Power Apps Newsfeed for Teams

Power Apps Newsfeed for Teams

Power Apps empowers teams to build solutions that solve their own problems without the time and expense of a custom build – or even any pre-existing development experience. Its integration with Microsoft Teams, however, kicks those benefits into high gear. 

See, not only can users build custom apps – they can design custom apps specifically for Teams using Microsoft’s Teams Toolkit for Visual Studio and Visual Studio Code.

In this installment of Velosio Viewpoints, we’ll show off one of our own custom creations: Power Apps Newsfeed, a collaborative news feed designed to support internal knowledge sharing and employee self-service. 

Developers Rod Donovan and Eric Forgo offer an inside look at our Power Apps Newsfeed for Teams app. In it, they’ll:

• Break down the initial goals for this project and the problems it solves for different user groups
• Explain how it all came together
• Demonstrate how the different components of Power Apps Newsfeed work 
• Walk through the process of logging into the app and making changes

Watch the full video to see our newsfeed in action and learn more about how we came up with this solution. You can also keep reading to learn how other organizations are using the Teams-Power Apps integration to solve their own challenges and support end-users. 

How Power Apps & Microsoft Teams work together to drive big wins for employees & customers alike

So again, Power Apps’ big selling point is that the platform makes it easy for almost anyone to build custom apps — regardless of formal coding experience. 

According to Microsoft documentation, Power Apps and Teams can be used in the following scenarios (pictured in the screenshot below).

Essentially, you can opt to embed an existing canvas or model-driven apps into either a personal or tab app. Or – you can create a canvas app within Teams, using the new, built-in development platform backed by Dataverse.   

Ultimately, this decision depends on what you’re trying to achieve. For example, if you’re building one or two features for Teams, but most activities take place outside of the collaboration platform, embedding is probably your best option.

But – if you’re building an app centered on enabling collaboration and productivity among employees – and the customers and partners they interact with each day, developing directly from Teams allows you to create applications that align with actual processes and workflows.

In our case, we used Power Apps and Teams to tackle the specific pain points our teams were experiencing in their day-to-day re: knowledge sharing. Our internal resources were spread across too many locations, making it hard for users to find the information they needed to complete basic tasks like access development documentation, generate accurate quotes, answer client questions, and so on. 

For the development team, fielding the same old questions from colleagues, clients, and even fellow developers — and jumping around to find basic information was constantly interrupting more valuable work. 

And for everyone else, finding answers to more technical questions meant either asking developers directly and waiting around for an answer. Or — taking matters into their own hands, digging around in various folders and files for information (with no guarantee that it’s accurate or up-to-date). 

Final thoughts

The Power Apps and Teams integration is just one of the many ways that Microsoft makes development — and adoption — easier on everyone, whether or not they know how to code. 

That said, it’s important to understand that these tools are designed this way, in part, because everything else is so difficult and time-consuming. Before we built the Power Apps Newsfeed app, we spent months gathering information (complaints, really) from the entire organization so that we could be sure it met everyone’s needs.

What we mean is, leveraging these tools to solve X problem or act on Y opportunity demands strategic planning, org-wide buy-in, and the infrastructure to support everything from planning to implementation, adoption, and beyond. 

Interested in how Power Apps can help you design better tools? Read more here.

Check out the rest of our playlist on YouTube. There, we’ll provide an inside look at more Microsoft apps, features, and integrations – with each video clocking in under the 15-minute mark.