Speaker 1: . Hello, everyone. Welcome back to Teams in 20, where we take 20 minutes of your time during lunch, and we talk to you about Microsoft technology. Today, we are here to talk to you about Tasks Publishing and the Updates app. We have myself and Chris Slunt presenting, so we are both Customer Success Managers here at Microsoft, and I'll be talking about Tasks Publishing today, and Chris will be talking about the Updates app. Without further ado, let's get right into it, because we have a lot to talk about today. First, let's look at Tasks Publishing. You might be asking yourself, what is Tasks Publishing? You may be familiar with the standard tasks using platforms such as Microsoft Planner and Microsoft To-Do, and you can use these platforms and apps to create tasks and assign tasks. But these are all owned individually, and they're created at an individual level. But there are larger organizations that have to share multiple tasks across the entire organization. For example, you could have a retail store with multiple branches, and each branch has its own team site in Teams, and they want to make sure to cascade those tasks all the way through the organization. This is where Tasks Publishing comes in. Now, it is worth noting that Tasks Publishing needs to be switched on in your tenant for you to be able to access it and view it. You might not be able to see all these features in your Teams currently, but I'm here to show you today what is possible with Tasks Publishing. This slide summarizes Tasks Publishing in five main points. Tasks Publishing allows you to publish a task in multiple Teams in one click. It's very easy to just set up one task and it's sent out to the entire organization no matter how large. You can also filter these tasks and maybe you want to target a specific part of the organization instead of the whole organization and Tasks Publishing allows you to do that. You can also see who has completed and assigned tasks at a single glance all in one page, and I'll show you that in a little bit. You can also duplicate regular task lists. Say you have tasks that have to be done monthly, for example. Instead of creating that new task every month, you could just duplicate the same list. Lastly, as I mentioned, Tasks Publishing needs to be enabled in your tenant for you to be able to use these features. Here's an example of how Tasks Publishing can be used. Say corporate headquarters, they have tasks that they would like everyone to do. They create these tasks and they send a message out to the managers, and then those managers go through and they assign those tasks to front-end workers who are usually using their phones in retail, for example. But they could be using other devices, laptops or computers. Before I get into the demo, here's a visualization of how an organization could look like. You have headquarters up here, and then you have the different branches, and each one will have a different team sites, and then each branch will have its own managers and its own front-end workers. Let me just jump right into the demo to show you what it all looks like. Here in my demo tenants, I have my team sites. As you can see on the left-hand side here, we have different team sites for each store, so each branch has its own team sites. There's automatically a tab up here called Tasks that has been assigned. Once I click on that, I'll open Tasks. If you've used Planner before, it's a very familiar view to that. You have different buckets and tasks that fall under each bucket. You can go through and look at those. I could also go ahead, and rename these buckets if I want, so those are very customizable, and to make sure they are specific to my organization as well. Then you can also change the view of how you see these tasks. You can have them show up as a list. You can also have the board show up as I showed, show area with different buckets. You can also have charts as well, so it'll show you the different status of the task, the progress, what buckets they fall under, different priorities. Lastly, you can view them all in a schedule-like way, just like this. Now, if I go to the Tasks app in Teams, so I have it pinned to the side over here, it's called Tasks by Planner and To-Do. What you'll usually see is this personalized one, so here it links your tasks from Microsoft To-Do as well as Planners. You may be part of a different task that are assigned to you, so you can go through and see your individual tasks, but if you do have Tasks Publishing switched on in your tenant, you'll have this extra tab up here called Publish Lists. Once I go through and click on that, I can go through and see the different lists that I have published. I can also see different drafts I have pending and so on and so forth. Let's just start from the beginning and just create a new list. If I go to the bottom down here, I can just click on New Lists. I'll just give it a name, so say I want to call it Midday List. I'll say