Looking for a way to see how much time is left in your Microsoft Teams meetings? Read on to find out how you can easily see the time remaining using these Teams apps.
This app is a game-changer for ensuring you’re running a successful and well-engaged meeting.
The in-meeting sidebar app shows the time remaining within the meeting, as well as giving you numerous statistics about engagement and time spoken.
It even boasts a transcription service, allowing you to read & share transcripts from your meetings if you’re unhappy with Microsoft’s transcription capabilities.
This app allows you to easily prepare for meetings, run meetings and then follow up on meeting outcomes post-event.
When it comes to running timers, rather than show one timer with the time remaining in the entire meeting you can start timers against each topic of your meeting agenda.
Need to show a countdown timer highlighting the time remaining before your meeting commences? Then this app is for you.
You can customise backgrounds, text, animations and more – meaning your employees or other team members won’t be bored while waiting for your live event to commence.
Seen any other apps for meeting countdown timers, or have a different way of tracking the time remaining within Teams meetings? Let us know in the comments.
As the name suggests, this podcast – released monthly – takes a deep-dive into the latest Teams news. The team also take a look at emerging trends surrounding the Teams platform. On average episodes run for 30mins or less.
This podcast takes a look at the latest new features in Microsoft 365 and Teams. Episodes are released fortnightly, and they tend to run for 25 minutes or less. The show is hosted by Microsoft adoption specialist Mark Thompson.
There hasn’t been any new episodes of this podcast for many years (since 2018), but it remains one of the few official Microsoft sources for Teams insights. If video is more your thing, you can also watch episodes on YouTube.
Found some other podcasts about Teams that you’d recommend? Let us know in the comments.
In this article we’ll take a look at how you can best integrate Notion with Teams by using third-party automation services and web tabs.
Notion has soared in popularity in recent times, but there’s still no official way to integrate the service with Microsoft Teams. However, there are some ways you can consume or create Notion data from Teams.
Create Notion database items from Teams
The easiest way to create Notion database items from Teams is to integrate with a third-party platform such as Zapier or Automate.io – the latter of which Notion themselves recently acquired.
Power Automate is another alternative, but there’s no out of the box task for Notion. So while you can trigger flows from Teams or elsewhere, you’d need to write some code to call the Notion REST API yourself to create database items.
Getting started with these platforms is simple. Simply create a Notion account if you don’t have one already, and then create an account with your automation platform of choice. In the case of Automate.io, after signing in you can connect your Notion account and your Microsoft 365 account and then setup a workflow.
The workflow allows you to pick what changes in Microsoft 365 you would like to trigger a new database item in Notion. For example, you may choose the “New message in Microsoft Teams” trigger on Automate.io, and have a new database item added to Notion containing the message and the author details.
It’s worth noting that these automation platforms have limited free tiers – if you’re creating lots of triggers that are called frequently, you may need to pay for the premium tiers.
Show Notion content in Teams
If you’re looking to show Notion content within a Teams channel, your best bet is to use the custom website tabs app to embed the Notion web app.
You can use the Website app to show the Notion website in a Teams channel tab
However this comes with some significant limitations – there’s no single sign on between Teams and Notion, so you’ll need to frequently sign in to Notion.
Performance of the Notion web app can also sometimes be sub-par when used within Teams tabs.
Great for: Showing Airtable records on WordPress sites
This free plugin is available from the WordPress plugin repository, and allows you to connect your Airtable account. You can then easily embed the content within your posts using short-codes for displaying, formatting and looping through your base’s fields.
Data is cached, helpfully allowing you to reduce the impact of Airtable’s strict API rate limits. It can also be retrieved from multiple bases.
Perhaps one of the more powerful capabilities is the ability to create virtual posts for your records.You can map a URL pattern to an Airtable table, and when a request is made that matches Airpress will attempt to retrieve the record from Airtable.
You can specify a custom template page that is used to respond to requests if a matching record is found. If no record is found that matches the URL pattern, then a 404 ‘Not Found’ error is shown.
One potential issue with this plugin is its ongoing support. The plugin hasn’t been updated in almost 2 years, and hasn’t been officially tested with the latest 3 major versions of WordPress.
Posts on the support forums are also going unanswered – so while it may work today, it’s unclear what the future holds.
Great for: Flexible workflows between WordPress and Airtable
One of the benefits of Zapier is the large number of integrations available. In this case, the integration with WordPress means that you can create some powerful workflows between Airtable and WordPress.
This includes doing things like copying comments made on your posts on WordPress into an Airtable base, or archiving your WordPress posts into a base.
Integromat also offers similar functionality if you’re already using it, or would prefer to not use Zapier.
