...in which I don't go up mountains

Category: Flow / PowerAutomate

Screenshot: Adding a new list item in Teams

Copying Files, Flows, a Plan, SharePoint Lists and a Notebook from one Microsoft Team to another

Reading Time: 13 minutes

Picture of a checklist

First thing on the list: get organised!

A couple of weeks ago I discovered a University document called the New Learning Technologist Development Toolkit. And so I began a new project to follow it and develop my skills in Learning Technology. Obviously a project like this needed some way over the top organising… 😁

A while ago, I developed my own Microsoft Team called ‘Team of Me’, for organising myself and bringing my notes and notifications together in lockdown. This seemed like a good place to organise my training plans, so at first I created a channel in this Team to collect resources for this new project.

I began setting up a plan in Planner, creating lists of links, collecting PDF resources, making a few notes in the OneNote notebook and setting up some helpful Flows to channel messages into the right places, and cheer my progress along.

However, I soon discovered that the New Learning Technologist Toolkit, which looked like a short PDF, was actually a lot bigger than I’d thought. Everything it mentioned sent me down another rabbit hole of links and documents, and I realised it would need several channels in its own right to organise it all.

In fact, I began to suspect that becoming a Learning Technologist would take a lot longer than the 4 weeks listed after all. Who knew🙄. And so I decided to set my project up in a new Team of its own, which I’ve called ‘My New Learning Technologist Toolkit Team’.

The challenge now was to copy across the content I had collected and created in my original Teams channel into this new team.

Photo of a Qi Gong pose

Using Flow with Teams, part 2

Reading Time: 19 minutes

Recap

This is a follow on from my previous post, ‘Using Microsoft Flow to update a Teams group with SharePoint activity‘. Flow is also known as Power Automate, and it is a Microsoft method for connecting apps so that outputs from one app can become inputs to another app, and events that happen in one app can trigger procedures in another app.

In my previous post, I added Flow to a Microsoft Teams group, and set up conditional testing to post a message in one of two Teams channels, depending on the value chosen in a metadata column when a file was uploaded to a SharePoint library belonging to the Team.

The Plan

The next steps to improve on this Flow will be:

  1. Changing the SharePoint column name to ‘Relevance’ and the option labels, Teams channel names and Flow conditions to say ‘Urgent’ and ‘FYI’ rather than ‘Yesterday’ and ‘Never’. This morphed into the far more complicated problem of waiting for the SharePoint column value to change before continuing the Flow.
    Jump to this section.
  2. In the message that’s posted to Teams, change the text displaying the uploaded file’s URL to a working link to the file.
    Jump to this section.
  3. Post the message in Teams using the name of the person who uploaded the file to SharePoint.
    Jump to this section.
  4. Another thing I would like to do is to add the updates as cards in ‘To Do’ columns in the Teams group Trello board.
    Jump to this section.
  5. Summary: Bringing the last few things together. Jump to summary section
  6. Jump to links
Photo of a red squirrel

Using Microsoft Flow to update a Teams group with SharePoint activity

Reading Time: 6 minutes

I resumed my progress with Microsoft Flow after a pointless side quest attempting to change my favicon in SharePoint. I had very little success there, though I learned a lot, but with this, thankfully, I am having better luck.

To get started, I watched some of a video course on LinkedIn Learning: Microsoft Power Automate: Beyond the Basics, with Gini von Courter. I’ve watched enough of these now that I find Gini quite calming and pleasant to listen to: it’s a no nonsense way to get back in the frame of mind for the Microsoft universe (which is like the Marvel universe, but kind of solid, unmoving and heavy).

As it turned out, this course was ideal for me, because I’d already set up a Teams group for my current project and Gini started off with adding Microsoft Flow to Teams. Being quite new to Microsoft Teams, I hadn’t thought of doing that before, but it does make a lot of sense and offers some useful opportunities worth practising.

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