Crisis Communication solution feedback

[mabolan]

On Monday afternoon, as news of COVID-19 cases spread globally, we pulled together a team to help customers coordinate their own information sharing and team collaboration in response to evolving conditions in times of crisis. Today, less than 48 hours later, we’re releasing the first version of that solution for any customer organization to quickly implement. You can read more about the solution in our blog post or get the full instructions for how you can implement your own Crisis Communication app here.

We're extremely excited to hear how the community leverages this app, so we've created this thread to hear directly from you. Feel free to share your experience customizing the solution and altering it for your own needs. Over the next few weeks, we'll take your responses to make the app even better and post incremental updates. 😁

[mabolan]

@mattrich71, F1 should be sufficient to run this app.

[Anonymous]

Hello, 

First of all great app and thanks for posting it!

Second, here is what I am trying to do,

1. On the share work status screen, I want change the "working from home" and "Out of Office" to other status names, I have tried editing the sharepoint list "Presence status" column but it did not work. I tried making changes to the colworkstatus collection but that did not work either.  If you could point me in the right direction with that, that would be appreciated.

2. I also want to add 2 screens after the date selection page, "working" and " not working" which lead to the Email auto response screen. Would that be possible? 

If you could help out with those things that would be great! 

Thanks

[RobF]

To the developers - thank you for your work on this, it is greatly appreciated by the community.

I just have a couple questions as we work on implementing the app at our company:

1) Is it possible to rename the app by simply changing it in App Settings, or are there other dependencies that need to be considered in doing so?

2) Is it possible to rename the individual menu items (e.g. Emergency Contacts --> Key Contacts), and if yes, how?  (I am still new to Power Apps and tried to dig into the components in Edit mode to see if I could figure it out, but wasn't able to)

Thank you.

[Mr-Dang-MSFT]

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@Anonymous wrote:

1. On the share work status screen, I want change the "working from home" and "Out of Office" to other status names, I have tried editing the sharepoint list "Presence status" column but it did not work. I tried making changes to the colworkstatus collection but that did not work either.  If you could point me in the right direction with that, that would be appreciated.

---

Hi @Anonymous ,

I'm working on making it a little easier to customize the work status options. Right now this is a choice column in SharePoint, and it only contains the text of the choice.

The app has a few different locations that would need to be updated to change depending on the choices selected. For instance, a helper column is used to include an icon for each work status option. SharePoint does not include an icon in its choice column. Therefore the customization is done in the app.

I'll message this thread once we roll out the next version which will centralize the customization to one location.

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@Anonymous wrote:

2. I also want to add 2 screens after the date selection page, "working" and " not working" which lead to the Email auto response screen. Would that be possible? 

---

It's possible to add as many screens as you want to the experience. You will need to look at the OnSelect icons for Skip and Action.

Look for the part in the formula for Navigate() and just make sure it points to the screens you want. (You may want to wait for the newest version to roll out before performing customizations like this.)

[Mr-Dang-MSFT]

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@RobF wrote:

1) Is it possible to rename the app by simply changing it in App Settings, or are there other dependencies that need to be considered in doing so?

---

There are no dependencies on the app's name. You can change it to anything you want. 👍

---

@RobF wrote:

2) Is it possible to rename the individual menu items (e.g. Emergency Contacts --> Key Contacts), and if yes, how?  (I am still new to Power Apps and tried to dig into the components in Edit mode to see if I could figure it out, but wasn't able to)

---

We've customized the menu names for our copy at Microsoft as well.

1. Select the Home Screen from the tree view (left pane).
2. In the top left of the studio, change the property drop down menu to OnVisible. This shows some of the actions that happen at the start of the app; the rest of the actions are in the OnStart property of the App object in the tree view. They are split up for optimized performance.
3. Scroll down to the section for 'GET MENUS'.
4. Revise the ScreenName and Description. By default, they point to translations of the text that would go there, and a fallback option in some cases. Change it to some text enclosed by "".
   
   Ex:
   {
   ...,
   ScreenName: "Menu name 1",
   Description: "Description 1",
   ...
   }

[JRSipes]

My company just asked for something like this and to discover this was available has saved so much time.  Thanks for making this available!  I am having a bit of an issue, however.  I am getting an error on the OnStart property of the app(and other places as well).  It can't seem to find the colTranslations data source.  The version I downloaded is the newest released on the 12th. I noticed the updates made included the following:  - Included table of translations,- Added support for Hebrew and Arabic.  I am curious if this table for translations is missing from the solution or if I am just missing something on my end.  Would this be a SharePoint list also?  I have made sure that all my data sources are correctly associated to my team site. Here is the first of many errors I am seeing thought out the app: 

Some things worth mentioning: My company does not use Teams so I have not configured any of those items. We also will not be using the Employee status pieces and have also skipped on that setup.  

[Mr-Dang-MSFT]

@Anonymous , a new version is out now.

@JRSipes , colTranslation is the name of the table in the Excel file that contains the translations. It is the table in CrisisCommunication.Translations.xlsx. You will only find this in versions on 2020-03-12 and later. Let me know once you've found it in the latest version.

[Max_Wang]

Hello,

Thanks very much and in our company we can provide this solution to employees pretty fast.
However, although we have E5 license, we have to accept the statement "by selecting start my trial you agree to the terms of use for PowerApps and the Microsoft privacy policy.", I wonder why is this happen? And how to fix it? Thanks.

BRs,
Max

[smartamrit]

Imported the Apps to the Power Automate but I am seeing CrisisCommunication.Request not connected. Have I missed something?

[lukem175]

@Mr-Dang-MSFTApologies if I am missing something obvious. We want to keep the solution current as it rapidly develops (great work btw!) but exactly how are those upgrades performed? Guessing all the initial tailoring needed in the setup notes is not needed each time?

Many thanks for your help.