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Before going into any detail lets agree on some terminologies
Before going into any detail lets agree on some terminologies
MS Team – Office 365 Service/Application, SaaS.
Team – Team within MS Team, whenever I will refer this ‘T’ of Teams will be capital.
Channel – A topic wise segregation of information in Team. Information like, chat, files, applications etc.
Environment – Power Platform environment, for the segregation of application and data.
Table – Same as entities in CDS
Columns – Same as attributes in CDS
CDS - Common Data Service
PVA - Power Virtual Agent
What is project Oakdale?
What is project Oakdale?
Project Oakdale = Power Platform (limited functionality) + MS Team
Project Oakdale is an integration of Power Platform capabilities with MS Team. Now we can utilize Power Apps, MS Automate and Power Virtual Agent inside MS Teams with a new licensing package. Where we can create applications associated to Team.
Traditionally we create Power Apps, MS Automate, Power Virtual Agent in isolation with separate licensing model. And if we integrate applications into MS Team then also we pay extra for the corresponding services.
But with Project Oakdale it will not be the case, under one MS Team license we will be able to create MS Team applications using Power Apps, MS Automate and Power Virtual Agent.
We will get to know exact license details as soon as Project Oakdale will move from Preview to General Availability.
To get more detail on this please follow Microsoft document here -Project Oakdale
How to use it in Teams?
How to use it in Teams?
First lets see my O365 account before Project Oakdale integration. You can see there are two environments here
Under these two environments you can see there are some applications.
When we will create an application for Teams using Project Oakdale then you will see a new environment for the corresponding Team where we will publish our application, if you will delete Team corresponding Project Oakdale environment will also get deleted.
Permissions to the environment will be driven by O365 Group corresponding to Team.
Association of MS Team with Project Oakdale environment is same as of SharePoint, if you delete Team then associated SharePoint site also gets deleted.
Now let’s experience it, we will create few tables to hold Employee detail, then we will create a Power App to manage Employee profile, we will publish this app in General channel of a Team, also we will create one flow to notify whenever there is a new entry of employee in system.
Go to your MS Team, search for power app
Add Power Apps in your MS Team
You will see home page of Power App like this
Go to Build tab and click on New app
Like I said earlier every application you build here is associated with a particular Team. At this point if you are creating first app in a given Team then a new environment will gets created. Point to note here - there will be only one environment against one Team, 1:1 mapping.
It will take a couple of minute if you are creating app first time in given Team.
You can close this window and continue other work, once it will be ready you will get a email notification.
Once ready you will be navigated to app designer, notice it is same as what we have for Power Apps but with some change in UI, for example you cannot see top menu to add controls, for that you need to go to the left bar.
Lets create few tables to store our employee profile
Add more tables by clicking Add data > Create new table
Creating Designation and Company tables
Populating Company and Designation tables. We will refer these tables in Employee table.
Add lookup fields, refer to Designation and Company tables
We can directly populate table as shown here, it will help us to work on our application UI.
As we configure form in Power App in the same way I configured detail form as shown below. No need to change anything else in the application. IDE is smart enough to configure your data for default app.
Click on Preview and give it a try.
If there is no issue with the application, then Publish it. But before publishing it just give a name to application.
Once you will click on Publish to Teams, you need to select channel where you want to add this application. You can select all channels. I selected only one channel - General.
Once published, go to the corresponding Team. In my case my Team name is Work4Delight, you can see Profile Management tab got added in my General channel.
Now lets review our environments again, you can notice one new environment got added here. It is having same name as of my Team name - Work4Delight. Also you can notice in Type it is Microsoft Teams
Lets see in our new environment.
Here you will notice top right section - Microsoft Team association - again my Team name is here.
Lets click on Power Apps under Resource section, You can notice our Profile Management application here.
Now one last task is remaining, we need to send a notification mail when new employee profile gets created.
For this go to our application again, click on See all
Click on Flows, then click on New > Flow > Automated
Search common, and select trigger as shown below. Please note here I am selecting the one where in description you see "Common Data Service (current environment)". Other triggers are for independent CDS, there you will need exclusive permission to connect.
This is how I configured my Flow
You can notice here, my flow got listed here
Its time to test, lets go back to our application. Click on New record, fill the form and click on check icon at top right.
Our new record will get listed in left pan.
Then in few minute I received this. If you don't get this mail instantly don't worry sometime it takes time. For me it took a lot of time for second record. In this case you can go back to your application, go to Flows select your flow and click on Details, there you can see all run history.
Quickly review our environment, under flow section
Conclusion
Conclusion
This is the first time I used Project Oakdale, and in first impression I have to say - it is FANTASTIC. There are lot of Team use cases I can think of, which can be handled very well using Project Oakdale. I am impressed with the simplicity of use and abstraction of access/permission management. Also with this, CDS and PVA will be more accessible. Eagerly waiting for license structure.
Post relevance date : October 2020
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