Behind the scenes of The Power Challenge
I recently set up the Microsoft Team for the Power Challenge for the contestants to enter as guests before the challenge begins. For any new member who registers on the site above, a flow is triggering an Azure Automation that adds you as a guest to the tenant and also as a guest to the Team in Microsoft Teams. All this by using the cloud services listed here (no third party needed):
- Sway (as the website above)
- Forms (to register ideas and as a contestant)
- Microsoft Teams (To gather people, conduct educational meetings and share information)
- SharePoint Online (To store files and create articles with information)
- Flow/PowerAutomate (to add guests and welcome them to the team)
- PowerApps (as a profil picture maker)
Setting up the sway and forms
Go to sway.office.com and start from scratch or do as I did; create your information in a Word file with headlines and then import it to your sway. Just remember to make sure everyone has access to your sway and your the embedded code when publishing your sway to a website.
Forms is even easier! Just go to forms.office.com and start creating your form! The magic of my Forms actually happen in PowerAutomate later on.
Microsoft Teams to gather people!
I’ve made a things to prepare my Teams environment. I created a team for the attendees that they are automatically added to as guests when they fill out the form above. The team looks like this and the red rectangles focus on the changes from a standard layout:
The contestants/attendees will get their own accounts in the tenant when the challenge begins and when logging in the the Teams environment they’ll have the PowerPlatform tools ready on the left side menu!
I’ve set up 3 extra channels apart from the general one created automatically. Knowledge sharing is for (you guessed it!) sharing knowledge between the members. I have a channel for new attendees with start up information and finally a channel for any unrelated stuff your might come across and your still want to share!
On the general channel, you’ll find a tab for the public website as well as to the SharePoint team site home page of the team! Right now, Home looks like this:
Up until the challenge, there are 4 free educational sessions led by a teacher on how to become a maker using the PowerPlatform! These sessions are hosted Teams meetings inside the channel, so you automatically get access by simply register for the challenge! No extra work needed!
In the new member channel, I have a flow in PowerAutomate that greets any new member of the Team and mention them! This way I hope they’ll find their way to the right place easier. The welcome tab is linked to the welcome article from the SharePoint Team site and holds more information you might need as a newly registered contestant in the Power Challenge!
The idol maker tab is a PowerApp with which you can snap a selfie and post to social media! I suggest open the tab on your mobile phone but it works fine on a computer as well. Freeze the image. Crop out the buttons. Post on social media. Become instantly more popular!
Using a Flow in PowerAutomate to greet new members
This flow is super simple and you could use this in plenty of your own teams to add some activity!
Trigger the flow for a new member is added to the team. Get the users UPN, use it to get the @mention token and finally embed this as dynamic content in a Post a message-action!
All of this could be set up in a matter of hours. Within a day, you could get from nothing but an idea to having your platform set up and ready to collaborate. The intention of this blog post is mainly to spread ideas and inspiration so that you might find some use cases for these features and hopefully your life will be just a tiny bit easier!
Cheers!
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