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- Coming up, we look at how anyone can automate
time-intensive common tasks that you use
day in and day out in Microsoft Teams.
Now, we're gonna show you how you already have everything
that you need to do this, including the access
to pre-built templates to quickly get you started,
and how you can even progress to building
your own mobile apps for your teams
with a simple point and click approach,
all without writing a single line of code.
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And here to show us how, I'm joined once again
by Aya Tange from Microsoft Teams, welcome back.
- Thanks for having me back on the show, Jeremy.
- Thank you, so, what we're gonna show today
is really powerful.
For one who's using Microsoft Teams, you can really use
the latest code-free technology integrated
in Microsoft Teams, really transform your day-to-day work.
- Right, and it's really powerful
and ultimately saves you time.
Most people know Microsoft Teams as the hub for team work,
where you have your chats, meetings, calls, applications
in a single and secure location.
But what I love most is actually being able
to streamline and even automate the things
that I do on a regular basis,
all within the context of Teams.
- Right, and there's always these things
that you come across and you think wouldn't it
just be better or easier if there was a way
to do that specific task that I do all the time
in a more automated way?
- Right, and another good example is
we all probably have to go through that
approval process, or we might be that key stakeholder
that needs to give that final approval.
So, let me show you what we can do here.
- Okay.
- So, I'm in Microsoft Teams here,
and you can see all the approvals that I've received,
as well as those that I have sent,
and also all of my history.
But we're taking this a step further,
and you can actually now receive alerts in chat
and directly approve in the chat.
So, let's show this Jeremy.
Do you mind uploading a document,
and let's see how this works.
- Sure, let me try this.
So, I'm here in my Teams channel for Approvals
in this case for Partner Services,
and I've got a file I want to upload here
to make sure that you can approve it.
- Right. - So, when I go in,
I'm gonna select this one here.
I'll click Open, and that's just gonna upload
the document then to this Files location,
and then once that's done, that will actually
be submitted for your approval.
- Right, I can just see the approval right here,
because my Flow bot has alerted me,
and now I can look at the link that you just sent me,
but because we've been working together
I'm just gonna go ahead and hit Approve
and I'm gonna say this looks great and hit Submit.
- Okay, so here I can see that your approval
actually just came through.
- Right, and so, this saved a lot of time.
All you had to do was upload the file,
and then it showed up in my Teams,
and I can approve directly from here.
So, you didn't have to go chase me down.
But when I approve this it also gives both me and you
a formalized record of that approval,
and this has all been automated.
But the best part is I built this myself, code-free.
- Okay, so then, what's behind this?
How are you getting all of the stuff to work?
- Sure, so, the backend here is Microsoft Flow.
If you're new to Microsoft Flow it's actually
a visual way to define the steps and conditions
within a process.
So, here you can see my Flow.
My file share in Teams actually lives in SharePoint.
So, when you upload a file the approval process kicks off.
It creates that approval, and then I can either
accept or deny with this built-in condition,
and then from there it'll inform the requester either way.
- Okay, that looked really great,
but we're going a little bit fast here.
Why don't we explain how you'd start out with a simple Flow,
'cause I know you're pretty fluent with that.
So, why don't we build one from scratch?
- Of course, so, I'm back in Teams here
in my Customer Support team under External requests,
and I want to add a Flow here, and I can easily do that
by just clicking on the plus tab here
and installing it and pressing Save.
You may be prompted to sign in.
If so, you can do that.
Here, I can actually create one from scratch,
or create one from a template.
And you can see we have a ton of templates here.
I can access all of this within Teams,
but there's also a website that you can look at,
and there's a complete set of templates here as well.
So, now because most of my coworkers and I live in Teams
we often miss some emails.
So, one of the templates that I've used in the past
is actually being able to be notified
when an email comes in.
So, here is the Flow that I'm talking about.
So, one tip here, Flow is tied to your identity
or your user account, and so, this makes it
so that you can only hook up to things
that you have permission to.
- Which makes sense.
It's kind of a security control.
You don't want to have to be able to Flow
all my emails, for example, into the team.
- Right, and don't worry Jeremy,
I can't steal your email through this Flow.
