How to Setup a Scheduled Daily Stand Up in Teams Channel
Currently I’m working in a project with team members in various time zones. In our working agreement we also marked Friday as a ‘no meeting day’. To keep each other up to date of the latest, we decided on an ‘async daily stand up’ in a Microsoft Teams Channel.
To have an easy start of this virtual daily each Friday, I wanted to have an automated post in that channel where every team member can reply to. This keeps the async stand ups easy to begin with and structured. I ‘came up’ with this idea, just by stealing (or ‘reusing’ as we say) the idea from another team 😏. But how can this be achieved?
I used Microsoft Power Automate for this solution. It’s easy to setup a new flow with these requirements. First, go to https://powerautomate.microsoft.com/. Of course you need an account to use this. In my case it is setup within the tenant of my company, which provides me access to internal resources like Microsoft Teams channels and such.
Creating the flow
I started with a blank Scheduled cloud flow, as I wanted to do post a message on a scheduled basis.
Next you’re asked for a name for your flow, the start date and time of the flow, the repeat sequence and which time of the week it should run.
When you click Create your in the editor of the flow. Starts pretty basic as we expected.
Click New step and in the Choose an operation dialog type teams to see all the Actions you can select for Microsoft Teams. If you scroll down a bit in the list, you’ll find Post message in a chat or channel. Click that action to select it.
By selecting Post in Channel other selection fields will be populated to select the Team and the Channel. And you can enter the message of course.
As you can see in the sample post in the beginning of this blogpost, I want to include the date in the header of the post. How do you do that? Well, using a thing called Dynamic Content. When you click in the Message box, an extra link with a button pops up at the bottom left of the dialog.
When you click on the plus-sign next to the Add dynamic content another dialog pops up to select dynamic content. Click on Expression to see functions you can call. I selected the utcNow function that takes the format of the date as parameter.
When you’re done, click the OK button to close the dialog. I added the rest of the text I wanted to have there — some hints on what to put in the update. If you like, you can click the </> button in the editor toolbar to switch between the result and the underlying HTML.
You can now save the flow. It’s a smart thing to test the flow manually to see if the message pops up in your channel.
And you’re done. Have fun with the daily’s 🙂
