Microsoft Teams is a collaboration platform from Microsoft with a huge number of integrations. It can help people and organizations stay productive in hybrid work environments, and Microsoft Power Platform provides custom development tools with little code required. The powerful Teams + Power Platform integration lets anyone build the tools they need to work and integrate them into their digital workplace. Here are some new ways it’s become easier to build, deploy, and manage these custom solutions, so teams can be even more productive!
1. Easily Automate Work for Your Teams
Integration is not yet available to everyone, but it will be soon. Automation is managed with Power Automate and Teams, and will allow you to create automated tasks in an even easier way. The new app will include a set of easy-to-use templates for some of the most common automation scenarios for Teams. Users will be able to create flows with drop-down menus and pre-populated dynamic text. Users will also have the option of creating flows from scratch, or editing flows they have already created.
2. Manage Approvals in Microsoft Teams
The approvals process can range in complexity across companies, but thanks to Microsoft Teams, you will now be able to create, manage and share approvals directly in the platform. Users can start the approval process from a chat, channel conversation, or the Approvals app in Teams. These easy approvals are powered by Power Automate.
3.Create Apps and Chatbots in Microsoft Teams
The new built-in Power Apps studio allows users to build custom apps with a simple drag-and-drop approach. These apps can be used on desktop computers or mobile devices, so everyone can be more productive, wherever they work.
Microsoft Teams gives you out-of-the-box apps so you don’t have to build them, and have made them available in the Power Apps app, as well as the Teams app store, so anyone can open and use them immediately. Because these solutions are built on the Power Platform, they are also highly customizable and can be modified to meet an organization’s specific needs.
The new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams provides a low-code authoring experience for building custom chatbots. Bots can be created simply by adding questions for the bot to ask, and messages for the bot to send back to the user. Although these robots can be simple to build, they are still very powerful. New features such as the ability for bots to recognize which user they are chatting with can provide a personalized user experience. For example, an employee who asks a bot about company HR policies may receive policies specific to their region or country.
4. Track Important Data via Power BI
An improved Power BI app for Teams, coming soon, will make it easy to discover the data that matters to your business, and quickly create visualizations from Excel data in Teams. The app also provides users with quick access to their frequently used reports, Power BI community sample reports, and commonly used organizational datasets. The app allows users to quickly send a report they’re reviewing to a chat or channel, even retaining report filtering and slicing, making it easy to start a chat with data. The ability to search Power BI content through the Teams search bar is also coming soon. These new features in the Power BI app for Teams provide a centralized place for users to collaborate on data, and make decisions more efficiently based on real-time insights.
In short …
Microsoft Teams is not just a collaboration platform; it allows you to perform almost all of your productivity tasks within the platform. If you want to know more about Teams, contact one of our experts, or to learn more follow one of our Microsoft Teams training sessions.
