Speaker 1: Hi, I'm Sonal from the Microsoft Teams team.

Speaker 2: I'm Harish from the Power Automate team.

Speaker 1: We're excited to share a feature that you can use to save time by streamlining tasks and day-to-day activities, and that is Workflows in Teams. Now, let's dig a little deeper into this. Workflows in Teams are now available to make it easier than ever to start automating your workday. With a few clicks, you can access Workflows directly from within the Teams Store.

Speaker 2: We will show you how you can streamline your day-to-day work with out-of-box automation templates in the Teams Workflow Store. To get started, let's head on over to the Teams App Store by clicking the Store icon. And don't worry if you've never automated a Workflow before, there are commonly used templates to help you get started. We're going to be walking you through some of them today. So, Sonal, how do we begin now that we are on the Teams App Store?

Speaker 1: Right, Harish. In the Store, you can see that Workflows has been added as a new category. When I click on the category, I can see that there are numerous groupings where I can find Workflows for productivity, approvals, notifications, and more. One place I always like to check is Topics. Once there, I can see some useful Workflows, like scheduling a follow-up reminder to a message, or creating a planner task from a message. Scrolling down, you can see that we have pre-configured Workflows for partner apps like Asana and more. Let's try one of these out. To get us started on the Feature App Showcase for today, we are going to be looking at Welcome New Team Members Workflow. When I click on the template, it's going to ask to make sure I'm signed in to all the services I need. So I just click Sign In to verify, and then hit Next. From there, I select the team I want to send welcome messages in, and what channel I want to post to. After that, I just select Create Flow, and that's all there is to it. Now there will be automatic welcome messages from me when someone is added to the team.

Speaker 2: Speaking of hybrid work, our next feature showcases how we can manually trigger to-do task flows. With hybrid work, it can get very easy to lose track of work sent across channel messages. You can set up a Workflow on your team's channel for a to-do task that lets you set up a keyword that automatically creates a task whenever it's mentioned. For this, we're using to-do, and this action looks for that word and auto-adds a task with a link back to the message directly in Planner. This allows you to stay on top of tasks mentioned over messages, like sharing a draft of a new contract or setting up time to meet with a sales team.

Speaker 1: What else do you think we should show, Harish? I think we should show everyone how you can access the workflows you need right in the chat and channel conversations. You can now notify your channel that you will be out of office. Now that a lot of us are working from home and we don't get to see each other very often, it's super helpful. Click on the ellipses or the three dots in your message extensions tray and in the search bar, type workflows if you don't really see the workflows icon already. If you don't have any templates that you're already using, just hit the plus sign to search for new ones. Among the templates, you'll find the notify a channel you'll be out of office. Once you click open the template, check that you're all signed in and you'll see a green check mark besides the attached apps. Once you hit next, you can create a custom out-of-office calendar event, Outlook auto-reply email, and Teams status message, and a post to a channel notifying people you'll be out and all in one workflow. So the next time you open your workflow message extension tray, you'll be able to see a notify a channel that you'll be out of office since you've already pre-configured it. Once you open it, you can see your start date, end date, and other parameters that you can enter right away. And once you hit submit, you can get all the benefits from the workflow right when you hit submit. So Harish, what's another really cool feature we can showcase today?

Speaker 2: I'm glad you asked. This feature is important. With remote collaboration taking place across different time zones and everyone balancing work and personal obligations, a team's work and focus times might not always align. With personal chats, you can set a reminder to send or reply to a message that you meant to follow up on that ensures you're not bothering your colleagues during your non-office work hours. Click on a chat message and then on the ellipsis icon, click on more actions and you'll see an option to create a new action. From here, you can click on the template follow up on a new message to create this flow. These can be manually triggered workflows that can be kicked off from any message or the compose box or automated workflows that trigger whenever an event occurs.

Speaker 1: We're continuing to add more and more workflow templates based on your feedback and hope you find workflows that make your day a little bit easier. Give us a like and be sure to subscribe to stay up to date on more productivity tips and the latest features from Microsoft Teams.