Create manual flow to push notify in Teams, showing in Activity 'bell' and pop up custom message

[Craig_101uk]

Morning all, your help is required please.

What I want to do....

Be able to send a custom message to a mailbox group that will pop up in their MS Teams and highlight the notification within the Activity bell in Teams.

How I want to do it...

I want to create a manual flow within Power automate which I suppose is similar to the 'submit for approval' button flow within Sharepoint.  However, I don't want to send an email, only a live notification within Teams within the Activity area.  The trigger needs to be manual with the ability to select either an individual or an entire mailbox from within the email list.  Then allowing either custom input of text for the message or a pre-determined message such as 'Please see the updated Bulletin', for example.

I hope this is clear and someone can help as I have only been able to post silent messages within the 'posts' area which is not what I want to do.

Thanks.

[jinivthakkar]

@Craig_101uk please check this out 

https://wonderlaura.com/2018/07/18/button-in-sharepoint-list-to-trigger-microsoft-flow/

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[Expiscornovus]

Hi @Craig_101uk,

There are a couple of ways to add notifications to the activity feed. I would say mentioning a user is probably the easiest one.

https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/explore-the-activity-feed-in-teams-91c635a1-644a-4c60-9c9...

Below is an example for the posting a message to teams part. At the moment it is just one single user in a teams channel. You might want to adapt that example to your needs.

1. Add an email trigger input to your button action.

2. Add a Get at mention token for a user action. You can email field from the trigger as input. Make sure that it is the userprincipalname of the user you want to mention. 

3. Add a Post a message (v3) action. Use the token from the previous action in the message field.

The result should look something similar to this.

Hope this helps to get you started?

[Craig_101uk]

Hi Expiscornovus, 

Thank you for the detailed reply, it's making sense but I am struggling to get that working.  I am a graphic designer stepping in to the 'flow' world and as a result, not great at the moment with how the basic stages work.  Can I ask you to baby step me if you have the time please?

From your steps creating a manual trigger with an email, cool, can I ask are you leaving the field blank where it asks 'please enter an e-mail address'?  

Step 2, add a get mention.  You state to ensure that it is the principalname of the user I want to mention.  I'm thinking this means to input the user I want the message to go to, so the end results shows in their Activity section.  I cannot seem to edit the @mention to point to a use?  If you could explain that to me like an idiot, that would be great!

Step 3, using the token from the previous action in the message field.  I can of course drop in a new @mention element from the dynamic options however, I don't know how to reference the token from the previous step? 

Sorry to be a pain as you were kind to help me, I'm just new to this and need a little help to understand how linking steps works at the moment.

Thanks ever so much!

Craig