Customize Microsoft Teams in Office 365 (Video)

TRANSCRIPT

Tracey: Welcome, everyone, and thank you for joining us for our presentation on Office 365, Customizing Microsoft Teams. I don’t have my headset on right now because I’ve got this short little video I want you to guys to be able to hear, so I’ll plug my headset in. So if the sounds not very good right now, that will only be for a couple of slides.

I’m Tracey Santos, and I’m gonna be doing a presentation today. I’ve been with Encore for over 20 years, and I’m a CPA, CGA, and I love my job, and I love working with Office 365. I’m really enjoying exploring all that cool, cool functionality.

And today we’re gonna have a quick overview of Microsoft team. So for people who perhaps might not be using Microsoft Teams right now and are curious about it, I could spend hours and hours on Microsoft Teams. There’s so much functionality in Teams as well as Office 365. But we’ll touch on Teams. We’re going to be doing some work with Flow and PowerApps and letting you know about the CDS or Common Data Services for Apps. And then we’re going to do a bit of a demo and show you some of the work that we’ve been doing with these cool apps. So here’s the little video I wanted for you to be able to hear. So I’m just going to play that real quick.

Woman: We’ve seen the impact teamwork has had in our world, but what if Teams could achieve even more?

Man 1: To truly do great work, we need people that have different experiences and understand the world from a different perspective.

Man 2: The thing that’s challenging is to make sure that there’s a platform for that collaboration. Teams are very liquid. We need to keep up with the way our people like to work.

Woman: What if people from different cultures and generations could come together in a more purposeful way so ideas feel free and evolve organically? Just imagine what we could achieve. Introducing Microsoft Teams in Office 365.

Man 3: Microsoft Teams is helping us accelerate and win on Sundays. Now we can share common ideas, common goals.

Man 4: I’m excited about the ability for people to be engaged in multiple Teams and making it very easy for them to not have to go to 15 different places.

Woman: Microsoft Teams is a chat-based workspace that gives people one place to connect and create in inherently human ways.

Man 5: You have that constant thread of communication that you can go back in history and see. It’s all right there in a single interface.

Man 6: Accenture is nearly 400,000 people across 120 countries. To be able to engage and collaborate this way is a big game-changer for us.

Woman: A way that builds trust and helps create the natural rhythm so ideas flow freely and evolve organically.

Woman 1: There’s a lot of communication. There’s a lot of data sharing. We’re all sort of working towards the same end goal, and that’s to build a car that goes out on the racetrack to win.

Man 7: It’s all happening real-time in a very frictionless way. That’s the way people expect to work these days. Because it’s part of the Office 365 set of collaboration tools, it’s part of what we already do. It’s a central hub where the conversations happen. It opens possibilities for connection and collaboration that we never thought possible before.

Man 8: And it’s about empowering them and taking somebody’s good idea and make it an awesome idea.

Woman 3: It has truly made us more efficient.

Man 9: This is exactly what we’ve been waiting for. This is how we think the world of tomorrow will work.

Woman 1: Welcome to Microsoft Teams. Together there’s no limit to what we can achieve.

Tracey: Great. I’m just gonna go and just got change over to my headset so you can all hear me. Melissa, give me the thumbs up. Make sure you can…

Melissa: Yeah, we can hear you.

Tracy: Well, awesome. Thank you so much. So Team is a complete chat and online meeting solution: online meetings, host audio, video, and web conferences. So for those of you that are using a Skype for Business, Skype for Business is moving to Teams. So again, you can do all of your communication calls, video calls directly out of Teams. So there’s the ability for it to be a one-on-one call or broadcast across larger groups and sessions. So again, lots of flexibility there with Microsoft Teams for the communication.

It makes teamwork easy. You can co-author and share files with popular Office 365 apps like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, OneNote, SharePoint, and Power BI. Last week I was personally able to work on a document with one of my co-workers and was awesome because, even though we were in different geographies, we could work on this document together and see the edits just happening right in front of us and putting in our comments. That made it very easy to work with that.

So again, integrate apps from Microsoft and third-party partner services to tailor your process, increasing teamwork and productivity. So again, even if you’re using apps that aren’t in part of the Office 365 apps, there are connectors that allow you to be able to have it seamless and be one application.

