Automate team lifecycle and management | My name is Daniel Chronlund and I work as a Microsoft cloud specialist here at Altitude 365. Today I would like to share with you some inspiration around automating Microsoft Teams management.
Microsoft Teams as a Hub for Teamwork
Microsoft Teams has been around for some time now and it’s clear that it is the new communication and collaboration hub in Office 365. Organizations are starting to really utilize its possibilities with cloud service integration, custom made apps and intelligent bots. For example, it’s really cool to see how airline companies automatically create teams for every flight and puts pilots and flight attendants, etc. as members. The team is then used for all internal communication regarding that specific flight. A simple but powerful solution for instant and modern communication with integration to backend systems. Imagine what you can do in your organization!
Microsoft Graph API
Microsoft recently announced Teams management capabilities through the Microsoft Graph API. Graph is a RESTful API that can be called to manage many of Microsoft cloud services. For example, you can write an application or a scheduled PowerShell script that calls Graph to manage Azure AD, Office 365 and Intune, all through the same API. If you would like to explore Graph’s capabilities you can use the Graph Explorer. It’s an easy way to query the API and you can even authenticate to your own tenant to work with real data.
Teams Automation
Altitude 365 has helped customers with different levels of Teams automation. The teams in Microsoft Teams are built on top of Office 365 groups which can also be automated through the Graph API. This makes it possible to automate the whole team lifecycle.
Examples of basic lifecycle automation:
- Create a team
- Add members and owners
- Configure team settings
- Add channels
- Post a welcome message
- Delete the team when the time comes
You might want to perform automation with a little more intelligence. Some examples:
- If a team has only one Owner, notify that person via email that it is company policy that teams has at least two owners.
- Create weekly reports of teams with external guest users and put the result into a Power BI dashboard and send an invite to the company security officer.
- Automatically create new teams for every department mentioned in the Active Directory department attribute and then add those users as members and the managers as team owners.
As you can see the possibilities are huge and with a couple of smart solutions like this you can really help your users to get the most out of the Office 365 teamwork tools. If you build the automation with PowerShell it’s perfect to run it with Azure Automation. No server required and you only pay for what you run. A modern way to do things.
More information about Teams Graph API at:
https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/docs/api-reference/beta/resources/teams_api_overview
See it in Action
If you would like to see this in action and do some brainstorming around what teams automation can do for your organization, feel free to contact us at Altitude 365. We’re ready to help you on your way to a modern workplace with Teams as the hub for teamwork.
Also, check out our new workshop Journey from Skype for Business to Microsoft Teams.
