Turbocharging Teams - Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams - Episode 12: Power Apps and Teams

6 Nov 2020
0

By Kevin Kieller and Dino Caputo

Turbocharging Teams focuses on tips and tricks to help you get the most out of using Microsoft Teams. In this episode, we continue their discussion of the Power Platform and provide specific examples of how Power Apps can be used as a “superpower” to get more from Teams for you and your organization. For inspiration, we review several example applications from Microsoft and from the Power Apps Community Gallery.

 

 

Microsoft Team transcript Microsoft Stream Generated Automatic Transcript

 

Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of turbocharging

teams. My name is Dino Caputo and I'm joined once again by my

colleague Kevin Kieller.

And today we're going to continue our discussion of the

power platform, more specifically, power apps.

In our last episode, we talked about power apps and what they can do

for you, specifically in the context of Microsoft.

Teams and we introduced.

We talked about some of the key

announcements at night, so. Just a quick recap.

The power plot power apps is really part of the

power. The Microsoft Power platform which encompases.

Power apps as well as three other areas, so there's power

BI, which is the the analytics application power apps which we

got into last week.

Power automate, which is the workflow automation and this was

formerly known as flow and then. Lastly the power virtual agent.

So think chat bots.

And then you know, really, tying it into teams, you know

Microsoft Teams is a platform, doing 75 million daily active

users, 5 billion meeting minutes generated in a single day. So

obviously a lot of usage within teams. So the notion here is

that power apps are driving business transformation. As you

can see some statistics there.

You know Microsoft reporting 188% return on investment for

exit are using power apps. 74% reduction and application

development costs and an average of 3.2 hours per week saved in

terms of employee productivity.

So I'll start things off in terms of you know, we dove into

an application example last week of how you can actually go and

build a power app into teams without having to get into any

coding or open up any third party applications. So I wanted

to show some more examples of ways you can integrate power

apps into teams and so built into teams. There's templates,

there's employee ideas.

Inspection applications or issue reporting templates. So if you

have any of these requirements you can come in and simply just

pick one of the three, and I suspect that there's going to be

more and more of these templates added. Right now, there's three

when you get into the powerapps

right within teams. And then if you don't fit into the one of

the requirements that you have, you can go to

thepowerapps.microsoft.com and there's a huge templates Gallery

there, and I've.

Put a couple snippets of different examples here.

The Budget Tracker site inspection, a service desk application,

customer success, case management. Maybe you have asset

checkout, so lots of different templates in the Powerapps

template Gallery to check out.

Which is kind of nice.

I've taken the inspection app and deployed it into one of our

teams and just wanted to show you a couple of screens on what

it might look like and you can see the fit of this. This is

really meant to be run on a phone or tablet and you can see

I've launched an inspection app and presented with a couple of

choices.

 I'm going to perform an inspection and in this case.

Going to, it's a it's like a food restaurant type storefront

environment and you know the application has some prebuilt

things you're going to look at the ambient location, the

backstage front desk, frozen food area. So really what it's

meant to do is, you know you would give it to your frontline

worker. They would walk the storefront and just use it as a

checklist. There's some pictures embedded in the inspection list.

Are the shelves filled with food? Yes. No, not applicable if

they're not, you can quickly launch. You can take some

pictures and embed them into the into the inspection. I can write

some notes. I can even assign a task, say Kevin, go clean up

your mouse and I'll I'll three.. So really kind of neat. And then

when the person is done, they just simply say.

You know, complete inspection.

And submit it and then all these all this is captured.

So again leveraging all the different technologies,

there's flow flow involved, task lists, chat involved

you can take embedding pictures. All of them get

returned back into team. So it's really really quite

nice and just easily built off a template.

And with that I'll pass it over to Kevin in terms of

talking about some other examples.

Yeah well, thanks Dino so one of the other examples and and and I

think just to clarify. Like you said, it's kind of built into

teams. It's you know, really, that Microsoft is kind of pre

deployed like these are just like power apps application so

it's they are applications and and that's the kind of cool

thing about teams is you know you pin this app to teams and

for all intents and purposes for your users it acts as though

it's built into teams. So I want to take this as one of the

other. Example applications, it's employee ideas app and it

has this concept of you can have different campaigns. So those

are kind of subjects around either where you want to capture

some ideas and it has an open date in a close date and it can

be open for a period of time so that you can kind of solicit

ideas. But this is one of the screens from that application

and when you're building your applications and you do this

with either, you know no code or very low code.

You can really build some sophisticated user interface

elements, so for example item number one there has this image

library, and really that's what they call a Gallery control, and

a Gallery can be like a list of text and it can be horizontal or

vertical or kind of in this matrix view, and it can display

text or images. So that's just one of the nice image controls.

You can drag it and drop it.