You can create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more. You can start from a template or create your own multi-step flow across several apps. It’s simple. Why constantly check email when you can have a text message or a ring alert on your phone as well or on your mobile device anytime an important email comes across automating? That means you can use the time doing other things instead of watching your inbox all day long.

And then PowerApps. PowerApps are the building blocks. It’s a collection of services, apps, and connectors that work together to let you do much more than just view your data. You can act on your data and update it anywhere from any device. Build apps fast with point-and-click approach to app design. Choose from a large selection of templates or start from a blank canvas, which we’re going to do today, easily connect your app to data and use Excel-like expressions to easily add logic.

Now for myself, when we’re going to be going through doing some of this work today, you could really spend a lot of time and really delve and get into it if that was your role within an organization, to really understand that power. But even from a simplistic perspective, I wouldn’t wanna be…I’m not gonna be a power-up developer, but I was able to go in and start with a template and make some simple apps that were interesting. And again, the ability to use that to your organization with just that simple process or that learning, I didn’t have to be a master or software engineer.

Common data service. This is great. It accelerates the growth and accelerates your ability to create those apps with PowerApps. It’s easy to manage both the metadata and data are stored in the cloud, so you don’t need to worry about the details of how they’re stored. Easy to secure. Data is securely stored so that your users can see it only if you grant them access. Role-based security allows you to control access to entities for different users within your organization. And again, that access to the Dynamics 365 data. Again, there’s already those connections so you don’t have to worry about building those connections. They’re already there.

PowerApps. There’s some really great case studies up on the Microsoft site on how the acceleration of the time to deliver. So again, not having to spend so much time on development and R&D and testing and deployment. That learning curve is greatly reduced. So again, that ability to have that innovation.

So now we’re gonna go over and actually go and look at Teams and Flow and PowerApps. So just give me one moment here, and I’ll just switch my screen. And I’m starting off in Outlook because I’m starting my day. I’ve logged in to my workstation, or even if I was on my mobile device, I could be on my tablet, on my surface, I could be on my phone. Again, it’s device-agnostic. So again, I can access them from anywhere.

And so I’m taking on the role of Megan. I’m the marketing manager, and I recently joined the Mark 8 Project Team, and I’m gonna organize everyone working on this project. So again, I’ve got a lot of colleagues that I need to collaborate with. And we’re going to be using Teams to have a single and secure location that brings together everything that my team needs: chats, meetings, calls, files, and tools.

So I’m gonna go over to my team’s site, and I’m going to go look at one of the projects that I’ve been working on. And here I’ve got my Mark 8 Project Team. I’ve got an X1050 Launch Team. And there are variety of teams that I’m part of. And again, I’ve got them here listed in my favorites.

So a team can exist within our organization, a project, or even an interest group. So for the product launch, I’ve created a team called the Mark 8 Project Team. Within that team, I’ve got several channels. So here I’ve got a General, Engineering, Manufacturing, Marketing, Research and Development. Channels are dedicated sections within teams to keep conversations organized by specific topics or projects. So I’ve created these channels so I can communicate and collaborate on these specific areas or sub-teams, channels, within that original team.

I’ve got an app bar on the left and gives me access to all the main areas in Teams. So for example, I can see my chats, meetings, and files. We also have here instead of…I might want to navigate this way, but I also have…we’ve got a command box. So when I’m on the command box, I can type different commands in. So for example, if I’m looking for a particular area of my team, I can click on launch, and it will quickly take me to that filtered section. So I’ve got a launch team, and I also have a launch event.

There’s also action commands as well. So I’m going to go in back in here. And I’m gonna go ahead and type a forward slash. And slash commands are shortcuts that allow me to quickly perform, navigate tasks, setting my status, adding a user to a team, or calling somebody. So I can click that forward slash, you can see all the different commands there. And I’m gonna type in “go to,” and then space, and then “design channel.” And it quickly will allow me to go there. So again, an easy way to navigate within and find things quickly within Teams.

Now I’m gonna go ahead and add someone to a team. So again, I can have up to 2,500 members across the organization, and I can also include external members through secure guest access. So I’m gonna go and add a vendor to one of my teams. And I can go ahead and click on this ellipsis here on the launch team, and I can go ahead and say Add Member.