Of course one of the limits you’ll run into with this integration is the cost. It can quickly add up if you’re running lots of Zapier tasks – at the time of writing, you’ll need to start paying if you are triggering more than 100 tasks per month with plans ranging from $19.99USD to $599 USD per month, billed annually.
It can be challenging in Microsoft Teams to schedule messages to be sent in some point in the future, but in this post we’ll take a look at a few options available.
If you have an Office 365 Outlook license, you can setup an automation to send an email to your Teams channel at a date and time in the future.
Note that this approach is only useful for posting new posts in channels – it can’t be used to reply to comment threads on an existing post.
1. First, copy the email address for the channel you want to send the message to. This can be found by opening the Teams app, hovering over the channel name, clicking the ‘More options menu’ (three dots) and clicking ‘Get email address’ as shown in the screenshot below
3. In the window that opens, paste your Teams channel email address (from step 1) into the ‘To’ field.
4. In the body of the email, type the message you want to send to your Teams channel.
5. Click the downward facing arrow next to the ‘Send’ button and click ‘Send later’.
6. Specify the time you’d like to send the email and click ‘Send’. Your message will now be sent to Teams at the time and date you specified.
Option 2: Use Power Automate
This option allows you to post messages to channels either as yourself, or as the Microsoft Flow bot.
It is also more extensible than the first approach, as it allows you to setup custom triggers for when a message is posted – such as when a file is uploaded.
You also have the option of retrieving additional information from other systems that integrate with Power Automate, and including that in the message that is posted to Teams.
2. Click ‘Create’ and choose ‘Scheduled cloud flow’
3. Configure the time and day(s) you want to send the message on. Specify if you’d like it to be a recurring occurrence. You can edit this again later if you’re not sure now.
4. In the screen that loads, click ‘New step’ and search for ‘Post message in a chat or channel’. Click it to add it to your flow.
5. Choose whether you want the sent message to come from your Office 365 account, flow bot or Power virtual agent/chat bot.
6. Configure the rest of the step, specifying the team, channel, message and more.
7. Click ‘Save’ and your scheduled message will be ready to send. If you’d like to confirm it’s been setup correctly you can click ‘Test’ in the top right-hand corner of the screen.
Option 3: Use Send Later app for Microsoft Teams
Using the Send Later app is arguably the easiest option to setup, and the most integrated within the Teams experience. It works with both chats and channels.
Send Later application for Microsoft Teams
You can schedule messages through out the Teams app, and there’s a tab app that shows you all your upcoming messages.
Keep in mind that this is a paid application, although a free tier is available if you can stay within its limits of 2 users and 10 messages per month.
In this post we’ll take a look at a few of the best Teams help desk apps for building a help desk on top of Teams.
For many organisations, Microsoft Teams forms the backbone for internal communications. As such, in a growing number of use cases it makes sense to look at allowing employees to manage help desk requests via Teams.
This chat bot app allows you to easily create and manage support requests via ‘conversational ticketing’. You can easily find and manage tickets, and even contribute to a knowledge base using the conversational flow.
The knowledge base powers an AI system to avoid employees creating tickets that would be otherwise unnecessary, by redirecting them to instructions on how to resolve common problems.
After installing the app for the first time, it takes up to 3 minutes to provision a space for your organisation. Note that admin approval is required due to the permissions that are needed.
This is a great solution if you’re looking for a chat-based system to handle support requests. Publisher attestation has also been obtained. It would be great to see a tab app for Tikit too, to make it easier to manage requests in bulk.
Pricing: Free tier, with additional paid options available starting at $64USD per month
JetDocs is primarily a tab app that offers a suite of powerful options for customers. A chat bot is also available though – unlike Tikit – the tab app is the primary mechanism for interactions.
This app offers more powerful workflow support, allowing for automations from a catalog of more than 80 templates for common business processes such as vacation leave, expense claims and more.
Multiple approvers per workflow are supported, and priority centre makes it easy to ensure the most important tickets are addressed first.
Pricing: Free tier, with additional paid options available starting at $10 per month/per agent
This is another app focused on conversational ticketing. It comes in the form of 2 chat bots – an agent bot, and a support bot.
The agent bot allows your support team to manage and respond to tickets, while the support bot allows customers or internal employees to raise requests for triaging.
A key difference between this app and Tikit is the ability of this app to act as a channel servicing external customers as well as internal employees. You can feed emails, web form submissions and more into Desk365 and respond through the chat bot.
Summary
These are just a few of the many apps now integrating with or being built upon the Teams platform. Each day, core business apps are integrating with Teams to bring enhanced functionality like timesheets, finance and more.
