Teams + Power Platform App Templates: Real World Scenarios to Empower your Business

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello. Welcome to The Experts Conference. My name is Christina Wheeler. My session is Teams Plus Power Platform App Templates-- Real World Scenarios to Empower Your Business. I work for Core BTS, I'm their Director of Innovation. I specialize in Power Platform, Teams, SharePoint, you name it. I'm a business applications MVP. Feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn. You can also find me on Twitter. And check out the Office 365 for IT Pros. We have an e-book. We update it monthly. And many of my colleagues are doing sessions, or many of my co-authors are doing sessions, so I highly recommend you check out the book and you check out those sessions. OK, before I get started, one of the things I want to talk about is the Microsoft 365 developer program. I'm going to talk about and demonstrate some of the Power Platform app templates that are available for Teams. And one of the things that I like to do is have a little sandbox environment that I can work in to play around with these templates. So this is something I recommend for you to sign up for. It's free. What you're going to get is 25 E5 licenses. And this is a renewable tenant so as long as you're using the tenant it will auto-renew every three months. And it's a great way to play around with if you're doing Teams development or Power Platform and stuff like that so that you can learn in your environment and try out different things without affecting your production environment. So check it out. There's the link here on the slide, and sign up for that whenever you have time. OK, so what I'm going to talk about is the Power Platform or Microsoft Teams app templates. Now, our world has shifted since COVID. I went from traveling the world, flying 90,000 miles a year, to not getting on a plane anymore. And the good thing is about COVID was that all of a sudden the world learned about Microsoft Teams. And so more and more organizations now are using Teams. Now, the great thing is we are going back in-person and doing things now, but a lot of organizations have either fully adopted remote work or has gone more of a hybrid approach. But either way, even if you're in-person, many of us are living in Teams. Well, Teams is a very powerful platform and it's a great way to collaborate. However, your organization may have a lot of business processes that you want to bring inside of Teams and there's ways that you can do that. Now, there might be some specific use cases and what Microsoft has done is they've created some app templates available for Teams that do address different business scenarios. And it's built off of-- I'm going to focus on Power Platform app templates, but there are app templates such as messaging extensions, bots, a Teams bot, different things that you can do. But what I'm going to focus is on Power Platform. But there's a link on the slide here. And when you go to this link and check it out, what it's going to do, it's going to take you to a website that's going to have a gallery of all these available app templates. There's an overview that you can watch, and then you can also see the gallery. But what you're going to see is some specific use cases. And on the screen there's a new one I haven't tried out yet called Tournament of Teams. You'll see there's a FAQ bot, and so on. I'm going to go ahead and click on See The Gallery. And when I click on See The Gallery, here's where you're going to have more information about each one of these app templates. Now getting back to my slide real quick, what these app templates are, they are prebuilt templates that you can deploy into your tenant. It gives you a plug and play experience and basically a one-click deployment. Now, each one of these solutions are available to download from GitHub. And when you click on any of the solutions that you're interested, what you'll do is you'll find the one you want to look at, and I'm going to scroll down to the bottom here. And there's a list of templates here. And in the list, you're going to see a little bit of an introduction to that template. And then here I see one that says Associate Insights, and it's a Power App. And if I'm interested in this one, I would click on the link for that app template. And what it's going to do, it's going to take you to that GitHub repo for the template. And then what you'll be able to see is what the technology is behind that template and what the focus is. Now, this one I'm looking at is one called Associate Insights, which is intended for firstline workers to get customer feedback. But what you'll see is screenshots of examples of this template. And then the other thing you can do is you can click on Architecture for each one of these templates, and it'll have a breakdown of what that solution is built on. So in this case, I can see that this is a Power App solution. I also see that it's using SharePoint for the back-end of the data, and then there's connectors to it. And then there's also a Power BI report for this template. Now, the other thing you can do is when you want to deploy the solution, or app template, you would click on Deployment Guide. And when you click on there it's going to have all the instructions, including the prerequisites, for you to deploy this solution into your tenant. What I do is, when I'm trying these out, I'll use my sandbox environment to deploy these templates so I