So, the typical scenario here is actually
if you are a sales support team,
and you have a shared inbox with customer inquiries
coming in, let's say at info@yourdomain.com.
And so, instead of actually having to leave
the Teams experience, continuously have to check
that inbox, you can use this pre-built template
in Flow and you can actually post the message into Teams
when the email arrives, so--
- This is great for a shared mailbox--
- Right. - That a lot of people
have access to.
- Exactly, so, let me show you how this works.
You can see here my inbox has already been pre-configured,
but I can also select a specific folder
that may be receiving requests.
I can also do other things,
such as include attachments.
Then I can go down into this condition here
and you can see the default is that
everything in the email will actually flow into Teams.
But I can decide what Team it goes into,
what specific channel, as well as what the message
is actually going to say.
So, in this case I want to make sure that my team
knows that it's an external request and very important,
so I've written in here external request.
I then can decide what from the email I want to pull in.
So, I obviously want to know who it's from,
the subject line, as well as the body of the email.
But I can also add other dynamic content here
if you wish.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and save this flow
and I can also test it right here,
but because you're with me, let's do this in real time.
So Jeremy, do you mind sending me an email,
and we can see how this works?
All right, and so, I've got an email here
that I'm ready to send.
I'll click send, and that will go into that mailbox.
- So I can see the email request just came through,
and I can see it says external request,
your email address, your subject line,
and all of the content of your email, all within chat.
- The great thing is that all this was achieved
without a single line of code.
So, it's a nice example.
- Right, so, this is something that anyone
on your team can really do.
But there is so much more you can do with Flow.
As you can see, we already have requests coming through,
and in this case, these are customers asking
for estimates on flooring jobs.
Now as a team, we can discuss who's gonna take the job
and how we're gonna respond.
So, let's say I'm gonna take this one.
And I will let my team know that I am.
But wouldn't it be great if I could actually
contact you, Jeremy, if you weren't sitting next to me,
and get all the details and actually set up an appointment
for me to actually come out and do the estimates
on your house?
- Okay, so, how would you go about doing that?
- This is a great way of actually using PowerApps
and another example of integrating processes
into Microsoft Teams.
So, let me show you how this works within Microsoft Teams,
but you can also access your PowerApp on your phone,
and again, I've built this without any coding,
and I'll show you that in a little bit.
- All right, sounds good, let's see it.
- Great, so, I'm gonna add your information Jeremy,
just by clicking on the plus button,
and to save time it's already been filled in.
So, I'm gonna go ahead and save the job.
- All right, so, is this a PowerApp then?
How did you get this to appear in your Teams channel?
- Right, so, once we actually built the PowerApp
it's just like any other tab in Teams.
Just like we did in Flow, you can click
on the plus button here and add your PowerApp,
and then select the specific app that you're looking for.
In my case, it's the Cost Estimator.
One of the coolest aspects of PowerApps is that
once you've actually built this out and published it
you can have them run on a mobile device
by any user in your organization.
- Okay, so, we've seen it now in the context
of Microsoft Teams, but how would I get that app
to run on your phone?
- Sure, so, users just need to go to the App Store,
or their Marketplace and install PowerApps.
Then, they would have to sign in
with their Microsoft 365 account
and then they will see all of the apps
that are shared with them.
If there's one that they use on a regular basis,
in this case it'd be my Cost Estimator app,
I could even pin this to the home screen,
so that I have easy access to it all the time.
- And it's great, 'cause it just is like any other app
on the phone, but what's next?
- So, let's pick up where we left off in Teams.
So, I'm gonna click your name Jeremy
and let's say I'm actually at your house now
and I'm ready to begin the estimate.
You want to do something in your kitchen.
It's 20 by 20, and now it'll calculate the square footage.
So, now it's time to select the flooring.
This is the fun part.
What kind of hardwood would you like?
- Of these options, I think I like the Natural Hickory.
- Perfect, so, we'll give you that,
and now I'm gonna add a photo of the current floor,
and review my estimate.
So, now I'm gonna sign and submit estimate, great.
And now all of this information is going to go to you
as the customer, as well as my team.
