How To Schedule A Recurring Message In Microsoft Teams Using Power Automate

hey there Louie here thanks for stopping by in this tutorial I'm going to show you how you can schedule recurring messages in Microsoft teams now specifically we're going to look at how you can schedule a message to be sent in a group chat on a recurring basis and we're also going to look at how you can post a message in the channel of a team on a recurring basis now we are going to create a workflow in Microsoft power automate that will allow you to do both of those things I will show you how you can create that workflow we'll go ahead and test it out then I'll show you how you can modify that workflow in case you want to change the content of the messages or if you want to change the frequency in which those messages are sent I'm also going to talk about some limitations associated with the approach that I'm outlining in this tutorial so you want to make sure that you watch the entire video so you can be aware of what those limitations are now let's go ahead and let's dive in all right now the first thing that we need to do is navigate to the power automate landing page next you want to click on Create and next we want to select the type of flow that we're going to be building now we will go ahead and use a scheduled Cloud flow so you want to click on this card and a scheduled Cloud flow triggers based on a date and frequency that you define next we need to give this flow a name so I will go ahead and paste in a name value here and next we need to configure when this flow should run now you'll notice that the information that's required to configure the trigger is the starting date and time so you want to go ahead and select the date and time on which this flow should execute for the first time now I will just go ahead and set this to occur in the future so we've gone ahead and selected the date and time on which this flow should execute for the first time and then the next step is to configure the frequency on which you would like this flow to run now you can click into this field here and select your preferred time interval now you'll notice you can schedule flows to occur monthly weekly daily hourly Etc I'll go ahead and select week and you can see here once I've selected week that it will add these date Pickers here now by default they're all checked so I'll just go ahead and uncheck these here and again you can select which days you would like this flow to run on so I'm going to say that this flow should execute every Sunday and if you wanted to change again the recurrence every two weeks three weeks you could just update the value here now what's really cool about this trigger card is it's also going to just show you the definition of this trigger in natural language and so it reads this flow will run on Sunday every week and it is going to fire at 2 pm once you've finished configuring your trigger here you want to click create and this is going to bring us into the power automate workflow canvas and you can see here that right now we only have one component in this workflow and that is our trigger which is this recurrence action and you can see here again that it runs on Sunday every week all right now that we've created our trigger the next step is to start to build out our workflow actions to do this you want to click on the plus new Step button and in the choose an operation box you want to search for the flow action called post message in a chat or Channel now you can see here that that is the first option that appears in the action list you want to go ahead and click on this and this is going to add the post message in a chat or Channel action card to the canvas now in this action the first thing that we need to do is configure the post as value now I'll click into this field here and you can see that you have a few different options essentially what this field is asking us to do is to determine when these messages get posted in the group chat or in the channel of a team how do you want them to appear in terms of who is sending the message now you can see here on the screen I've included a screenshot of what it looks like if you select user now what this option does is it just displays that message as if it is being sent by you and if you select flowbot essentially what this is going to do as you can see on the screenshot on the screen it is going to post that message as being sent by power automate on your behalf so it's a very minor difference but between the two options you want to just go ahead and select whichever one is best for your use case and in this example I will go ahead and select flowbot as I would like my users to know that this is a scheduled message that I am posting and the next step is to go ahead and configure the post in value now I will click in this drop down here and again you're going to notice that you have different options now this is where you're essentially determining whether you would like to schedule a recurring chat message or whether you're trying to schedule a message be posted in the channel of a team now if you want to do the latter that is post a message in the channel of a team then you want to select Channel and then you're going to be prompted to select your team and we're going to look at that a little bit later in this tutorial or if you want to post a message in a group chat then you want to go ahead and select group chat here now another really important note with the approach that I'm outlining in this tutorial you cannot schedule messages to be sent to an individual chat that is you cannot schedule a message to be sent to a chat with just one other recipient on a recurring basis now it's important to note that the method outlined in this tutorial is really useful when you want to schedule messages in Microsoft teams that are to be sent on a recurring basis now if you're looking to schedule messages in Microsoft teams that perhaps you're going to be sending on a one-off basis or on an ad hoc basis then there are two other functionalities available in Microsoft teams that can allow you to do that now I do have tutorials outlining how you can use both of those different functionalities I've included the links to those videos in the description below so you want to make sure that you go ahead and check them out after you finish watching this video now we'll start off by creating a recurring message that will be sent to recipients in a group chat so I'll select group chat here and you can see here that the action card updated with two additional fields that we need to configure and the next step is to select the group chat that we would like this recurring message to be posted in now you can click into this drop down and what power automate is going to do is it will display a list of all of the different group chats that you are a member of now as I scroll up and down what you'll also notice is that it is going to display the chats that were created as part of meetings that you attended so you can see here meeting with myself these are all instances of meetings that I participated in and so this can make it a little difficult for you to find the group chat that you would like to post this message in now the workaround to this is if you know the name of the group chat that you want to post this message in you can just start typing that here so I'll just go ahead and start typing project and you can see here at the top of this list the project manager group chat now what I've done is I've gone ahead and created a group chat in Microsoft teams and I've renamed it to make it easier for me to find that group chat so that I could select it here now the next step is to input your message in the message field so I will place my cursor in this field and I will paste in a message here now you'll also notice that you have access to the same type of formatting that is available in Microsoft teams directly so you can change the font the size apply different formattings include bulleted and numbered lists Etc now let's say you want to include a file in