Microsoft Ignite Weather to Microsoft Teams using Microsoft Flow

So I'm headed down to Microsoft Ignite along with a couple other guys from Time2Market. I've decided to setup a Microsoft Team to help us keep recorded, take notes, and share information with others at Time2Market that couldn't go to the conference.

So I decided to see what interesting things I could cook up in our use of Teams. I recently noticed that Microsoft Flow has had quite an update. One of those updates that I really like is that there is now a connector for Microsoft Teams. The connector is pretty basic right now, but it does allow you to post a message. So to start to play with Flow and Teams I decided to cook up a flow that posts the Weather forcast in our Microsoft Ignite Teams General channel.

First off, you need to gain access to Microsoft Flow. There is a free version, but it is limited in some of its features. Beyond that, it appears it is part of every Office 365 and Dynamics 365 plans.

Anyway, now that we got getting access to Microsoft Flow out of the way. Login and Navigate to "My Flows"

This is where you can see all the flows you've created. For the weather flow, there isn't a template that matches what we want to do, so we will need to "Create from Blank".

Microsoft provides some commonly used connectors, but for this flow we need to hit the link for 'Search hundreds of connectors and triggers"

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On the search screen click on "Recurrence" and click Advanced Options. Then set the Frequency to "Day", the Interval to "1", Time Zone to "Eastern" and then "2017-08-19T08:00:00" for the Start time. Make sure you change the date to the current day.

Next click on "New Step"

Click "Add an Action" and then search for "Weather". Click on "Get Weather for today".

Set the Location to be "9800 International Dr, Orlando, FL 32819" for the Orange County Convention Center and set the Units to be appropriate for whether you are used to Imperial (US) or Metric (Practically everyone else)

Click "New Step"

Click "Add an Action"

Search for "Teams". Then click "Post Message". At this point you could select a number of places to send this message. You could send it to email, or a mobile notification. A great way to discover is to just scroll through the list of Actions available. 

Select your "Team" from your Microsoft Teams in your tenant. Then select the Channel, the default one created is "General". Finally format the message. You can see in my example I mixed in text along with the dynamic content tags. You can really go nuts and HTML tags to format things how you want.

When done click "Save Flow"

To test it out immediately click "Run Flow". Otherwise you'll have to wait til 8:00am Eastern for the flow to run. You can see in the Teams client behind flow what the message looks like

There you have it... hope this inspires you to explore what else you can do with Microsoft Flow and Microsoft Teams. Stay tuned to this blog for more flows as I dream them up.