Four new ways to simplify your work with Microsoft Teams and Power Automate
Published Aug 20 2020 12:01 PM 78.9K Views

Microsoft Teams can help people stay connected while working apart with capabilities like chat, meetings, and calling, but users often ask how it can help streamline the work they do. Fortunately, Teams and Microsoft Power Automate work seamlessly together to simplify how you and your team work – whether you’re on the Sales team, the Product team, the HR team, or just the office ping pong team.

 

Power Automate allows you to create low-code workflow automation for yourself and your entire team using logic-based building blocks, starting with a trigger that sets one or more actions in motion. The new "for a selected message" trigger is unlocking new ways to drive business processes, starting from a message in Teams. Below are four examples of how teams are doing this, but the possibilities are endless. Templates are now available for each of these scenarios to help you get started right away!

 

1. Sales teams: Convert a chat to a Sales opportunity
"Create an opportunity from a message" template
Creating a customer opportunity is a critical step in any Sales process, and often that opportunity starts with a conversation. Now Teams users can create an opportunity right from the conversation where it began.

 

When you build the workflow below 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 and selecting “Create Sales Opportunity”. Simply fill out a custom form, and the information you enter is automatically sent to your CRM system.

 

2. Project Management teams: Track project information where your team works
"Create an item from a message" template
A rich and open dialogue means that projects can happen faster, and nearly all projects require us to keep lists – whether that’s a project status, the plan for an event, or a list of materials to develop.

 

SharePoint lists are a great way to organize information and rich file types for you and your team, and now Teams users can easily add content to their SharePoint lists directly from chat with this new Power Automate trigger. Once the flow has been created, users can add critical data to their list right from a chat – for example, when they learn that a project deliverable has been received.

 

3. Product teams: Streamline product development
"Create a work item from a message" template
The product development process is complex and often relies on multiple teams working together. With so much collaboration and planning happening over chat, messages can be a great way to request or report new work items to your development team.

 

By combining the “for selected message” trigger with the Azure DevOps “create a work item” action, you can now use the message as the starting point to create a work item. All the necessary details can be added to Azure DevOps to provide more details for the work item.

 

4. Any team: Follow-up on important conversations
"Follow-up on a message" template
Many of us have been there – you receive an important message right as you’re about to start a meeting or are in the flow of important work. Now it’s easy to remind yourself to follow-up on an important message from a colleague at a later time, like after your Teams meeting or once you’ve finish working on an important document.

 

Building a simple “follow-up” flow will allow anyone on the team to create a custom message reminder just by clicking the “…” on the right-hand side of a message and specifying when they want to be reminded. The Flow bot will send a reminder and a link to the message right in Teams.

 

Check out the "for a selected message" documentation and additional details to learn more about this new capability. Of course the examples above are just scratching the surface of what is possible for you and your team to automate, so check out the Power Automate templates for Teams and learn to build your own flows to achieve even more. We’re excited to hear about what you build!

 

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‎Jan 26 2021 11:50 AM
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