Forum Discussion
Create an alert system for field workers with Microsoft Teams, Exchange and Power Automate
Hello Community,
Let me share with you a case study that may help some of you, ( or at least give you some ideas ).
Initial Situation
Some Companies have many field workers and they need to keep updated in real time about new orders/requests. Create a mailbox for each of them is expensive and it's hard to monitore if each field worker received all the notifications.
Target Group
Field Workers
Benefits
Centralize customer's new orders/request in a single managed/monitored place and keep real time control over the work dispatch.
Tools
MS Teams
Exchange Online
Power Automate
How it is done
. Create a "orders" mailbox and configure an auto reply message to confirm to the customers that one technician is on the way.
. Create a "orders" MS Teams Group/Channel and grant membership to all field workers. ( To get this automated, you can create a dynamic distribution group. Dynamic membership enables the membership of a team to be defined by one or more rules that check for certain user attributes in Azure Active Directory (Azure AD). Users are automatically added or removed to the correct teams as user attributes change or users join and leave the tenant ).
. In Power Automate, create a flow that forwards the orders mailbox messages to the MS Teams Channel.
1. Create the mailbox and the auto reply message.
2. Create a "orders" MS Teams Group/Channel
3. Configure the Power Automate flow
How it works
When a customer send a message to the "orders" mailbox, he/she will receive the following auto reply message, ( see screenshots below ).
The customer's message will arrive to the "orders" mailbox and a Power Automate card will be created in the MS Teams Channel with the message content.
That way a technician can take care of the order and all the field workers will be informed.
Optionally, you can have a dispatcher figure, assigning the orders to the available technicians and organizing the tasks with Planner.
You can also use Mentions, improve the alerts system with more options, etc... The possibilities are infinite. This is only a start point that would be very helpful in some environments.
3 Replies
- Thanks for share. You could even send the mail directly to the Teams Channel picking its email address.
Hi danirecio,
Yes, you're right. But doing it with Power Automate allows you more freedom and personalization than a simple forwarding.
You can trigger many actions for the event or add more actions to that single trigger. For example, create the mentioned Teams alert, personalize it and also save the order to a dedicated SharePoint list for documentation/tracking. The possibilities are endless.
Of course, it depends of each Company needs. The forwarding should work pretty fine, ( but ensure to check that's enabled in the environment, as in some of them it's blocked ).
- Agree with the posibilities of customization with power automate, but I replied because the screenshot in your power automate sample is doing just a "forwarding", so if you send directly to the channel email is the same result.
Any case, great post, thanks for it.
