Adding lot’s of Champions to a Team using Flow

Some time ago I had to add about 170 people to a Champions Team in Microsoft Teams. Apart from not wanting to add them all one by one manually, I also wanted to inform all the users why they where added to a Team all of a sudden. Bear in mind that this organization had never used Microsoft Teams before so I was urged to use email in my contact with the Champs. I agreed to send them 1 email, in wich I was going to inform them that any new information from here on out was going to be in Teams.

To make it happen, I created this incredibly simple yet effective Flow in PowerAutomate!

I created an Excel file with a row for each of my Champions. The row consists of the email address to the user as well as their first name. The flow begins by reading all these rows and then moves on to an “Apply to each” block, which means that anything inside this block will be executed for each row in the Excelfile.
Step 1 was to send the user an email. This is where the first name on the row in the Excel file comes into action as I where able to begin each email with a personal greeting!
The email below is in swedish, but I essentially just point out that they’ll be invited into a Team where more information will be found.

After the email was sent, the flow would move on to adding the user to the Office 365 group of the Champions Team. Note I simply used the users email adress both for sending them an email as well as adding them to the Team since the users email address is also their UPN.

That’s it! What I did before activating this flow was preparing a Teams conversation in the Team in wich I mentioned the team as well as providing more information to my champions. When the flow was done, in a few seconds, I just had to press Enter and send my message in Teams. This way, everyone was already a member of the Team and thus got notifications from Microsoft Teams from here on.

As you can see, a flow in Power Automate doesn’t have to be used over and over or automate something frequently to be saving us time. Sometimes, like with this, it’s a very effective way to use a flow even for actions you’ll be preforming only once.