Speaker 1: One of the most powerful features of any computer system maybe the most powerful feature is the ability to do repetitive tasks consistently and quickly and when we automate this process we get huge amounts of efficiency for our organization. We can automate simple tasks maybe something that we need to schedule or something that we need to do on a regular basis and we can also automate complete business processes and that's really unlocking the power of a computer system by building automated workflows. Let's take a look at how we can build an automated workflow in Microsoft Teams. Automating Microsoft Teams or any automation in the Microsoft world can be very very simple or quite complex. So I can take a simple process that I just want to automate or I can take an entire business process that has many parameters that I want to automate and I can ensure that I have consistency for all of them. So here I am in Microsoft Teams and in this video I'm going to show you a couple of simple automations but if you are interested in learning about more complex automation let me know. I'm happy to make videos on that topic as well. It's very useful but for now let's do some simple automations that are very useful. So Great Divide Trail and Big Mountain Hike are two teams that I have. If I go to the ellipse here I can go in and I can type in workflows and this is an application that I can install into Microsoft Teams that allows me to automate different actions. You can see here that in my case it says open because I already have it installed or if I didn't have it installed I could say add and I could add it but I'm going to close it from this location and instead I'm going to click on the app icon below here and underneath here you'll see that I now have apps and workflows. What I like about this is look at all of the different templates that Microsoft has provided that I can just use as is or I can make slight modifications to to suit my environment. I really like that and I'm also going to talk about how I can use the manage workflows once I've created them. So let's create some workflows. Now the first thing you'll notice is there's a number of top picks for us that we can look at. Things like follow up on a message, things like you know invite or welcome new team members into Microsoft Teams and post their bios in there, that sort of thing in there. I almost said bios like their computers, bios. So the idea here is that there's all sorts of cool things that we can do right out of the box. One of the things you'll notice is some icons on here that relates to the services that you need to have access to in order for these workflows to work. So a good example of this is if I want to create a workflow for project planning I need to have access to project or the planner task. So I'm not going to be able to create a planner workflow if I don't have access to planner. But let's do the follow up on a message. Notice that for this one here I have to have access to Teams and I have to have access to Office 365. Both of these are services that I'm currently logged into and I can give it a name. So I'm just going to call it follow up rather than follow up on a message. I'm just going to call it follow up. I'm going to then sign in to Microsoft Teams and Office 365. You can see by the green check marks that I've successfully signed into both of those services. That means that this workflow can work with both of those services. I can even hit the ellipse here and I can add additional accounts in there if I need to. But I'm fine. I'm going to go and add this workflow. This is a very simple workflow. It's just going to be added and add functionality to Teams. You'll see that Power Automate has now sent a card here and you'll see it gives me instructions on how to use this workflow. When I have a message what I'm going to do is just go into more options. I can click follow up and it'll prompt me for a time that I wish to be reminded to follow up on the message. Let me show you how that works. So I'll click done and I'll go into my chat. There's the card from Power Automate that told me that it created the workflow. But I'm going to be having a chat conversation with Diane. So let's say I'm having a conversation with Diana Prince who happens to be Wonder Woman if anybody's following along. And let's say I go in here and I say here's a YouTube video that you should watch. So I want her to watch this video on the whiteboard tutorial and then I'm going to follow up with her to see if she has any questions. So please watch this over the weekend and then what I do is I go into the ellipse here, go into more actions and I go into follow up. Now underneath follow up it's going to say when do you want to be reminded about this message. So I want to be reminded let's say on Monday I'm going to talk to her at 9 a.m in the morning and we're going to have conversations to discuss whiteboard to make sure that she understood how to use the Microsoft whiteboard to make sure she watched this video. And that's it. I've now created an automated action that will go into Teams. It will see that there's a time or a follow-up on this particular message and then it will remind me in my Office 365 account that I need to follow up with her about this video. That's an example of a very simple workflow that we can do right away. You should be able to do that right away. Let's go into one that's slightly more complex. So once again I'm going to go into workflows. In this case here I'm going to go see all. I'm still just seeing all of the top picks. I could go into a different category in here but in this case I want to do one that saves a message to OneNote. So here it's a little bit different. So I'm going to say save a message to OneNote. Notice here that for the connections I need Microsoft Teams, Microsoft OneNote Business and Office 365. I have all of these services so I will sign into all of these services and you can see that I'm now connecting to them and it's all happy. It's connected to all of them. I can even add other ones in there. I'll now say next and now it's going to ask a little bit more complex information. It's going to say well when you run this workflow what notebook do you want to go to? And in my case what I want to do is go to my main notebook and says okay what section do you want to go to? And it'll go through and because I'm logged in it knows what those sections are. So in my main notebook the Teams tutorial I'm going to put this or I'm going to have the ability to put a message in there. So I'll add the workflow and I'll demonstrate this to you. So we go in there once again Power Automate indicates that it worked. Once again it's an add-on to the more options. I'll say done. Let's go back to my chat. Let's go back to my conversation that I'm having with Diana. Maybe what I want to do is in my OneNote I want to go to more actions and in this case here I'm going to save this to OneNote. So now it's