Bring Microsoft 365 collaboration to your model-driven apps

Stephen Earley, , ceturtdiena, 2022. gada 4. augusts

With Power Platform, you can create line of business apps that allow you and your team to track and automate business processes.

Meanwhile, with Microsoft 365 solutions and platform capabilities you can bring your apps to collaborative surfaces like Microsoft Teams. You can choose between our pro-code Visual Studio and low-code Power Platform tools that best serve your scenario.

We also want to enable you to embed M365 collaboration capabilities into your model-driven apps. Until now a way to achieve that has been through our Graph APIs and pro-developer tools.

Today, we are enabling you to build low-code collaborative model-driven apps with the introduction of Collaboration controls (Preview) in Power Apps.

Collaboration controls (Preview) enable you to add M365 capabilities to your Power Apps line of business custom applications to simplify user workflows when collaborating on business processes in Teams and Power Apps.

Controls in Form Designer component pane

With these new controls, you as a maker can drag-and-drop controls that bring Microsoft 365 collaboration to your model-driven app.

And your users can experience productivity gains and stay in their flow by collaborating on approvals, files, meetings, notes and tasks without leaving the context of your app.

Combine the customizability of Power Platform with the ease-of-use from M365 to build collaborative apps

Getting started is easy; drag-and-drop in Power Apps

The Microsoft 365 Collaboration controls have been built on top of the Power Apps Control Framework (PCF) which means they can easily be added to any existing model-driven form. As first party controls, we’ve gone the extra step of adding them to the control drawer within the Power Apps Form Designer.

Once you’ve added the controls to your form, you can then publish your app and start taking advantage of their capabilities.

Create and manage tasks, backed by Planner

Create and manage tasks with the same UX that Microsoft Planner uses to show tasks. With the new PCF control for tasks, your users will have an easier time creating, assigning, tracking and managing tasks.

Control experience when creating a task

Schedule meetings backed by Outlook and Teams calendars

Schedule meetings with team members from within your app. Join the meeting from your Outlook or Teams calendar, or directly from within your model-driven app.

Control experience when creating an internal meeting

Add virtual appointments with Bookings

The meetings control by default provides support for internal meetings, but with Bookings, you can allow external customers to schedule meetings with your users. Simply map your entity to a Bookings group and then you can support virtual visits.

Control experience when creating an external meeting

Store your files in SharePoint

Easily add files to enable file collaboration from within your app.

Example of files added to the Files control

Request approvals from others in your team

Users can request and track approvals from others.

Control experience when creating an approval

Build automation with the new Collaboration controls connector in Power Automate

This new connector provides triggers and actions that enable you to create automated processes that help facilitate collaboration, such as auto create tasks when a record is created.

Collaboration connector triggers

Virtual Tables

An additional capability is a set of Dataverse Virtual Tables which enable developers to interact with Graph via OData APIs.

The external system used by the Meetings, Files and Tasks Collaboration controls is Microsoft Graph and there are virtual tables for group calendar events, booking appointments, planner plans/tasks and SharePoint drives/folders/files.

These can be used for programmatic access to the data created by the Collaboration controls. The link below provides samples which demonstrate how to access the virtual tables using the Dataverse REST API to perform CRUD (Create, Read, Update and Delete) operations.

Backed by Microsoft 365

Because the controls are backed by M365, your users can also access their tasks in Tasks by Planner, view and join meetings from Outlook and Teams calendars, view approvals in the Approvals app and files in SharePoint.

Tasks created in the Tasks control, visible in Planner

For more information on how to install, build and deploy model driven apps to Teams using the Collaboration controls, please visit Microsoft Teams documentation

To acquire the Collaboration controls for your Power Platform environment, please visit Microsoft AppSource.

Note: You may need to request your tenant admin deploy the Collaboration controls (Preview) to your Power Apps environment.