Update, and then I select the team that the task is from. In my case right now, I want the task and the list to be sent from HQ so that when people receive the task, they know it has been assigned and published from Retail HQ. I go through and create that list. Then once this pops up, I can go through and just create a different task that I want. Say for example, I want to check inventory. I'll just go through it and type that in, check inventory. Then I can also assign the tasks a different priority. Say for example, this is an important task, I can put the due date as well. I can make that maybe due tomorrow, and then I can assign it a bucket. I go through and this is an across-the-store task. I can just click on the check mark to create that task. These are all drafts. It hasn't been published yet. I'm going to publish that in a little bit once I'm done. I can go through, I can add as many tasks as I want and assign them different priorities and due dates and so on. I can also open the task as well. What I can do is I can add notes and descriptions. I can have different checklist items. Maybe this task has several items to be done before the task can be complete. I can go through and add those. I can also easily add an attachment from my computer, from a Teams file, or a link. Maybe there's a relevant deck or a relevant document that you want to attach. I can also go through and change the bucket, the priority, and so on. Say I'm done. I've set all the tasks that I want. All I do is click on publish to publish the tasks. Now, I have two options on how I can publish the task. I can select a team from hierarchy, or I can upload a customized list of teams. If I click on this second option, it'll tell me to upload a team, and it'll tell me to upload a file of the different teams, the list of teams that I want to customize. Or if I go back to select teams from hierarchy, what I can do is I can filter the teams and go through and do that. Say I want all the store layouts, I'll click on all of those, but say the regions that I want to focus on are only the northern regions. I'll click on the northern regions, and then it'll give me all the teams that are available under the filters that I've selected. The retail store one, and retail store two, fall under these categories. So I'll just click on those, click next, and then it'll just give me a quick check in to make sure everything's okay. Click on that, and then I'll publish the list. So I'll give that a few seconds. And then I will move back to the team, team site. So I'm in retail store one. Under general, I have the tasks bar up here. And then as you can see, the task was then published. Over here, I can go through, I can click plus and assign this task to certain people or groups. I can also expand the task. Now, once you've published a task, there are certain things that you can't change. So I can't change the name. I can't change the checklist items. I can't change the notes, but I can edit everything else. I can add comments. I can change the buckets. I can change the progress as well if I want to. And I can just go through and filter all of those. And then once that task is done, I can just check that off and it'll come off the list. And then if I, as management, if I go back to the tasks app, I can click on this list report up here. And then I can see if I drop this down, that's retail store one. I think I want a different one. So check into it. I just, I think it needs to be refreshed. Okay. And I'll just check this out. This is a set up of the tasks. And this is the task that I'm assigned. So I can just see, I can see that the task has been assigned and the task has been completed as well. And it's just a great way to do everything all in one place. As you can see in this image up here, you can see the task, whether they've been assigned, whether they've been completed and different progress and so on, you can also attach APIs to monitor task progression. And last but not least, this is what it looks like on the mobile view. So you can see the tasks that are assigned to you. You can see the planner, the tasks that you need to do in order to complete a task. And then I can go back to the task. And I can click on this one. to monitor task progression. And last but not least, this is what it looks like on the mobile view. So you can see the tasks that are assigned to you. You can see the planner and you can see your feed as well. And you also have the option to take photos, maybe to show the task that you wanted to share a photo and do it that way. So that is it for me on task publishing. Now I'm going to hand over to Chris to talk about, oh, just quickly, resources. If you want more resources, I'm going to post a stack in the communities. So if you want different resources, and this is what, this is a screenshot of the Excel sheet that you'd upload for the different teams and how to customize those. And now I'll hand over to Chris to talk about the Updates app.