going to launch the automated action. It's going to say do you want to add a note to this? You know and I'll say reference for conversation with Diana. Now it could obviously be the other the other option I did would reference back to the message but I'm just going to go submit this and then it's going to open up my OneNote for business. It's all doing this automatically. So it's opening up my OneNote for business. It sent me a card and it actually put that in there and if I want to see that card I can view the note. It's already saved there so I'm just opening it this way. I could easily open it with OneNote and there's reference for my conversation with Diana and you can see that it's got a link back to the message. So that's a very handy way to add elements into my OneNote directly out of messages that I have in Teams. Now if I go to power automate here you'll notice that it's here. I could also I'll just do it this way. I'll go to my apps. I'll go to my workflows. Underneath workflows see where it says manage workflows. I can go into manage workflows here and both of those workflows that I created are now here on a list. I have one that I was testing with. Actually I should get rid of that one. We'll just delete that one out of there. So I have here my save a message to OneNote and my follow-up workflows. Notice that I can turn them off. So let's say it's something that I don't want to use or something that I temporarily want to disable. I can do that. I can see who owns the workflow. I can see what type of workflow it is. It's instant because I can invoke it. Notice that it's not applicable to a team or a channel because it's not something where if I add a new member to this team it invokes and puts it in here. I'll just close this here. Oh no I don't want to go to the running room. I'll go running later after this video. But I can go into this workflow and I can edit it and I can share it and I can also see how often it's been run. So you can see here that it was run about a minute ago this particular workflow and I can even get a copy of the times that it was run. So this can be very handy if I have something like a workflow where I want to add a bio of somebody into a team. I can see how often I've done that. Let's go back here. Go back into workflows. Go back in to manage those workflows and with these workflows another thing that I can do is let's go into the save the message to OneNote because that has several steps in it. You can see it gives me details about it when I modified it. How it works. The last runs that were in there gives me information of the connections of this workflow. I haven't shared it with anyone but here's a very useful tool. I can edit this workflow and this gives me the step-by-steps dialog boxes of everything that was being done in the workflow. Now this is starting to get more into the advanced but a lot of times if I'm building even a customized workflow I'll start with a template that Microsoft provides. But notice that it works with Microsoft Teams for a selected message. Then it goes and creates a page within a section of OneNote. Then it goes in and it gets my profile and then it posts that card into the channel saying that it has done it. I could add new steps to this. I could go in and modify a step. So for example underneath the page here I could go in and I could rename this step if I wanted to. I could add a note to the step so I can you know especially with complex business processes I usually map them out and then I build the workflow around them. But I also use this for documentation of the workflow. You can actually even look at the code if you want to get into the really heavy duty details of it. You can get into the code of that and you can even add new connections right in there as well for that particular step. If I double click on it right so if you go out hit the ellipse here. So if I go in here you can actually edit it as well but this particular one if so let's go into like a step in here. Not every step is going to be editable but you can see here that it talks a little bit about the fields that are in there. I'm getting more into the the more complex portions of Power Automate but the nice thing here is that you can actually I'll go into settings. So I can go in here and this is where I can do things like modify some of the settings that this particular step does when it comes to the workflow. Again in the weeds that's a little bit more complex. Comment down below if you are interested in seeing some more advanced workflow building. So underneath here I can save it if I've made changes. I can check it so I can go in and check it to see if there's any errors or warnings in there and you can even run a test on it. So I can rerun that test here on the workflow and I can go with the recently used trigger that I just did. It was four minutes ago. I just showed it to you and we'll go ahead and test this and now it's going to test that workflow to make sure it's running. You're going to see a bunch of green dots because I know that that workflow works. You see it sent the card which was the fourth step in this workflow. Now you're now not necessarily going to have to go in and create this complex of workflows when you start working with them. You're going to start initially just by using some of the built-in templates, getting used to how these workflows work and and using some of the more valuable ones in here. I like a lot of the data collection ones in here. So you can have data ones here if a task changes. One of the ones that's very popular is approval. The challenge you have with approval ones, just so you're aware, is they do rely on quite a few different services. So be aware that you're going to have to have access to these services. So if I do, I'll have to have Office 365. We'll have to be using Microsoft Approvals, Microsoft Teams, Microsoft Outlook, Microsoft SharePoint. In my case, if I go to sign in to all of these services, I don't know if I've put approvals. I did. So I have approvals as part of my team. But if I didn't, oh there we go, SharePoint. So in this case here, I haven't got the SharePoint login for this particular setup configured. So I would have to go in and I would have to make sure that I log in. I have an invalid connection here. So I'm going to have to go in and I'm going to have to go through, in this case, an on-prem gateway. And the reason for that, just now I've connected up. So I'll say next to this, this actually wouldn't work that well because I'm using a cloud PC to do this demo. But it just gives you an idea that some workflows are simple, some workflows are a bit more complex. If you're interested in more videos that demonstrate how we can automate workflows and business processes in Microsoft Teams, let me know in the comments down below. Meanwhile, share this video with others and comment and like and do all those YouTubey things. We'll see you in the next video. Thank you so much for watching.