Power Teams: Microsoft Teams + Power Apps
Combining Teams and Power Apps enables organizations to customize and repeatedly execute high performance collaboration patterns.
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
‘Power Teams’ is one example of this effect, enabling you to Create Apps in Teams, with a guide on how to create your first one.
There is a powerful array of tools that enable developers to customize the functionality of Teams.
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:
- Send an email when a new message is added in Microsoft Teams.
- Save Outlook.com email attachments to your OneDrive.
- Keep my schoolwork in sync with my Google Drive.
- Create an issue in Azure DevOps when an email is received.
- Run sentiment analysis on tweets and push results to a Power BI dataset.
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 model driven approach enables an organization to define what is a high performance workflow and encode it into an easily repeatable pattern.
