS Project?
    So far the copied Trello, tried to build upon the Trello idea, restated that Sharepoint is the mother of old project management and now there is Milestones which looks at first sight like a mixture of all of the above.
    Looks like a contest around which of the products is loved the least...
    MS you can do better than this, we are firm believers and now ACT! Please.

  • dmeffe's avatar
    dmeffe
    Brass Contributor

    PhilFancyAndMe 
    Milestones: That is a tool lots of our project guys were waiting for and I was excited as I read the news and began to try it. But sadly it turns out it is just a app with no connection to any Planner plan, just an island for data to be kept up to date by hand - that will not work for most people. So "high potential as well, but not as is". 

    I agree... looks powerful and I like the customizability. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to integrate with Teams' default Tasks By Planner. It's just another place to hold data, as it's not pushing to member's tasks list.

    KPKing 
    Please just focus your efforts in one place!

    Exactly! Love the enthusiasm and trying new things, but there are already several project management tools from various companies... and now there are several within Microsoft.

  • Bulletins: Would be a great thing if it would post to the linked Teams as a new Bulletin is created. I know this can be done within Power Apps but in current state no one can use it ootb. The users would just not click on the new tab if they did not knew there was something new. So you can just continue adding a SharePoint page on a tab (which means you do not have to copy content to Bulletins and reach the same goal). So "could be a great tool, but not as is".

     

    Milestones: That is a tool lots of our project guys were waiting for and I was excited as I read the news and began to try it. But sadly it turns out it is just a app with no connection to any Planner plan, just an island for data to be kept up to date by hand - that will not work for most people. So "high potential as well, but not as is". 

    I know I could put in some hours or days with Power Apps and modify both to be more connected. Sadly that is not what I have lots of time for. 

  • Sam Gray's avatar
    Sam Gray
    Brass Contributor

    Microsoft_Teams_team I think there may be something wrong with the Milestones package. Bulletins has installed fine.  But when Milestone gets to the end it says installed successfully and then says failed to install.

  • Please focus on Project for the web and/or Planner. This just makes things confusing.

  • KPKing's avatar
    KPKing
    Iron Contributor

    Sometimes I feel like Microsoft is trolling us. Milestones? Seriously? As if we need yet another project management app? Tasks, Planners, Project for Office 365, Project for the Web, Lists.... now Milestones? Please just focus your efforts in one place! You're starting to look like Google LOL!

  • noahsparks's avatar
    noahsparks
    Bronze Contributor

    The first link to the Power Apps blog appears to have a trailing space at the end. Thanks for sharing! Exciting to give Bulletins a try.