Actually, I’m gonna go to Manage Team. Go to Manage Team, and I can see all of the members on the team here, and I can go ahead and add the member. And again, I would just simply type in that person’s email address and go ahead and add them to the team. So again, both internal and external members can be on the team site.

Now we’re going to talk a little bit about chat. So that’s another area here. I can engage in private one-on-one chats, group chats, or channel conversations. And I’m gonna go head back to my design team again, go back in here. And when I click on Design, we can see here, the tab here, Conversations. So there’s a variety of conversations going on within that channel under that launch team. And as I scroll up, I can see there are certain indicators that let me know I am mentioned here. So you can see that @Megan is mentioned here, as well as something that’s important here for me to be able to catch up on.

So chats are persistent and stored in their entirety. So I can catch up on things. For example, if I’m off on a meeting or I’m off-site for the day and I wanna come back and find out what’s been going on, I can see all of the information that’s there. And by default, team conversations are visible to the entire team making it easy for everyone to stay in the know and to share information in a transparent way, and that accelerates decision making. That symbol shows when I’m mentioned, and then the red bang shows high importance. So things that I need to be able to take care of right away.

When you have many members in a team, or when you have chats about multiple topics, it can be hard to follow a conversation. So to help that, Microsoft Team conversations are threaded so that Megan can reply directly in context to specific conversations, keeping relevant chats grouped together. So if I go along here to look at my excellent meeting, I can click on to see all of the replies regarding that particular conversation.

You can also email a channel. So when I’m on this particular area here…actually, not that one. We’re gonna go back. We’re gonna go back to Design. And let me click on the ellipsis. I get the email address. So I can go ahead and look at the email address. And we’ll just do a quick example of this. We’ll go ahead and copy this. Go back over here to my box, my inbox. Click on Message and paste that in. And go ahead and send that off. And I go back to my design team. And there it is. The message came up.

So again, you might get an important message into your specific email inbox that you wanna share out with the team or the channel. You can then go and email that directly there, so then there’s full visibility, rather than I’ve got an important message and I want Melissa to know about and I want Tiffany to know about and I want Nicole to go know about it, I don’t have to email them to their inboxes. I can just put it on to the team site, into the channel that we’re working on. So that’s that chat. So that persistent chat is there and the ability to email out the channel.

Another way for collaboration and communication is through the meetings and calls. So sometimes it’s most efficient to jump on a quick call to resolve an issue or to answer a question. Teams offers a complete meeting solution supporting sharing video and audio conferencing. Meeting and calling capabilities are all built into Teams. So Megan can easily start a meeting directly from the chat conversation without having to sign in and out of multiple applications.

So to start a meeting, I can go click Audio Call or Video Call to instantly turn a chat into an online call. So if I am down, let’s see, go into any one of these particular…We’re gonna go to here, Legal and Compliance, just so I can show you a couple of different features here. We’re gonna go into this Legal and Compliance Channel, and I’m gonna click on Reply. And right from here, from that Reply, I can go and hover over the Meet Now. That comes up. And click on Meet Now. So we’ll start. That’s not very interesting, but anyways, that’s my Kleenex box there. And we could say Show Conversations. And we’ve got some more attachment options down here.

So again, I can type in, attach something. I’ve got some additional things here. And I’m gonna go ahead and say Wikipedia search. So this particular conversation that I’m having…And install that. This particular conversation that I’m having has to do with copyright infringement. So I want to go ahead and look at and see what Wikipedia has got to say about copyright infringement. If I could type. And a document comes up here. And I can attach that in and then send that off. And I’m gonna go on stop my meeting. I hope it was good quality.

And we are back into Teams. And we can see that all that information there is captured on that. So again, that meeting can be recorded. I didn’t record that particular meeting, but you could record that. And then anyone who wasn’t available for that call, I can go and listen to that afterwards and then also see my attachment from Wikipedia. Great. Just hanging up, and we finish that call.

Now we’re gonna go ahead…and that was a spontaneous meeting. Now we’re gonna actually you on schedule a meeting. So in here, we can go in to schedule a meeting. And I can invite internal and external participants to that meeting. And then, again, we can have that via video call, it can be just a phone call, but you can go ahead and schedule that meeting, and all of your meetings can be run out of here.

