Say Goodbye to Emails: Simplify TPS Reports with Teams Adaptive Cards

today we're going to talk about getting away from those email driven systems and get them into what we call adaptive cards so a lot of us like to have business processes you know get our TPS reports filled out via sending an email saying hey I need all this info so my response that information and then when I get the response back they then correlate it into an Excel spreadsheet or SharePoint list or something like that so what we're going to do right we know that we've female-based world to a teams-based world we're going to talk about how using power automate flow you can build an Adaptive card in teams so what we're going to do is we're going to send Chewie an Adaptive card it's going to prompt him for all the things we want he's going to fill it out right there inside of teams hit save and then that's going to go whoosh right over into our data source and to add a little flare to this we're going to do it office space style so if you've seen the movie you'll enjoy the jokes if not you'll still enjoy the jokes I hope but let's switch over to my desktop and take a look okay so how many business processes start out like this right hey Chewie urgent you forgot the TPS report I hope you're having casing the Mondays here it is right and so the manager the data collector the project manager whoever it is they want their information right away and so they ask for it in email right so we send this email over to Chewie eventually Chewie goes through his 5 000 spam mails to find this one real email he would then respond to it it comes back over and then yes they've collected information but man now all of a sudden someone's gotta correlate it and do something with it you know put his cover sheet whatever so this this wall is a very common way of doing business doesn't work really well what we could do is we could build ourselves power app to do something like this right the TPS report 9000 we could grab this information and then when they fill in all this information boom we send it off to SharePoint right this is probably my first answer of how I would want to do this but invariably we know that we have the people that no matter how easy we make this they don't want to come here and fill in their TPS report right once again I think it's you know not enough Flair in their life who knows but what we want is we want to make this a way to say all right they didn't fill it out right like the good people in the world the Patricks of the world they fill this out every day like they should thank you Patrick but the others they need those reminders what we're going to do now is we're going to build ourselves a power automate cloudflow and we're going to send a adaptive card straight to Chewie so that way we can collect information and then write it straight to our SharePoint list so if we run this and we hit go now and we can switch over to Chewie's browser and look Chewie got an Adaptive card right there's Lumber's lovely face and so now it's prompting Chewie to fill in the things you know demo one very nice name right we got a little date picker here to choose when the date will not be done how many meetings did it go it's even got a cute little control right there and then the different reasons why I didn't get it done and you know it's because the bobs there you go we'll make the boss happy whoosh whoosh whoosh so this is an Adaptive car right the ability to get interactive information from a user directly inside of a team's chat because my users live in teams all day and now you can see the flow is done it has created the item over in SharePoint so let's break down how to build this okay so the first thing I want to do I guess we'll just start at the beginning it's quite a new flow I don't want to skip any steps now for the trigger in this case you know for this particular scenario what I would probably do is I'd probably have it scheduled to go every morning at 8am and just remind Chewie to do it right so just go over here and be like TPS reminder now if you wanted to be better right then we could do something like one of my nag flows I'll put a link up there where we set the reminder to run once a day but then check to see had Chewie already done it we're not gonna do all that today we're just going to run this thing we're going to tell it to run once a day very simple scenario right so this will create us a flow it'll set the trigger to be daily and so then now we're over here and so once a day what do we want to do we want to send Chewie that reminder right so we're going to do is we'll go to new step we're going to search for teams find Microsoft teams and now we want to do is we want to search for adaptive card so there's a bunch of different ways that you can use these and adaptive cards aren't just for teams they are a overwhelming or a concept that can be used in other places but we're going to focus with them just today and so what we're going to do here is we're going to say we want to post an Adaptive card and wait for a response now think about you could also be using this for a replacement for approval emails if you're doing approvals today right it would be another interesting use of this but so post an Adaptive Card wait for response now when you do the post as you can either post as power virtual agents which is a different product we're going to mess with right now or flow Bots and so we're going to post as flowbot and you might have noticed when you're over here is Chewie so these came in from Power automate they don't come from me the creator of the flow they come from kind of a generic service account if you will which is probably ideal so it's going to come from for a while then it's going to ask you where do you want to post it do you want to post it in the channel I chat with flobot or group chat so which one of those places are you looking for in this scenario I would probably want to post it with a chat with a flowbot right which is what we just showed you sometimes we see people post these in channels though so say for example you're using adaptive cards to you know uh triage incoming uh support tickets or things like that and you want to put a channel so anyone could respond instead of this case we are sending it