In Microsoft Teams all your Teams are organized into two categories, Your Teams and Hidden. And there is really now way to organize teams together in groups or to associate teams together.
Let’s say you have a department team and that department have several other teams that belong to that department. They have several project teams and other teams that are “owned” by that department. But in the Teams client there is no way to see that these Teams should be associated with the “main” department Team and there is no way to navigate or find these Teams from the department Team. We could use the name of the Team to give some sort of structure and help with the navigation. But you have no real good overview of what Teams belong to the Department Team.
Would it not be nice if we could provide an easy overview of the other Teams belonging to the Department Team? And only show the once you have access to?
PowerApps to the rescue.
We can create a PowerApp to use in the Department Team to show links to associated Teams the user have access to.
There is a Teams connector in PowerApps that should give us the information we need.
Start PowerApps and create a new canvas app from blank.
Give your app a name and select tablet for the format.
Once your new PowerApp is open click the view menu, click Data Sources and search for teams
Click the Teams connector to add it.
Once it’s added go to the Insert menu and insert a gallery, choose vertical for you layout.
Insert the Gallery and select the Teams connector as the source. Your gallery should look something like this:
Go to the Items property of the gallery and change it to this:
MicrosoftTeams.GetAllTeams().value
Your gallery should start to populate with all the Teams you have access to:
Click the image in the gallery to show an icon before the team name.
But this will show all the Teams the user have access to so we need to filter this list somehow.
The Filter function in PowerApps will do this for us but we need some sort of naming policies for our Teams for this to work.
We could prefix (or suffix) all Teams associated with Department 1 with Dep1 and then filter on this.
You put the Filter function on the Items property of the Gallery like this:
Filter(MicrosoftTeams.GetAllTeams().value,StartsWith(displayName,"Dep1"))
That will filter the list to only show Teams starting with Dep1
Save and Share your PowerApp and it’s ready for use in Teams.
In Teams create a Department 1 Team and ad a tab to the General channel.
Select PowerApps, search for it if its not listed
Add the app Teams Navigator (or whatever you called you PowerApp when you saved it)
That’s it for Part 1 of this article. You now have a tab listing all the Teams starting with Dep 1
In Part 2 we will add navigation. We will add the URL for the Team so you can click the arrow and navigate to the Team.