So I can put my title in here, and then my location is it. And you can actually choose as well which channel it happens to be in. So for example, it could be that Mark 8 Project Team and for Engineering. And again, I can go and invite a variety of people, and you’ve got your scheduling assistant here as well to see if everyone is available. Go ahead and discard that. Go back to our Teams. So again, you have the ability to do a spontaneous meeting as well as scheduled meeting.

Now I’m gonna show you how you can collaborate with the integrated office apps. And we’re gonna go to our Teams and to our Go to Market Plan, and we’re gonna look at files. So you can see here, we’ve got these different tabs here. We’re gonna talk about customizing that as well. Click on our files, and we see our files are here. And you can see when I hover over this, more options. Again, I’ve got the ability to go and open that up in Excel and work online with that and collaborate with someone, or maybe I’m going to email it out, I’m gonna make it a tab, I can move it. So again, the whole flexibility. I didn’t have to go out into Excel and then work with it there. I can work with it right from Teams.

So our team has moved from initial spark of an idea through the initial brainstorming stage and is now making our new product, the Contoso Mark 8, a reality. So we began collaborating in Teams. And I’m going to go and collaborate on a document. So we’re gonna go ahead and pick out a document that we can work with.

So we’re gonna go back to our Design channel, and we’re gonna find that conversation about usability and testing. There it is there. And I can click on that and go ahead. And I’m viewing it right within Teams. So again, I can go ahead and say I wanna see the conversations that are going back and forth about this particular document. I can edit right from within here, make comments. I’m showing this on a different screen but I can’t use my finger to draw right on it or use the pen, but if I was on the Surface or a tablet, I could go and directly edit it directly from there. So the ability to collaborate on those documents is there.

I can also go and say, make this a tab. So for example, this document, maybe it’s super important, and I wanna raise the visibility of that. I can have that right on there, make that a tab. So again, you can do that with any of the applications, documents, etc. So we go in here, and we say Add a Tab. It could be Excel. It could be a Power BI dashboard, PowerPoint, a website, a Word document, a planner board, which we’re gonna look at in a moment. And if I go to my Go to Market Plan, and I’ve got a Power BI dashboard embedded in here as one of my tabs.

So depending on which dashboard I wanna look at, maybe I wanna look at my website and social analytics, I can go and change tabs. And again, when I hover over those data points, or if I wanna see more information, I can explore that data, show, spotlight it, change the sort order or sort by. So again, that ability to interact with all of that information there. So I’ve got a variety of different tabs as well as different data visualizations that are giving me information to make decisions.

Also in here, I’ve got a product launch event, so I’m going to go ahead and look at that. And that’s actually my planner board. So again, I’ve got that ability to embed Planner, which is one of the Office 365 apps. I’ve embedded it directly in here. So I can go ahead and look at the boards. I could go look at it from a chart perspective. I can look at from a scheduling perspective so I know exactly what work is coming up.

I’m gonna go back to my board, and I’m gonna go add a task. You can add the task here. And what due date is it set for? I’ll put it at the end of the month. I’m gonna assign it to myself. Add that task. And it’s in my To Do, but I have started it, so I’m gonna say that in progress. And you can put more of a description in there or attachments, comments.

And I can see all of the tasks that are sitting there to be done. And I can filter by if I wanna know, for example, what date, what have I got going on today, what do I have next week. It’s got that whole visibility that’s shared throughout the team, and I can assign those tasks to particular individuals. Wow, looks like I’ve got a lot of tasks assigned to me compared to everyone else. I better reassign those, I think. Okay.

So let’s go on and look…Oh, yes, as well, we’ve got third-party apps and websites. So again, you can go and add, build out the functionality across here. In this particular one, we’ve got…I didn’t wanna go there. We’ve got four more here. We’ve got Power BI, the Product Roadmap, the Go to Market Plan, and the Product Brochure. So again, lots of flexibility there as well.

You can also add bots onto here. We’ll go and look at some of the Flow and PowerApps. But again, I could have a bot directly in a team or in a channel that can monitor the activity or respond. One of the cool…it’s like a kudo grobot [SP] that you can go and comment on team members and it will keep track of how many positive comments that that individual will get. So again, you can apply those bots directly in here.

