Create a Team using input from user, add a Planner tab and some Tasks

[charleshking]

Happy New Year, folks!

tldr; I'm hoping some of you can give me some pointers.  I'm trying to create a flow to automate the setting up of a Team in MS Teams, add some standard files to the General channel, add a Planner (To Do) tab, and create a set of tasks - all based on some input from the user.

In more detail:

My team and I use MS Teams to centralise the process and documentation around the projects we run for clients.  That means that we frequently set up Teams that have similar structure, file content, and scheduled tasks - which seems like an ideal candidate for automation.  So I'm trying to learn Power Automate by doing that.

Here's the thing I'm trying to do, and some specific questions, although any guidance would be helpful:

I'd like anyone in my team to be able to trigger this flow from the press of a button.  (Where to put that button? How to control rights to see/use it?)

When the button is pushed, I'd like the user to input some data - project due date, lead team member, other team members, client name, etc.  (how to gather and validate that data?  where to store it?)

Using the data, I'd like to automate the setting up of a Team (Team name built from project due date, and client name), assigning of owner and members to the team, copying some standard documents into the team's General files filesystem (where to store the standard documents, and how to copy them across?)

Then I'd like to add a Planner/To-Do tab, and set up some standard tasks with due dates calculated from the project due date (how to store the template tasks and relative task due dates?)

I feel like this should be fairly basic stuff, but I'm trawling through the documentation and suffering from information overload - I'd be really grateful for any pointers about how to tackle this, or where to find specific relevant info/tutorials 🙂

Many thanks!

[DAllen365]

Hi @charleshking, it certainly is easy to get overwhelmed.  I am not sure you can do 100% exactly the way you want, but I really think given a few things you said, you will need a SharePoint list form (standard) and optionally a PowereApp (better).  This will be your data collection, enter info, live validation, etc.  If you ONLY had a Flow using a button to start it, you can enter some data but its very basic and it is not intended to be a large complex data entry.  It's just if you want enter a couple of parameters.  Using a PowerApp to collect the data would get you close to a button.  Then when the form is created in the SP list, that triggers your flow.  This flow will then do any additional calculation / validation / emailing, then also creating your Planner / To do tasks.  

For the templating, using either CDS or just a basic SharePoint list works fine for this.  There is a row item per template (name, dates, etc).  Then your Flow determines which template to get and use its properties to get and use.  

For any project large or small, I like to write myself a functional spec.  If you follow my suggestion, you will need a SP list for the submission, a flow for all the automation and planner to hold tasks.  Each part will have lots of sub stuff, so its helpful to me to write out what I'm doing and how I'm doing it.  A little extra planning now saves you headaches later. 

Hope this points you in the right direction.  Of course reply if you need to discuss more, good luck!

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[takolota]

@charleshking @DAllen365 

This template build has several pieces of what you ask, it sets up a template SP list, new Teams channel, & new Teams tabs. You can learn much of what you’re asking about with it…

Free for any licensed Office365 organizations, this SharePoint & Teams template makes one source of truth for a project log, kanbans, GANTTs, workload trackers, & update notifications:
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-...