Automate teams provisioning with the Request-a-team app template

We have heard your feedback and are aware that enterprise and departmental leaders are working to enhance productivity and collaboration, especially across remote workforces. Microsoft Teams plays a critical role in doing this. Therefore, to support and promote strategically focused Teams enablement, we are pleased to announce the newest app template: Request-a-team.

Request-a-team provides a framework that automates the provisioning process based on core teams and channel options which are relevant to optimizing usage. This enables faster response time for team requests and offers a wealth of personalization options for organizations to implement repeatable best practices on team collaboration.

Easy to use request forms encourage and enable reuse of best practices

The Request-a-team app template leverages a Power Apps application to surface easy-to-complete forms for the collection of information such as business justification, access scope, and ownership. End users can create teams from scratch, reuse existing internal teams, and/or take advantage of publicly available templates published by Microsoft.

Figure 1 Landing Screen for team requests

Figure 2 Set privacy in the first step of the wizard

Figure 3 Check availability of desired name and add additional detail to expose value

Figure 4 Follow best practices in ownership and enable member population up-front

Figure 5 Review inputs to ensure accuracy prior to submission

Actionable dashboards and adaptive cards keep everyone in the know

Once requests are submitted, it is important to keep track of progress and to respond to those requests as approvers. The Request-a-team app template offers list dashboards (shown below) and adaptive cards to keep everyone abreast of changes. Approvers may respond to requests either from the Approve requests tab (only visible by approvers), or within preferred channels where they can easily respond using an adaptive card. These dashboards include an extra bonus feature for cloning an existing request and give approvers an alternate place to approve/deny requests.

Figure 6 List dashboard showing previous requests

Figure 7 List dashboard showing Approve requests tab (for approvers)

Figure 8 Adaptive card targeted to approver's channel

Enable teams to hit the ground running with strategic templates

Reuse is important to scaling knowledge across the enterprise, thus Teams has always supported building teams from templates. Teams templates are pre-built definitions of a team's structure designed around a business need or project (learn more here). So, we have included this option in the Request-a-team app template in order to facilitate building teams from pre-existing internal Teams instances as well.

Haven’t had time to create reusable templates? No worries! Take advantage of the many tried and tested publicly released templates by Microsoft! Learn the purpose and description of each Microsoft template directly in the app by selecting one from the dropdown and checking out the description on the right.

Figure 10 List of publicly available Microsoft templates

Envision, Execute, and Enable

We are sure you will be delighted to discover the value of the new Request-a-team app template! This new template will empower remote workers to plan new teams based on learned best practices, to execute powerful Teams instances for productivity and collaboration, and to enable employees of all levels and skill sets to get the most out of the Microsoft Teams experience! We look forward to hearing your feedback soon.