I was just talking with Melissa before this session started about bots, and there’s a lot of legalities around bots since you have to be careful about how you’re using them because you don’t want a bot to be going and spamming someone. So when you are working with bots, just make sure that you’re taking to account the Privacy, etc. Act. I don’t know the exact right word for it, but you have to be careful with those bots.

So that’s a quick, high-level overview of just Teams itself. So again, creating Teams, that you can create those meetings, you can have your audio/video calls directly from Teams, chats, and then obviously, all the files that you can attach in there. So again, it can be very simplistic. You can create, you know, a few teams and have your different channels within there. There are many teams that you could be part of.

So for example, in this example, here we’ve got HR, we’ve got Business Development, Sales, IT, Finance. And then within those teams, you’ve had different channels. So again, a general channel may not have as many parts in it, and then other channels will have a little bit more.

I’m gonna go into where I’ve got My Flows set up. I think I put some flows here. So within the Office 365, there is Flow, which I have up on the top here. I’m gonna go into there as well and show you that. When I’m adding a tab in here for Flow, it allows me to filter flows that are specific for teams. So things that I wanna work on that or have teams in mind. So again, when we go on it, you can see from the card, it’s something to do with Power BI and Teams, this has to do with SharePoint and Teams and approvals. This has to do with the planner board and Teams. So again, visually, I can see exactly what that is all about.

So let’s go ahead and we’ll look at one of these flows that I’m using. And this one, I’ll go and edit it so you can see. There are hundreds and hundreds of templates of flows, and we’re gonna go and look at some of those so you can see that. When you are working with, it’s really simple to use and be able to check to make sure that the flow is gonna work the way that you want it to.

So when you’re on here, you can actually open that up. And so this one I did grab from the template, and that’s what makes it easy to work with when you don’t wanna do a lot of programming or building up the flow yourself if you don’t have that skill set. In here it’s pretty straightforward. It’ll say, “Great. What’s the site address?” So when you hit the down arrow, it already…because we’ve got that common data service, everything is integrated. It is like one application with many apps within that. And it already has visibility into your different SharePoint sites…or your Teams sites, sorry.

And then the singing was asking, “Great, it’s got a site address, but what’s the library name?” So when you hit the down arrow, you see different library names that already exist there. This makes it really easy to work with. And then it says, “Oh, is there a specific folder within that SharePoint, a library that you wanna look at, or do you wanna look at the whole library?” And I said leave it for the whole library.

You also have advanced options that you can have as well. That one only has limited columns by view. And then we go into that next component, which is Post Message. So then it’s saying, “Great, where do you wanna post the message?” Well, I want it to go to this team, in this channel, and this is the message I want it to say. So, “Hi, team. Something’s been created, and I’ve added a new file. Please review and approve it as soon as possible.”

So again, that was your little message. And then who’s gonna approve it? So I was having myself was gonna be the person that was gonna approve it. But you could have a group of people, and you’re asking basically what do you want them to do. And that was all pretty much pre-populated.

So you can see here where the stars were the areas that I had to fill in as opposed to things that were just populated automatically based on the flow that was built. And the condition is, if it’s approved, then it will go ahead and approve and allow us to use that document. So if it’s yes, you’re gonna post a message. If no, there’s another message. So in here, we’ve got our message. This has been approved. And here the preview has rejected. So again, everyone has got visibility into that. So again, that was from a template.

And here, if you are building it from scratch or maybe your pre-populating some of this and you’re not quite sure how this is working, it’s great, it’s got this flow checker. And we’re gonna go into one that does have an error so you can see what it is because I’ll walk you through how to resolve that. So that was one flow that’s in here.

I think this is one that has a prompting message. This particular workflow, it will have, when a new task is created in the planner board. So we had that Product Launch, and there was tasks, and we’ll go and post a message to the whole team so that they know that there’s work to be done. So let’s see if…This one doesn’t have any errors either, but we’ll go and have a look at that. So planner ID is called Planner. And you need to post a message when someone creates a new task in there so everyone has visibility into it.