just to Chewie because we just want Chewie to respond so then you know we've got the recipient kind of shows up here so then we would just search for chewy so chewy at powerapps 911 um and then up here for the message okay so for the message you need an Adaptive card how do you do that right so there isn't a way to do it right here unfortunately you know and you you're not going to write this by hand I'm going to guess so what you're going to do jump over to your favorite search engine for me that is Bing but you know you guys already knew that and so we're going to search for adaptive card designer you're going to see a bunch of different stuff here what you're really looking for is adaptivecards.io designer so we can click on this this takes you to a Microsoft property right that's what I like about it we're not in some weird third party land and what this tool does is this is going to help you build an Adaptive card without you having to really like write a bunch of Json right because all adaptive cards are is a bunch of Json right you know curly brackets structured stuff but we don't want to hand code that we want a tool to do it now this is the default card we could kind of go from it I'm not going to what we're going to do instead is we're going to go up here first and we're going to change the select host app and we're going to change this to be teams but this will give you some ideas of different places that you could be building adaptive cards like I've always wanted to build one in Outlook I just never have or Viva you know Cortana skills like there's a lot of cool stuff here we're going to choose teams the reason you want to choose the right platform is if you look way over here on the far right you see this target version 1.4 right so that's the oldest version that our dear friend Microsoft team supports but there's a 1.5 there's even a 1.6 preview now so this is one of the things you have to be careful of if you start you know uh being searching how to write more complex scenarios you've got to make sure that the thing that you want to do is supported in your version because if you add a 1.5 feature it's not going to show up over there in teams and you're going to be really confused so be very feature cognizant as you do this you know probably chat GPT would be very helpful here to make sure you do this right but 1.4 is right and this set it so I don't have to touch anything but I wanted you to know this is over here because I first time I tried to write a really hard one and I did some really cool stuff it was only supported in version 1.5 which was worthless to me okay now what I want you to do is instead of messing with match card here I don't do not know who Matt is I'm guessing he's someone famous we're going to say new card and so over here they've got mad again they got all these different uh templates here now unfortunately there is not a TPS report template that would be really cool um you know there's a bunch of different ones in here though like you can see it's a pretty template that's kind of cool like they're doing some different things because adaptive cards can be informative right like in this case it's just Microsoft stock report it's not um you know interactive it's just pushing information so you can push or pull but we want to concentrate on pool so we're going to go back up here and instead of using any of these right because it's easier for me to teach you we're going to start with a blank card so click on blank card over here we now have the framework of a car right this is what a blank cards framework looks like basically nothing but we now have this interface that reminds me a lot of info path for being honest for building out what we want so for example we want to start at the top and just be like well you know what firsthand wants a text block that says something so we add this over here I'm going to the right and now I'm going to say you know Chewie fill this out something like that so that gives us the little thing over here very nice now we wanted input right that's what we're after here and so we want the project name first so I'm gonna go over here to inputs I'm going to drag this and drop it in here in the right spot now go over the right there's a couple of things that you have to do well there's really one thing you have to do they do not set an ID see how ID is not set by default you have to have to have to have an ID if you want to be able to reference this as Dynamic data over in your flow which I'm guessing you do so we're just going to call this project name right so always set the ID that's another place that I stumbled when I was doing these by myself first time so placeholder text we'll just blow that away now the label right this we do want and we're just going to do project name and look at that now we've got a little input there for project name so then now we wanted a date right we'll drop the date in here we're going to go up here again we'll say project eight and remember you could write whatever you wanted here it doesn't matter uh we don't want to label we don't want default value minimal value right we don't need any of those things we just want an ID oh you know we do want a label right because we want to tell them it's a project date so I got to type in Project date twice almost mess that up okay project name project date um so I think we also knew we had a number right it was like number of meetings or something so meeting numbers I don't know uh label meetings attended okay we'll get rid of the placeholder text now maybe we want to set a default right so I said they went to 20 we don't have to I did remember most this stuff is optional and also remember I can scroll down here I'm not scrolling a lot looking at all the settings but as you kind of do more with this you're going to want to you know connect more dots and so scrolling down here will help because one thing we might want to do is go to Project name for example and we know that's a required field my SharePoint list so we could make that required here as well easy peasy okay project name project day meetings intended oh yeah the last one we wanted was a choice right so input Choice set and so then here I believe we called this um reason there you go what is called reason label