And then just connected to a data source which if you

remember from the previous episode Dino showed how to kind

of create a particular data source. It's akin to creating a

SharePoint list or an Excel spreadsheet. So pretty easy you

can have different types of lists, so item number 2 shows

another list which is really just another Gallery control,

not showing images but showing some repeated text with some

buttons you can have some modern

toggle buttons. Um, you know there's the regular toggle

button up on the top with green, but by #3 you know there's a

toggle button where you can choose whether the response type

is rating or text. And as Dino pointed out, because you're

building these applications in the context of teams, you can

tie it into things. I think you know well. Dino mentioned tying

into a task in planner, but in this case, like by #4, you can

choose when you add a new

campaign. And say you know submit, you can then have the

application post information about that campaign to a

specific teams channel. So it's really you know announcing it.

So once again, you can build modern looking and they're all

responsive design applications, which means it automatically

reformats if you're running it on a desktop or a tablet or a

mobile device, and you know and then they can access the.

Or of teams, and even though this is that example was, you

know, kind of one that Microsoft does has pre deployed and it

shows up in your application

list. These are power apps applications, so I think it's

important to to remember if you know for those existing

applications or applications that other people created or if

you or someone in your organization creates a power app

application. The great thing is, is it can be maintained and

updated by other people by yourself or other people you

know. Really this concept of citizen developers so you don't

need to go back to some professional developer.

So here for example I opened that screen that I showed you before, I just opened it in the

power apps for teams application and you can see like number one

that is in kind of the design layout mode, but that's the

exact same Gallery control that. I talked about.

You know, #2 just shows the properties like, so this is like

a selected the whole card, which is one of the components and you

can position it and change the color and then by #3 there you

see that's just really a list of all the different controls that

are on that particular at new campaign screen. So you know I

think not only can you create and deploy these applications,

but a key point is that you or

anybody else. Can really then open them and keep them up to

date as your business requirements change.

So power apps you know makes it turbocharges teams. It makes

more of teams, but it also power apps draws on all the other

components and you know this slide shows some of the really

exciting AI capabilities that you can incorporate into your

power apps application.

So you can do things like have AI categorized text blocks and extract some

meaning from it. You can recognize specific entities

which is kind of like doing some form processing as well.

You can do object detection in images to be able to, you

know, identify things, count things, and then you can use

some AI models to do some prediction.

You know, for instance, there's some examples that Microsoft has

put together, and all of these are, you know, building blocks.

So for example, a business card reader already does a good job

of extracting the name and address and phone number and

those kind of components. But you know, you could start with

that and maybe apply it to something that's similar but a

little different than other than a business card. Or if there was

something else you wanted to to recognize on that. So all of

these you know. AI components you can also leverage and tie

it into your power apps for teams applications.

You know, I think the Gallery is a great place to start. And what

was that URL again? Do you know that was just

powerapps.microsoft.com? OK, so sign in and you can quickly

browse some templates there.

And this other URL is, you know, is this really kind of the

community powerusers.microsoft.com you

can? There are some examples as well so but as you know you can

also ask questions. And then there's code snippets and really

in this episode we wanted to start you thinking of some of

the things that you might want to do.

So for instance, we've seen organisations in these pandemic times want to make sure

they schedule building access.. Maybe to go pick up a secondary

monitor or. You know, pick up a chair if you're going to

continue to work from home. So we've seen applications that do

some building access scheduling.. You can book a time and then

they can approve it and just count the people and keep track

of it. In case you know, God forbid they had to do some

contact tracing, you can build some sophisticated process

checklist. Certainly there's lots of applications where you

could build a checklist, but here you can. You know, build

logic into that, so if you have a sophisticated, reflexive

checklist where you know you say

one thing and. They may go down a different path. You can

automate. The process is kind of like using its self referential,

but you can create an application and there is an

example of this that is a form to allow users to crew request

the creation of Microsoft Teams team and it has approval

mechanism and also make sure that it can apply whatever

governance rules you have. For example for naming teams or

membership of teams etc. And then you know you can certainly

do some complex workflow

handling. Where you incorporate through some logic and it may

be, you know, a little bit of coding, some complex workflow

handling that may be applicable to your specific line of

business. And then Microsoft recently ran power apps kind of

contest and one of the the winning entry was somebody that

created a learning application.. So it it provided some

interactive learning targeted at kids. It taught them some math

and I taught them about the planets in this type of thing

so. You know you can create some learning materials in a very

interactive sense using power up. So certainly lots of

different ideas and lots of different capabilities with

power apps and so that brings us to the end of this

turbocharging. Teams episodes were very excited about what

what applications?

You know organisations create can create for themselves, or you know.

By partnering with people that have some expertise in this, we

would you know absolutely suggest that you spend a little

bit of time exploring power apps along with and, you know, make

it known to other people in your organization that it may be

applicable to we're always open and welcoming your feedback.

There's our contact information an please go off and hopefully

learn a little bit more and then use this to make your business

life a little bit more efficient. Thank you.

Thanks till next time.

 

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