This one doesn’t have any errors either. I’ll find one that does have an error. This one is really interesting. When a data-driven alert is triggered, so on the Power BI dashboard, you have something, for example, when something got, you know, more than so many likes, you wanna know about it, or if you had a negative comment on Twitter, you can have that trigger an alert and send that to the team.

So again, when you want an action to happen after an event has happened, you can have these from your data visualizations, can trigger something to happen. Again, this one works with Power BI, but again, you can have many many different triggers.

So let’s go over actually to Flow. So now I’m on my app, Flow, not the app that’s embedded in my Teams, but just Flow in general. Because again, Flow works in many different areas, not just for Teams. And you can see that there are hundreds and hundreds, if not thousands, of templates that you can leverage and use, or you can build flows from scratch. So again, we’ve got common services. So again, is it coming from SharePoint, Outlook, Twitter, Dropbox. You can have multi-step flows. You can have approval requests. And there’s tons and tons of resources.

So again, starting with a template, so there’s featured templates. If you want it based on email, productivity, notifications, data collection, social media. So again, lots and lots. And you can see from the tiles quickly gives you a visual indicator of where this is going or where the data is coming from. So again, if you’re using lots of different tools, you can have access to that information there.

So when you go ahead and select a template. So here, “Start Approval When a New Item is Added,” that’s one I have just shown you. Let’s go ahead and we’ll grab something else and click on it. And it basically gives you information about what it’s going to do. And I don’t have Google Calendar, so it’s not gonna let me go on. It’s not gonna really recognize who I am here on this one. So again, there’s lots and lots of things to explore within this. So you could track and manage your expenses, stay connected. So lots, hundreds and hundreds of templates for you to work with. So let’s go ahead and we’re gonna go and look at Create a Flow From Scratch. So we’re gonna go here.

Oh, I’m getting back here. There we go, My Flows, there we go. All right. There we go. It wants me to connect to the Google Drive, and I’m not going to do that. So you can see I’ve got My Flows, and then there’s the Team Flows, and then there’s also Business Process Flows. I’m not gonna be showing business process Flows today, but there’s really great, some really cool business process Flows.

One of the examples I was talking about on another session was about making sure things were formatted properly before they went out to the public. And so there’s a business process flow that every time someone works on a document, I’ll walk them through, did you check this, did you check that, you know, is this done right, etc.? So again, for that document in a business process flow, it was very cool the way that it was working.

So those were those Team Flows that we looked at earlier. And I’m gonna go ahead and do a new My Flow. So there are some key components when you’re creating a flow. So when you click on New, and I’m gonna create it from blank, the first thing you have to have is a trigger. So you have to think about, okay, what is the event or what is the trigger, what do I need to have happen?

And so I’m just choosing a really simple example. My trigger is when the current weather changes. So I’m gonna click on that. And I don’t know how many people are joining us from sunny climates, but it’s very cold today. So I wanna know when the weather is gonna change. And I’m gonna put in location. And I wanna know when the temperature goes over two degrees Celsius. And what’s the next step?

So I’ve got my trigger. And now I need an action. So do I want it to do? Well, I could have a notification. So I have a notification sent into my cell phone, but I’m gonna actually do an Office 365. So I want it to send me an email. And I can’t remember Megan’s email address by heart, but it’s gonna auto-fill because it knows me. And again, there’s some default things to build out that message, if you want to. But I’m just gonna quickly do that there to make my message. And I can go ahead and save that.

So when it’s saved, I might wanna do a Flow Checker. So again, it will let me know if there’s a problem. And I can go ahead and save that. And there you have a really really simple flow. Back to My Flows. And again, if you don’t want them, you can edit them and get rid of them. And you’ve got your Team Flows there.

And I was going go and grab to something so you could see what it looks like when there’s an error message, but I don’t wanna run out of time. So maybe we’ll come back to that because I wanna go on to business apps, and we’ll come back and I’ll show you a Flow that doesn’t work and how you can find…kind of troubleshoot through that message to resolve it.

So let’s go ahead over to…Sorry, one of the things I should have started off with when we were first starting off this session is talking about Office 365 and all of those apps, because I’m only showing a few of them. I’m showing Teams and Flow and PowerApps. But again, those are all of your apps in Office 365.

