Use Power Automate to send Teams messages to To Do #NoCode

I am a productivity enthusiast. I use Microsoft To Do for my individual task management. When someone has a task for me in Microsoft Teams I need to get them in to To Do. MVP Vesa Nopanen created a Power Automate routine for doing this which works great. In his blog post, he talks about how to create it and how to share it with select users within your organization. I have tuned this routine to make it universally available so that no changes to the code is need for it to run in your organization. How? Read on

Use Power Automate to send Teams messages to To Do #NoCode

I created the universal routine which you can download from GitHub and try for yourself. Just import it, authorize access to Microsoft Teams and Microsoft To Do and you are good to go. Check out Vesa’s blogpost for how to share it in the organization

Originally the routine checked for the name of your tasks folder, but I found a way to do that programmatically, since the name of the folder is different depending on your language. The flow will look up the lists in user context and from there we can check which is the default one. Tasks is always the default one.

Use Power Automate to send Teams messages to To Do #NoCode

I did one more thing. When capturing the text to go in the task, I wanted to limit the length of the subject to 150 characters.

  1. I had to convert the output from Teams to plain text
  2. Then I checked the length of the body
    • if it was short than 150 characters, I used that as length,
    • if the body was more than 150 characters I limited it to 150.
    • if(lessOrEquals(length(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’]),150),length(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’]),150)
  3. Finally I created a string variable which is no longer than 150 characters and used it in the subject.
    • substring(outputs(‘Html_to_text’)?[‘body’],0,outputs(‘Compose’))

That’s it, simple and effective. You can download the flow from GitHub, make sure you read the original blog post for full details. MVP Yannick Reekmans has a different take to accomplish this using a graph approach. You still need the above routine to get the default task list.

When importing the flow, you need to have these connectors available so that you can complete the import. All connectors are part of your Office 365 subscription

About the Author:

Ståle Hansen is the Founder and Principal Cloud Architect at CloudWay. He is awarded as Microsoft Regional Director and Office Apps and Services MVP with over a decade of experience with Skype for Business and now focused on hybrid Microsoft 365 and Teams. In 2018 he received an honorary award from Microsoft Norway for his longtime commitment to knowledge-sharing. He was recognized as top 100 UC influencers by Mio in 2020.

Learn More
Blog: http://msunified.net/
LinkedIn: http://no.linkedin.com/in/stalehansen/
Twitter: https://twitter.com/StaleHansen
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/stalehansen
Book: https://cloudway.no/office365foritpros/
Usergroup: https://www.meetup.com/NSC-Oslo/events/

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Reference:

Hansen, S. (2020). Use Power Automate to send Teams messages to To Do #NoCode. Available at: https://msunified.net/2020/10/04/use-power-automate-to-send-teams-messages-to-to-do-nocode/ [Accessed: 26th November 2020].

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