How to automate processes between Teams and SharePoint
Automate processes as a daily management key
The day-to-day of running a company, doing business, and managing teams, can be extremely repetitive. If we talk to someone who started working during the 2000s, surely they can tell us how crazy it could be to start new assignments: wasting time, failures due to fatigue and repetition, waiting too long to give the green light, lost colleagues due to lack of order…
This, fortunately, is less necessary every day. In our offices, tools such as SharePoint and Microsoft Teams are becoming more and more frequent, which have many mechanisms to automate processes and, in addition, are capable of doing so through Windows applications, such as Power Automate, which we have already talked about and deepened in our blog.
Microsoft Teams and SharePoint within our company
On the one hand (and as we have already mentioned), from SharePoint we control all our documentation and permission structure, creating new storage and access to information for our users when they need it.
On the other hand, Microsoft Teams is Microsoft’s ultimate collaboration tool, including a common point to share resources. Its integration with the rest of Microsoft’s inventory has made it the most successful business hub.
But what else can we do from SharePoint and Teams?
Do you want, for example, to link SharePoint and Teams for automation and synchronization between the two? You could create templates for documentation defined by type (invoice, call log, material requests, …), or for your teams and shared resources.
Are you interested? You’re in luck because Microsoft is a few steps ahead of your plans.
The necessary extensions to automate processes
For this type of process, Microsoft has specific modules and libraries that we can use for these operations:
- Microsoft.Online.SharePoint
- MicrosoftTeams
- SharePointPNPPowerShellOnline
Thanks to these, we can perform actions such as automatically creating SharePoint sites, assigning groups and permissions at the moment (adding users to our liking), creating content directly in our new SharePoint site, or creating channels in Teams with the members directly associated with it. site.
Again, the key revolves around the automation of processes and permissions that, normally, in a company (especially larger ones) can take a long time if done manually.
Very important: do not confuse the PowerShell cmdlets for SharePoint with those of Microsoft 365. Those based on SharePoint will focus their work on it, and will not apply it outside that environment. Those of MSO yes, since they apply it at the Office level.
As an added bonus, SharePoint PnPs (Patterns and Practices) are easy to find on GitHub, the leading hosting service for software development.
What do I gain by using these tools?
First of all, the most important thing we gain is time. The time that we can take advantage of to concentrate our resources (which will also be more available) on the processes that really add value to our business, translates into greater comfort for our employees.
All this will result in a better service to our customers, which never hurts. This is because, for example, tasks such as the “onboarding” of new projects, documentation, or workgroups will be done automatically with the push of a button. Before, clients had to wait until our administrators prepared everything for them to start working. Now it is no longer necessary.
If you want to start learning about these products in more detail, we recommend the Microsoft Docs library regarding SharePoint Online Management Shell and SharePoint PNP.