So let’s go ahead and go and look at PowerApps. And the first thing we’re gonna do is I think we’ll go and look at building a really simple power app just so you can see the building blocks. This one I’m building off of a SharePoint list. So let’s go ahead and we’ll go over to SharePoint. And it made a really simple list here. So you can see I’ve got vanilla ice cream, chocolate ice cream, strawberry ice cream, and salted caramel ice cream in a list in my Mark 8 Project Team. And we’re gonna go over into our PowerApps, and we’re gonna go ahead and make our own app.

So when I’m on my homepage in PowerApps, you’ve got choices. You can make your own apps, and there’s canvas apps from blank. So again, you’re going to design it connecting two different data sources. And then you might already have data that you want to go and create a model off of that. So again, there’s templates that make it really, really easy for you to start with.

I’m going to go ahead and choose this one, start from data, canvass app. And again, you can see this one is for a phone or mobility, and you can make them for tablets as well. So I’m gonna go ahead and do this one, Start from Data, a canvass app. So it’s gonna automatically…it is gonna go build out this history screen application. So I’m gonna click on Make this App.

And so now it’s taking me into an area where we actually going to go and build it. So when we’re on the other screen, it was the apps that already had access to and perhaps we’re leveraging, and now I’m going into the builder, where I’m gonna go and actually build out something. So because my data lives in SharePoint, I’m gonna go ahead and click on this SharePoint. And that common data service allows us to connect automatically to that data.

And here, so it’s saying, “Great. Well, what site, where does your data live?” And we saw that it was up on that Mark 8, so I’m gonna go ahead and select that. And of course, right away it recognizes that I have already an existing list. So I’m gonna go ahead and click and connect to that. And again, I know this is super simplistic, my example that I’m showing you, but there’s a really great…I’ll see you Melissa can send it in the meeting notes afterwards.

So this bank, they’ve created hundreds and hundreds of apps internally. So one of the things they would have to do is go around and check the bank machines. So again, making sure they’re working properly, etc., and it was all paper-based. So if we think about things that we do on a consistent basis or a repetitive basis that involves paper, you could go and build an app instead of having that piece of paper. So they built this app so they could go around and check the bank machines and make sure that they were working. Again, that was all automated and no more paper, which was awesome.

What happened? I clicked on that. There we go. Connect. Getting things ready. I feel like I’m in deja vu here. There we go. I was talking away. Did I hit the wrong button or something? I’m sorry.

So it’s going ahead building the app based on what we set. And there we are. There it is. Chocolate, salted caramel, strawberry, and vanilla. When we’re working within the PowerApps, when you click on this area here, it will then go and highlight how that looks. Again, it’s showing you the coding here, very simplistic. Sorry, that’s not what I wanna do. There, back here.

Fields. Again, you’ve got very simplistic there. You can go and edit that. And we’re gonna go and edit in another app that I have. Again, you can change that design, how things look. We can go into the Detail screen and the Edit screen. So now those three screens, we made a really simple app. So I’m gonna go over and we’ll close down here.

 

I didn’t save that. Silly me. Let’s go back. We’ll go back and save that one. Start from Data, Make this App, because I wanna show you how it updates. So we’ll quickly go back here, go to our site, Connect. And I’ve got six minutes, so I got a hurry up here. Connect. That’s my data. There we go. There we go. Okay, back to the app, and we’ll save it this time. And again, you’ve got those supporting tools there for the checker to make sure all the data is working properly. And this time, we’ll go ahead and save it. There we go. There we go.

And then I could share that out with other team members or keep it only for myself. And we go back here, we should be able to go and see now we have ice cream. And let’s go back over here, and we’ll put in a new flavor. I’m running out of flavors. And again, if I wanted to have a picture, we’ll do that right now, just so you can see how this works. And obviously, it’s not my phone, but it is here, and we should see there’s chocolate ripple there. So again that coming off of that list in SharePoint, and again, I could go into that, make edits, or add new. So I can add new from here as well. And when I go back in here, there’s strawberry.

Okay, so let’s go back in here, and we will close out of here, and we’ll go into…Got Cool Flooring App. And we’re gonna go and edit that. So let’s have a look at this. This is another three-screen app and it has to do with flooring, so carpet and hardwood, just for an example. And we can go and modify that.

