Microsoft Teams Integration
Microsoft Teams is a versatile tool with several services built into one app, including chat, call, meeting, file sharing, and more. As a Microsoft 365 product, it's tightly integrated with other apps in the family of Microsoft productivity tools such as SharePoint, OneDrive, Office 365, Power Platform/Power Automate, among others. You can easily augment Teams interactions and collaboration with the processes and data from your ProntoForms environment.
The basic premise of using Microsoft Teams with ProntoForms is to bring your field services capabilities to your 'central hub for teamwork.' There are several benefits to having such a setup:- It can help you enable effective team collaboration. Team members can see progress as forms get submitted, find answers, and fix issues together.
- You can send notifications to a Group, Channel, or Chat and customize it for different teams based on the job, project, or department.
- ProntoForms with Teams can help you automate your workflow and complete next steps. For example, once an inspection is submitted, you can initiate the next step in the work order, such as sending it for billing or supervisor approval.
- You can use Teams as an alternative to email and take advantage of its communications features such as chat and video calling to provide remote assistance to your field workers.
- You can implement a 'swarming' support model where one technician handles a ticket from start to finish instead of tiered support. This will help develop employee skills, lower turnover, and improve customer satisfaction.
Workflow and use cases with Microsoft Teams
Create a SharePoint Document Library
First, the citizen developer creates a SharePoint Document Library within their Office 365 user interface. The Library can contain custom columns for capturing additional metadata from the form, such as the Account, Case Number, Technician, etc.
ProntoForms will upload the form document and populate the additional columns in this document library.
Create a SharePoint Document Library Data Destination
Using ProntoForms, an admin creates a SharePoint Document Library Data Destination and attaches it to the appropriate form.
They set the library path and map the columns to the form's questions, answers and other custom metadata using ProntoForms' DREL language.
Create a Flow using Power Automate
The citizen developer then creates a Cloud Flow using Power Automate. The Flow looks for any new uploads in the document library and sends a notification to a Teams channel. The message can include dynamic content such as data from the columns, thumbnails, a link to the actual form submission, etc. The message can also have filters, such as the type of work, customer, or department.
Get Notifications within Teams
As soon as a field worker submits a form from their mobile app, a document representing the form is sent to the SharePoint Document Library containing additional metadata configured earlier by the citizen developer.
The Flow runs, and a notification appears in the appropriate channel with a link to the document, for example, a PDF. Team members can click the link to view the document.