Power Teams: Microsoft Teams + Power Apps

As Microsoft explain in this overview you can integrate Power Apps and Microsoft Teams.

This is another example of the ‘Power Cloud’ effect – The most compelling argument for the Microsoft products is the holistically integrated suite: Power Apps, Azure, Teams, Sharepoint and Dynamics aren’t standalone, isolated technologies but rather can act as component parts of a whole solution building framework.

‘Power Teams’ is one example of this effect, enabling you to Create Apps in Teams, such as Embedding an App in Teams, with a guide on how to create your first one.

When you combine it with Power Apps, Microsoft Teams can be seen as the modern day version of Excel and Access. Ie. it’s the most common IT tool used by all office workers to complete their projects, and they’re going to want to self-modify it in the same way to best reflect how they conduct their work.

Team is the raw utility, the video conferencing et al, and then Power Apps is the programming tool set for building workflows that interface with that utility, connecting to schedule a two-way flow of event-driven updates.

In 2020 Microsoft announced Dataverse, a new low-code data platform for Microsoft Teams, and an apps extension framework. With Power Apps, Automate, and Virtual Agents now available via Teams, those users can access low-code to automate processes and deploy chatbots.

Ultimately all of this means that Teams is an entirely customizable platform toolkit, meaning organizations can shape it to suit exactly how they work.

Model Driven Agility

This is especially powerful when combined with a principle of ‘Model Driven Agility‘. Quite simply this means achieving business agility through the use of pre-defined templates, the ability to define and repeatedly execute a high performance process so that it is baked into the unconscious capability of an organization.

In the case of Power Teams this is best explained through their Templates, where you might activate one to:

• Create a Task in Planner when a message is added to a Teams channel.
• Forward my Shift Schedule to My Calendar.
• Save Gmail Attachments to a Dropbox folder.
• Post Weather Updates to a Yammer group daily.
• Receive a weekly summary of Dynamics 365 opportunities.

There’s hundreds of them, across categories ranging from Remote Work to Approvals.

When you consider the general dynamics of office work – For example a Sales Manager organizing a weekly sales call review will want to i) schedule all the team, and ii) send data like a weekly summary of Dynamics 365 opportunities, you can see it’s made up of lots of repeated ‘micro-processes’, often assigned to a human.

Technology is most effective when it is used to automate this type of mundane, repeated process, and an MDAg approach enables an organization to define what is a high performance workflow and encode it into an easily repeatable pattern.