Three new Power Apps Solutions to enhance information discovery and create more inclusive organizations

We are excited to announce the preview release of three new Power Apps Solutions on Dataverse for Teams: Profile+, Boards, and Perspectives.

These apps are additions to the series of extensible sample apps such as Employee Ideas, Inspections, Issue Reporting, Bulletins, and Milestones. Thousands of customers have already deployed these sample solutions and are benefitting from using them as-is or customizing them using low code extensions to meet their unique needs. These template solutions are helping organizations accelerate their journey to digital transformation by integrating Line of Business applications directly into the collaboration fabric of Teams.

Learn more about the people in your organization with Profile+

The Profile+ solution helps you quickly look up colleagues, understand org structure and roles, and learn about open positions. You can update your profile right from within Teams and express your personality by adding an introduction and even a video. You can add additional information that will help colleagues to know you better – such as your current projects, areas of expertise, goals and interests. The ability to filter by project and expertise creates new opportunities for like-minded people to find one another and connect. Once you find someone you’d like to meet or collaborate with, it’s easy to introduce yourself in chat, give that person a call, or schedule a Teams meeting.

Most employees prefer to look for new roles within a specific team or reporting to a specific manager. Profile+ enhances the visibility into open positions by enabling managers to highlight open positions on their team. They can provide a brief description of the role with a link to the formal job posting.

The Profile+ solution is designed to add to, not replace, the current system of record for employee information. You can extend the application to meet the unique needs of your organization. Integrate into your HR system to surface information for team members to browse, or add additional information to the user profile – for example, territory managed for field sales, research papers written for an R&D firm etc. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsProfilePlus. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Profile+.

Tap into the knowledgebase of peers and experts with Perspectives

The Perspectives app is a place to listen and be heard in your organization. Start a discussion on any topic by simply posting a question or a conversation starter. Other members of the team can provide responses to the posted questions. The most relevant content rises to the top when team members upvote a response or the discussion’s creator flags one as “Recommended”. A simple search-and-browse experience makes it easy to find interesting discussions, whether you’re looking to share your perspective or tap into the collective knowledge of your team. You can easily bring ongoing Teams conversation into Perspectives.

By centralizing important conversations in a single application,  teams can start to create a community sourced knowledge base that enhances information discovery. The app can be used for employee engagement, diversity and inclusion efforts, support systems, process Q&As, and more.

Once installed, you have full access to the source code of these solutions. You can edit the apps using the Power Apps personal app in Teams to bring your own custom features – such as your company branding, adding proactive communications on new discussions etc. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsPerspectives. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Perspectives.

Stay organized and discover content with Boards

Information and resources relevant to a particular topic can be spread across a broad surface area – a Teams channel, a chat conversation, a file on Share Point, an internal web link, a Yammer post etc. making it hard to find. With Boards, you can create shared space to collect all this information and organize them by categories. All members of the team can contribute to the Boards – enabling crowdsourcing to organize information. Team owners can govern the accuracy of the information with the ability to edit any user created information.

As with other sample solutions, the application can be customized to meet your unique business needs, from adding additional sources or integrating with other applications such as Bulletins. You can get the preview version of the app from github at https://aka.ms/TeamsBoards. The application can be deployed on Teams using One-Click installation. Click here to learn more about Boards.

Create better connections and a more inclusive workplace with Power App solutions

These applications can be used with others in the Power Apps solution portfolio to promote a more collaborative and inclusive environment in the workplace – especially in the post COVID reality of remote work. They take advantage of the great collaboration gestures that are core to Teams. Employee Ideas app can be deployed to give a voice to every individual on improvement opportunities. Perspectives can be deployed to encourage open conversations on wide ranging topics. Boards can be used to enable everyone to discover information about employee resource groups (ERGs) or other special interest groups. Bulletins can be used to share stories and information about diversity and inclusion programs. Profile+ can be used to give every individual a voice to tell their story in their own words.

All of these applications can be extended using low-code development tools on Power Platform. Here are some tips to get started with customizations and be on the lookout for extensive documentation, how-to videos, and additional resources to extend these solutions.

Once you have configured and customized these applications to your needs you can deploy them to be used within the team, or deploy more broadly by sharing it with members outside of the Teams team. You can even make these apps available on your company Teams store and even pin it to the app bar for your users to easily discover these apps.

How do you plan to leverage these solutions in your organization? Please share your ideas and other feedback in the comments below.