Speaker 2: All right, great, thank you. There's a few questions in the chat. Zane, when you get a moment, you might be able to answer some of those I didn't get to. So the Updates app, is really used for requesting structured updates from your team or broader than that. And it provides kind of one place to review those updates as they come in. Those that you've requested updates from get notifications in Teams. And to kind of tie our two topics for today together, note that providing an update could be a task that then gets assigned in the way that you've just learned about, using a unique link to that update on the task, that you've assigned. So I'm going to just jump right into a demo. If we go to the next slide, I think it's just like setting up, we're doing a demo, I think, saying, yeah, right. So I'm gonna do a demo that comes from, to show you a real use case that I've been working on with the NHS. So I'm gonna go ahead and share my screen at this point. Okay, so I'm here in the personal app for Updates. It does, Updates can be requested from a channel as well, but I'm looking at the full kind of personal app here. And you reach that just like you do all of the other Teams apps, right? So from the three dots, you just search for Updates. Unlike the task publishing, which does need to be enabled by your admin because of the setup that's required there, Updates is available to everyone. It should be on by default. It's in the same category as approvals or tasks or these other kind of native apps that are part of Teams. So this is the app here and I can generate a new request. I'll go through several pieces of this, but just to show you what creating a new request looks like, there are several templates to choose from. I'll just pick the facility inspection one as an example. And if I were to pick this one, it's taking a second for that template to come up. So it shows me the preview of what's going on. So it shows me the preview of what's going on. So it shows me the preview of what the template looks like. I can pick that one and then come in here and adjust the settings, right? So I can then change any of the questions. I can edit these questions and this UI might look similar to you. It'll make sense in just a second. And if I click Next, I can specify who I want to request this update from. So who are the people that are submitting updates? And I can use groups as well. And I can use groups as individual people, right? So I can add some teams or whoever I want to submit those requests. And then I need to specify who can view the reports or the updates as they come in. And then I can set a recurring schedule for those if I want to. Or I have an option instead to provide, if it's not recurring, I can get a link, a specific link that I can send out to those people. In other words, if it's broader than those people, I want anybody to be able to submit it, then I don't have a set of people that I can remind. So what I get instead is a link that I send out and I can use automation to send out that link on a regular basis in whatever channels that I want to, but they can get links that take them directly to that update. So I'm going to cancel this one and show you back on, sorry, back on the updates app. What it's doing, so, sorry, when you can, when you've submitted that, when you submitted the request, then as they come in, I can look at one and see the whole series. So this has been sending requests daily, it looks like, but I've got responses here from the 16th of May from these two people. This is more for reviewing these updates if they were kind of monthly or weekly on a one-by-one basis to smaller groups of people. What it's doing on the backend here in order to do this is, as you may have guessed from the UI of editing those questions, it's using Microsoft Forms on the backend and then some workflows to collect the data and send reminders. But in my use case, I oversee all of the allied health professionals. And so I'm just getting all of the data across a NHS trust, right? These are physically therapists and the like, and I need to collect just nine weekly numbers from hundreds of staff. And I want them to get these reminders and I want one place to view them and I need a dashboard of what all that data is. So I've created an example here. If I edit this series, you can see I've created this one already, so collecting this data. It's just a set of numbers, right? But what I'm doing is sending it to teams of people, right? So I can send this one to the physios, right? And maybe it's to a whole hospital over here, right? But what I wanted to do was send it to even a broader group than that, to thousands of people, right? So what I have done is set up an automation that ports that data from forms, where it's getting collected, to a SharePoint list that I can then analyze. So in order to do that, once I've set up my update request, I can go into Forms, so if you log into Microsoft Forms, and then you land by default here on your recent ones. If you click on My Forms, you'll see this Teams update template. This is the one that you just created, right? So if I click on that, you'll see that there's an actual form behind the update, but you can't edit it here. Excuse me. You can't edit it here. You edit it back in the Updates app in Teams. But what this gives me is an ability to now download the results in an Excel format, right? So if I click and I can open that up in Excel, I can use that Excel file to create a SharePoint list, like I've done here, that has all of the same fields. So if you've ever created a new SharePoint list, you know, one of the options is I can start from an Excel file, right? So now I have kind of a database that I'm going to be able to do more. I can do a lot of things with it. And so what I've done is also set up an automation that I can trigger off of whenever a new response is submitted to that form, right? So I've selected, you know, that same form. I'm going to get the details of that form. And then in my case, I had nine numbers. And so I had to do some kind of fancy manipulation here in the flow to get those responses into actual numbers to pull into my SharePoint. SharePoint list. I have some experience with Power Automate, so I knew how to do that, but it only took me about 30 minutes to set it up. It looks more complicated, and you might not need all this data manipulation here for your example. But in the end, I'm just creating a list item then to put all of that data into the SharePoint list. So now every time a update comes through, I am storing that data here in the SharePoint list. And what that leads me to be able to do then is say with one click, I can now generate my Power BI dashboard, which I did, and that I can show you that over here. So this is the dashboard, and it's going to take a minute to come up. But with that set up, I now have a Power BI dashboard that I can customize to my liking. So that's the updates app. There's a simple app, and maybe just out of the box it will work for you. But it was that simple. But I wanted to show how you could expand on that with some automation and pulling that data into other sources. That's me.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much for joining us today, and we really hope you have a great day. Bye.