this message or perhaps you want to include a link to a folder what you want to do is generate a shareable link to either that folder or that file and for files you'll have to store them either in teams or SharePoint online or OneDrive and then you can go ahead and select a piece of text in your message and you can click on this link button and this will allow you to actually paste a link in this message so what I've done is I've generated a link to the folder that I'm asking my fellow project managers to store their status updates and I've pasted it in this link Target and I will go ahead and click open link in new window and click add and this is now going to include a hyperlink to that location and again had it been a file it would have included a hyperlink to that file now the last step is to go ahead and click save and you can see here that our flow is ready to go and that we're actually able to test this now if I wanted to test this I could click on the test button here and just manually test this and it's going to go ahead and post that message in real time but what I'm going to do is I am just going to update our trigger to have this post in the next minute and then I'll pull up teams and you'll see this thing actually Fire based on that schedule that we defined in our trigger all right now what I've done is I've modified the trigger for this flow to execute in about a minute's time just so that you can see what it looks like when the message actually gets posted on the schedule that you define and you can see here that the message was actually posted in this chat in real time and you'll also notice that when I selected post this as the flow bot it shows up again as me via power automate now I do want to draw your attention to something and you'll notice that I did put a hyperlink in the contents of my message but for some reason that hyperlink didn't actually make it into the message so you may experience this kind of behavior from time to time and it's important to test out your flows and make sure that that kind of functionality is actually working I've experienced this type of issue before and I've just gone in and re-added that hyperlink and this kind of issue has been resolved now let's say you want to modify the flow that we just created either to update the message content or to perhaps change the schedule what you want to do is click on my flows and you want to find the flow that you created now the one that we just built in this tutorial is this first one here so I'll click on it on this page you can view the 28 day run history so you can see here that test that I just demonstrated that was successful now if you want to edit the flow you can click on edit and this is going to bring you back into the workflow canvas where you can edit the flow now if you wanted to amend the content of the message you can click into the post message card and you can edit the content here and again you'll notice that for some reason the hyperlink we embedded on the word folder disappeared and that's why we didn't see it in the test that we just read now if you want to amend the recurrence you want to click into the recurrence card and then you want to click on edit and this is going to bring up the recurrence card details now click on show Advanced options and what you'll notice is that by default it is only going to show the start time in this ISO date format which is somewhat difficult to decipher without going to some third-party website now what you can actually do is let's say you wanted to modify the start time you can just remove this entirely and you can rely on these additional Fields so the next field here says on these days so again you can amend how often you want this flow to execute and you can just select the days in this field you can also program the time so if you want it to execute for example at 2 pm then you want to select 14 and then you can also program the specific minutes and you'll notice that this text in this field reads enter the valid minute values from 0 to 59 separated by a comma so it's pretty easy to come back in here and actually change change the schedule if you ever need to make an update so that is how to create a workflow that will allow you to post a message in a group chat on a recurring basis next we're going to go ahead and look at how you can create a flow that will allow you to post a message in the channel of a team on a recurring basis all right next we're going to look at how you can post a message in the channel of a team on a recurring basis and I'm not going to walk through the steps of creating the flow again you can follow the steps that we covered earlier in this tutorial if you want to create a separate flow and you can also follow the same steps of adding the post message in a chat or Channel action card to the workflow now what I'm going to do is click back into our post in field and this time I'm going to select Channel and you'll notice here that now the action card has updated and it looks a little bit different the first thing it's asking us to do is select the team that we would like to post this message to so I'll click into the drop down and again you can just search for and select the team that you would like to have this message posted in I'll just click project management and then the next step is to click into the channel field and to select the channel that you would like to have this message posted in now this team only has one channel titled General so I'll select that and I am just going to leave the message exactly the same as it was from earlier in the tutorial now you'll notice here this additional field body recipient I'll go ahead and just delete this that is just carrying over the conversation ID from the previous steps earlier in the tutorial now I'll go ahead and click on save you can see here that the workflow is saved and that there are no error messages being displayed all right now I I've gone ahead and amended the start time for this flow to execute in about a minute's time so that you can see what it looks like once this message gets posted in the channel of this team and you can see here that this message was posted it is the exact same message that we saw in the workflow action and you can see here that the workflow was posted as me via the power automate bot it's also important to note that there is also another way that you can automatically post a message in the channel of a team on a recurring basis now that approach uses what's called an Adaptive card and an Adaptive card is a powerful interface that can be used in Microsoft power automate and you can even use adaptive cards to allow your users to perform data entry that you can then consume in your power automate workflows and you can do a ton of different stuff with them now I also have an in-depth tutorial showing you how to use adaptive cards in a workflow and how you can post adaptive cards in the channel of a team in Microsoft teams and again I've included a link to that video in the description below so you'll also want to check that out once you finish watching this video so that's it in this tutorial I demonstrated how you can schedule messages in Microsoft teams on a recurring basis I hope you found this video helpful if you did please hit that thumbs up below and be sure to subscribe to stay up to date on the latest tutorials that I publish I'm Louis acabalas thanks for stopping by talk soon

Channel: Lui Iacobellis

Views: 25,360

Keywords: power automate post message in a chat or channel, power automate post message in chat, power automate post message in group chat, power automate post to teams channel, power automate recurring teams message, power automate schedule teams message, schedule a message in teams power automate, schedule channel post in teams using power automate, schedule recurring message in teams, schedule teams channel message send message in teams using power automate, teams schedule recurring message

Id: 6YyDS9V0Uu8

Length: 16min 8sec (968 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 16 2023