Microsoft Teams is a unified communications platform that combines persistent workplace chat, video meetings, file storage, and application integration. The service integrates with the company's Office 365 subscription office productivity suite and features extensions that can integrate with non-Microsoft products.
Microsoft Teams is being used by over 125,000 organizations across the world, since its launch on March 14, this year. It has come out as core product of Microsoft ‘s vision for intelligent communications – bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations at a single hub in Office 365.
And as Teams become a single hub for team work, it is obvious that all project related updates should be available as posts in Teams as well. Though Teams provide a bunch of connectors to integrate with other application, but not for Microsoft Project Online. This integration is important because it would help to keep the project team updated with the latest project happenings in the form of posts in Microsoft Teams. Isn’t it interesting?
In this article, I’m going to share a simple scenario about how we can quickly integrate Teams with Project Online using Microsoft Flow.
To give you a bit of context, Microsoft Flow is a cloud based workflow service that enables automation of common tasks and business processes across the most common apps and services. It has Project Online connector and supports the following triggers:
Microsoft Teams is core to our vision for intelligent communications—bringing together conversations, meetings, files, Office apps, and third-party integrations—to provide a single hub for teamwork in Office 365.
- New project created
- New resource created
- New task created
- Project published
And following are the actions available for Project Online:
- Check-in and publish project
- Checkout project
- Create a new resource
- Creates new project
- Creates new task
- List projects
- List tasks
Let’s see how we can develop Microsoft Flow workflow to post a message in Microsoft Teams whenever a new project is created in Project Online.
- To begin, sign-in (or sign-up), into Flow and click on Create from blank.
Step 2: At the bottom of the screen, click on Search hundreds of connectors and triggers
Step 3: In the search bar, type Project and you will see the list of connectors available for project management.
Step 4: Click on Project Online
Step 5: Next screen shows all the supported triggers for Project Online. In this scenario, we want to post message in Teams whenever a new project is created so select Project Online – When a new project is created.
Step 6: Provide your project root site URL and click on + New step
Step 7: Click on Add an action
Step 8: Here we need to specify action for Microsoft Teams. Type Teams in search bar and click on Microsoft Teams
Step 9: Select Microsoft Teams – Post message.
Step 10: Select Team Id to post a message.
Step 11: Select Channel Id.
Step 12: Draft a message for post using custom text and fields from Project Online. From the right Dynamic panel, select needed field and drop it in the Message box. See the below image:
Step 13: Once you have drafted the message, give a name for your Flow and click on Create Flow to save this workflow settings.
Testing Flow
- Go to Project Online and sign-in
- Create a new project
- Check Microsoft Teams to receive project creation notification in the configured channel
There you go! You have successfully integrated Project Online with Microsoft Teams without any coding. If you are looking for more such integrations with Microsoft Project Online, our PPM experts can help you with the right solution.
Here I showed just one example for a trigger and action. Similarly, you can add more triggers as you require. Good Luck!
