Microsoft Teams can help people and organizations stay productive in hybrid work environments, and Microsoft Power Platform provides low-code custom development tools. The powerful Teams and Power Platform integration allows anyone to create the tools they need to get work done and bring them into their digital workspace. Here are some new ways that it is becoming easier to build, deploy, and manage these custom solutions so teams can be more productive!
Easily automate work for users and teams
A new Power Automate app for Teams, has been announced for later this year, that will make it easier than ever to build automated workflows. The new app will include a robust set of easy-to-use templates for some of the most common automation scenarios for Teams. A simple building experience will allow users to build these flows with drop-down menus and pre-populated dynamic text.
Manage custom approvals in Teams
Nearly every industry and every business department needs to manage approvals in some form, it has been announced that Teams users will soon be able to easily create, manage, share, and act on approvals directly in Teams. Users can start an approval from a chat, channel conversation, or from the Approvals app in Teams.
There will also be integrations with Adobe Sign and DocuSign, to get legal consent or approval of electronic documents from people inside or outside the organization. Additionally, approval flows from across the organisation can be integrated in Teams with over 350 systems using Power Automate, including ServiceNow, Dynamics, and GitHub.
Build and deploy custom apps in Teams
It has also been announced that the new Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents apps for Teams, powered by CDS Project Oakdale, have entered public preview allowing Teams users to build custom apps and AI-powered bots right inside Teams, then easily deploy them to their teams.
It is important to keep in mind that Power Apps can also help professional developers accelerate their app development process. To that end, it has been announced that professional developers will soon be able to build Power Platform connectors with Azure API Management and Azure Functions to any Microsoft hosted third-party, legacy, or line-of-business apps.
Build Chat Bots in Teams
The new Power Virtual Agents app for Teams provides a low-code authoring experience to create custom chatbots Bots can be built simply by adding questions for the bot to ask, and messages for the bot to send back to the user. While these bots can be simple to build, they remain very powerful. New features such as the ability for bots to recognize which user they are chatting with can provide a personalized user experience. For example, an employee who queries a bot about company HR policies could be provided with policies that are specific to their region or country.
Engage with data in the new Power BI app
An enhanced Power BI app for Teams, available in public preview later this year, will make it easy to discover data and quickly create visualizations from Excel datasets within Teams. The app also provides users with quick access to their frequently used reports, example reports from the Power BI community, and commonly used organizational datasets. The app also allows users to send a report that they’re reviewing to a chat or channel quickly, even maintaining the filtering and slicing of the report so it is easy to start a discussion with data. Also coming later this year is the ability to search for Power BI content through the Teams search bar.