uh reason for late and then if we scroll down here look to give you a little interface for building these and so we'll just do two right we'll set the Reds rate red red how we say that word red stay poor is one of our choices and then um The Bobs was another one of our choices right so something like that you if you want to add more you just say add a new Choice and then it would show up here and then we could just be like flare you probably should spell it right though Blair Blair there you go and so we could kind of continue to add choices there as we saw fit doesn't matter now remember as we're doing this oh it's like hey required inputs should have an error message remember we turned on for project name we made it required right we did that we should have an error message this is required so oops good job right this is why we like the designer it's helping us it's holding my hand and if we kind of scroll down here so you can see that look it wrote all of this Json and so as you've gotten more familiar I've done more of these I actually understand what's going on down there but in the beginning we don't have to we just know that that Json makes this form now we need one more P star form before we go forward and that is a button to submit it so the button what you can do here is you can kind of click on it you can say add an action what do you want to do do you want to open a URL submit show card toggle visibility or execute I want to uh submit so I add the submit button we can then click on it same thing right save this and bingo bango we have done that now I guess the other thing I did in the demo will just and for completeness so if you go up here you could drag like an image in and so then the image you know we've done these different ways we've put the base64 because we wanted like a raw image in there or in this case just to make this go faster I just grabbed a URL so let's hit my windows V and there is a URL that takes us straight to limburg's face and then we're going to go ahead and change the size here to medium and we'll set it to large there you go so there's Lumberg All in His glory on our form right but like one of the ones we use for an internal process here like we have a chewy logo I've seen you know different ones you could pass Dynamic images any of that you want it's totally up to you just you know do what you do what you like okay but weren't you okay I think this is right or maybe close enough because you don't always get it right on the first try so that's okay what we're going to do up here in the top right is we're going to say copy card payload so that is now copied that Json to my clipboard we can now go over here and you literally just paste it in here that's it paste it in there and what's really great about this is now like if we go down here and so say that we wanted to write that to my SharePoint list I have a SharePoint list over here called TPS report and if we go to list settings you're going to see that it's basically what you thought project name single line text date is date number of meetings number reason behind is the choice right I even made it a little trickier just to be fun so we just go to our flow now and then we would say SharePoint create item and so then now look you need to see this just rolled out this last week flow's got a new interface about time right so if we search for videos look at that much easier and then if we go in here and we search for TPS much easier right so kind of cool and then now it's like hey for project name what goes here click in here they've also changed how Dynamic content works so we all have to click on this to show the dynamic content and if we look in here remember so this is where naming those remember we we took all that time over here like we clicked on Project name and then we set its ID to be project name so over here now if we look there is Project name so flow automatically sees that Dynamic content for us that's why we had to put those in there so we could reference them so date not done now we go to do date not done you're going to notice that like it doesn't offer it knows it once a date but it doesn't know that one's a date no big deal just type in date project dates right there number of meanings meeting numbers perfect and then reason behind this one's a little trickier I made a tricky one just for you and so what you need to do here is say add a custom item and then you're going to click into here now you click on the dynamic content and now if you look in here we should have do reason right there are Dynamic content and say okay right so a little bit of a different interface kind of had to click slowly to make sure you got it but you got that this looks good to me right I think we got it all so we're going to say save and now let's save we'll say test manually test it and because it's a date trigger right like we're not gonna have to do anything it's going to run the flow and so then now it is off and running and so if we did this correctly over here in just a moment Chewie got oh I'm faster when I get here too we got the card and so then now you know project name I don't know test date the 16th sounds great meetings attended right there's a little picker place over attacks The Bobs and we'll say save this now if we go check on our flow it says it's successful and if we go to SharePoint and go back to TPS reports test 616 15 the mobs that's kind of cool right that's a great way like if you start to think outside the box and think about all those things that we do manually you know collect the information via email maybe it's time to start having those conversations in teams and instead of just collecting information that someone else has to go type in somewhere else right adaptive cards are a way for you to collect that information and action on it whether that's you know approving something capturing it in SharePoint starting another process one of the ways that we use these here powerapps911.com is when people go to our website and fill out the contact us form at the bottom right one of the most common things we get is requests for free help yeah what do you do but with all those free requests helps you know they go to different people on my team to answer those free request help and so we have a flow