- All right, so, that looked like a pretty advanced step,
but how do you go about building that?
So, just to make it clear, I am not a developer,
and I actually used a template in PowerApps
to create all this.
So, I'll show you how I did this.
I'm going to go to my Cost Estimator app,
and this is really very much like building a PowerPoint.
So, it's first gonna ask me does it want it
to be a Tablet format or a Phone format?
I'm gonna choose Phone today.
So, now we're gonna start building this out.
So, in the app itself I'm gonna click into Cost Estimator,
and you can see that this is really just a simple text box
with the Properties on the right hand side.
- Right. - Then I'm gonna go
into Tree view and here I'll show you a few aspects
that we saw in my app just now.
So, I'm first gonna go to RoomPage.
This is where I wrote kitchen and 20 by 20.
Then I'm gonna go to FinishEstimatePage.
This is where I signed, and at the top
I'm gonna go to OpenJobsPage,
and this is where all my customer information is.
Then, in the top right hand corner I'm gonna click
the play button and you'll see exactly
what this looks like.
But what I love about PowerApps is it actually gives me
dummy data, so I can really see how this works.
- And this is really great because as a former web developer
I can reverse engineer this, and the nice thing
is I've got the scaffolding,
I've got some dummy data in this case.
How would I though make this app my own app
with my own data in it?
So, that's what Make my own app does.
It actually allows you to customize the data
that's behind the application.
So, first it asks me where my data is stored,
and my data is stored in OneDrive for Business.
This is where my Excel tables and images are stored.
So, let's jump into OneDrive.
Just to save time, I've actually already navigated
into the PowerApps folder and into my Cost Estimator app.
And here is my data Excel sheet,
and this is what's actually populating the application
and where all the new data will be stored,
and you can see the most recent information
about you, Jeremy, is right here.
So, I can also modify data directly from here as well.
So, let's say Bobbie's name is spelled incorrectly,
and we want to change it to Steinberg.
So, I'll make that change, and if we go back
to our PowerApps in Teams you can see that change
that I just made.
- And one of the nice things about this is
it's just using OneDrive behind it.
So, any time that you want to say go back in time,
if you want to un-delete or change Bobbie's name back
to Stein, it's just a version change in that file,
and you can also grant things like read/write permissions
to just the users of the app,
and it's all just backended by Excel.
So, you've shown us some really great use cases.
And these are technologies really integrated
with Microsoft Teams, but we can also build
more sophisticated business process automation
and we do even more with our app experiences, right?
- Right, so, once you actually take that step
and try these code-free approaches for yourself
you'll see how accessible these environments are.
- Right, and there's really a lot of opportunity then
for users to really streamline the business processes
they work with every single day,
and do that even further by automating the things
with Microsoft Flow and using things like PowerApps.
- Right, in fact, the example that I just gave you
was inspired by a dispatcher
at the glass repair company called Autoglass.
This dispatcher built his first app
to automate the process that their field technicians use
to update their job status while repairing
chipped or broken glass on cars.
He taught himself PowerApps and then built
and deployed his first app, all within one month,
and this is really just scratching the surface.
You can even integrate AI and machine learning
with Cognitive Services for speech, vision,
text, sentiment, and much more.
So, really the sky is the limit.
- And this is really great 'cause it could be
for a small business.
Maybe you have 10, or 20 employees,
or it could be a large organization
with 20,000 employees.
- Right, and all these workflows are easy to create
and manage within Teams to increase your efficiency.
- Really good stuff.
So, thanks for joining us today, Aya,
but what's a good way for folks watching to learn more?
- Sure, so, first try it out.
Start with those pre-built templates,
and you can modify them and then graduate
to building things from scratch.
And there are a lot of tutorials.
So, you can find out more at the link shown below.
But the best way is to really just kick those tires
and experiment like I did.
- Really great stuff.
So, hopefully everyone watching it will be inspired enough
to help improve general aspects of their day-to-day
workflows using Microsoft Flow and PowerApps for themselves.
And of course, keep watching Microsoft Mechanics
for the latest tech updates across Microsoft,
and we'll see you next time.
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