I’ll just show you quickly just some editing. We won’t go through all the examples. But when you click on Browse Gallery, it then goes and highlights this information here, and I can go ahead and look at the information that’s there if I want to go and change that. I can go and change the fields that are there. I can also go over back to here, Browse Gallery, and when down here and editing, again, I can change the different information. So we’ll go clicking up there.

So for example, if I wanted to change this information here, this item name, perhaps I wanna have this item category. So again, really simple to go and change that. Maybe I want it to be price, quickly go and change that, and change that data there. So really easy, easy to do. So let’s wrap this up and we’re gonna go back to our PowerPoint.

Melissa: And just to let you know, Tracy, there are a few questions here. So when you’re ready, I can read them out for you.

Tracey: Okay. So, well, let’s go ahead with the questions because everyone’s gonna get the presentation afterwards. And I’m not guaranteeing I can answer your questions, but I will certainly try.

Melissa: Okay. So the first one was, can a channel be moved from one team to another?

Tracey: That’s a great question. I can test it out right when we finish with the other questions.

Melissa: Okay. And the next one, can an external group be added as a member to a team?

Tracey: Yes.

Melissa: Great. Last one. Will PowerShell commands work inside the PowerApps?

Tracey: I’d have to find out. I don’t know for certain, but we can find out. We can put that in the notes afterwards when we publish it, Melissa.

Melissa: Sure, that sounds good.

Tracy: Yeah. So let’s just go over to Teams. And here’s my channel. So we wanna copy it from one to another. So I don’t have it immediately there, but let me…I can ask Ziad. He might know. And we can publish that afterwards. That’s a great question.

Melissa: Great. No other questions have come in. Oh, another one came in. If my AED password changes, will my flow continue to work, or do I have to update my password?

Tracey: Great question. I think that’s a Pierre question, Melissa. I’m believing that everything will because you’ve only got one identity, so when you change your password it should go and update everything. Because all my flows I create still work, and I have to change my password every certain, you know, whatever it is, 30 days.

Melissa: Okay. I can pass that along to Pierre, see if he can answer it. Okay, we’ll get back to you on that.

Tracey: Awesome. Well, I hope everyone goes out and be bold and goes and starts using Teams and creating channels. It’s really a discipline of working in a different way. For me, it’s like, okay, great, certain emails come in, I’m like, “Ah, this should be emailing channel. I should be emailing to the channel instead of sending it out to everyone.” And a way you can communicate effectively, I think, internally.

Now I’m trying not to send emails out everywhere. I’m trying to leverage the teams more to share all that information because then everyone can look in one place. I didn’t have a Wiki up in any of my channels here, but for my internal channel here at Encore, I have a Wiki in our inside sales channel because I can publish important things that we can share out.

So I love exploring it, and it’s so cool because every day there’s new stuff from Microsoft. And it’s just amazing. It’s really, really a lot of fun. On my slides, I did say, you know, be careful because sometimes people go and make too many things, and it becomes overwhelming, and then people don’t buy in because it becomes too complicated. So start really simple, and then build it up from there.

Melissa: One more question. Do you have a little more time?

Tracey: Sure.

Melissa: Is the SharePoint site created from the team?

Tracey: That’s an excellent question. So let’s go in here. Let’s see, where was that? Was it in Design? When we have a SharePoint team in here, what’s up in SharePoint can only be seen by that team. So again, if you’re leveraging SharePoint…I haven’t put it up on here. [inaudible 00:58:12] You could have a corporate SharePoint site, and if we build a SharePoint site that everyone has access to is very different than making a SharePoint site for the team.

So when I’m generating it in here, depending on the how this has been deployed, this could be a public group that everyone can see as opposed to just a SharePoint site that I’m creating from here that only my team can see. So there’s definitely a differentiation. There are public or corporate-wide SharePoint sites as well as team SharePoint sites, which I’m learning all about. Because I thought that when I shared something up here, everyone could see it. And it’s like, no, only the team can see it. So a good question.

Melissa: Okay, that was the end of the questions.

Tracey: Awesome. Everyone have a fantastic day. And thank you so much for joining us.

Melissa: Thank you, Tracey.