that takes it when you fill out that form on the website the flow then sends a team's message to whoever's on call for that particular day and they answer your question right there in teams and then they say send this back to Susie and then it goes back to you uh via email so you know using these adaptive cards is part of one of our key business process here powerapps 9-1-1 also you know we're not going to get into it today but with adaptive cards you can build like branching so you change the visibility of different pieces so you could say hey only show reason for late or sorry only show meetings attended if reason for late was um Bob right so you can start to build that type of logic we're not going to do that today if you want me to build one that is really complicated I don't think any of you watch the videos why not make it really complicated but if you wanted leave comments below and I will consider making one where we we do more complicated adaptive card stuff but for a lot of us just this simple data collection or remember I'm just using this to push out more interactive data works well also so over here let's edit this real quick so another thing that you're going to find interesting right it was right hey Shane well what if instead of this always saying chewy fill this out you know I wanted this to be dynamic based on a list of people right I you added the logic up above that found all the people who hadn't filled out their TPS report you're not looping through and you want to send each one of them a card good job you but then you're going to say well wait but I want to put their name instead of just have it all say chewy no big deal all right flow the rules of flow don't change this is just text it doesn't care how you get there so there's nothing stopping me from going right here and then saying add Dynamic content I don't have any right now but I get here let's use an expression so like if I did UTC now and said save so then now that date the current date and time would be put there in text all right so you can use Dynamic content to fill in the blanks here right test it write it hard coded make sure it works then start thinking all right well now I want to put a default you know uh placeholder text here I want to put the last project they worked on I'm gonna go look that up and get that cool no problem I want to set the uh the default date to be today plus seven days no problem you can do all those things by using Dynamic content here wait there's one caveat though when you introduce Dynamic content up here right this is all working didn't break anything here but if I now go add a new Step let's just add a compose to show you what happens oh it's spell composed but thankfully flow knows what I meant so now after I added the compose if I go here and click on Dynamic content it's going to get really confused okay so what's happening is because it can no longer read this so when you add Dynamic content inside here it doesn't understand how to break the schema down anymore it's like what happened like this really messes with Flo's brain so before you add any Dynamic stuff in here you have got to use all your Dynamic content right now my flow is so confused it can't even go on with life but if you add the dynamic content first like we did with create item then you can you go in here and make this Dynamic content and as long as you don't use the dynamic content menu anymore you won't have any problems but that's one of those things that could trip me up on Thursday I'd forgotten all about that so editing this Json not to be straight text anymore will break the rest of your flow but but not forward right if we do here so yeah you know there's no way to get out at this point I just have to kind of refresh okay but like so we're back to our fully working flow right so now if we go in here and we just go change Chewie again and so we say Dynamic content right this this does not technically break anything expression this just breaks your ability to use Dynamic content elsewhere in the flow going forward but if we save right now right savings will be fine right it's saved and now if we just do another test no big deal here and if we go look over for Chewie look there is UTC now put in there so it works it just breaks the ability to have Dynamic content going forward right because now if we go back over here we're like all right cool that'll work oh yeah whatever edit we don't care about that test run anymore but so now if we go in and we said hey a new step and we try that compose again right compose is happy happy right new Step add another compose but if we try now to say click in here and say Dynamic content now flow is really confused okay so that comes up so I wanted you to see it because it's bad right and I know whatever all right now I'm just rambling because now I'm in like a weird state where I can't really show you all the things that go on but it's okay you've got the idea start using adaptive cards to replace emails quit using email as a crutch for everything right we should be sending teams messages even if they're just informational adaptive cards a way to capture information right there's a lot of cool things that you can do with this because I know most your organizations are using teams more and more so your flows and power apps should be talking to teams more and more questions comments answers any of that leave them below you know and remember also like this is this type of stuff you know we learned in training class this week so why aren't you taking training classes with me my training classes are lots of fun so come join me all right anyway with that I'm gonna say thanks and have a great day

Channel: Shane Young

Views: 21,887

Keywords: Shane Young, powerapps911, PowerApps, Power Apps, Microsoft Teams, Adaptive Cards, SharePoint, Workflow Automation, Office Space, TPS Reports, Power Automate, Teams Tutorial, SharePoint Integration, Email Replacement, Data Collection, Office 365, Teams Adaptive Cards, Microsoft Flow, cloud flow, adaptive cards microsoft teams, adaptive cards power automate, adaptive card designer tutorial, adaptive cards tutorial, adaptive card action.submit, adaptive cards designer

Id: _O08-bbBVy4

Length: 23min 31sec (1411 seconds)

Published: Mon Jun 12 2023