1. Installing Microsoft Teams and opening Power Platform inside Microsoft Teams
In this section we’re going to start looking at Microsoft Teams and you’re probably thinking, okay, that’s not part of the Power platform and it isn’t. But when you get to the Microsoft Teams licensing page and scroll down, you’ll see that part of it includes chat and collaboration, which the free version has as well. And if you have a look at that, 250 or more integrated created apps and services for teams and that includes things like PowerApps. So to download Microsoft Teams on your desktop, just google download Microsoft Teams. So here we’ve got my page.
So I will download for the desktop download Teams and it’s a fairly easy install. You may already have it on your computer of course, as you may have been working from home and your company may use Microsoft Teams. So I’m just going to pause the video until it downloads, right, so it’s finished downloading, so just click on it to open it. And here you can see starting to be installed. So enter your work, school or Microsoft account, click sign in. If you’re not on Teams, then you can see there’s a sign up for free button as well. So I will now enter the password, sign in and stay signed into all of your apps and allow my organization to manage my device.
I’m going to say no, I don’t want somebody else to be able to manage my Windows. So I’ll click okay, says hold on while we register this device with your company and apply policy. Well, as I said, I don’t want any policy to be applied, so hopefully it won’t be doing that. There we go, we’ve added your account successfully so that’s all done.
So now it’s loading Microsoft Teams and there we go, it’s installed. Now on the left hand side we have got apps. And if I go up to search all apps and type in the word Power, you can see that we’ve got Power, Bi, Power, Automate and PowerApps. So you can click on any one of these and click on Open. And after a few seconds you get to the home screen, empower your team one app at a time, create a log called App in minutes and you can click Start Now. And then it invites you to select a team for your app. This is where your app will live. Team members can’t see it until you publish it.
Well, I don’t have any teams, so what I need to do is create a team. So on the left hand side I go to Teams, I click Create a Team from scratch and anyone in my organization can join. And I’ll call this the Power Platform team. So then it invites you to add more members to your team. Well, let’s add one more member. There we go. There was a skip button at the bottom if you didn’t want to do that. So there is our team now created. So now I can go into Power apps. Start now. Select a team for this app. So you’re the first person to create an app in this team, will do some setting up and loading time will be a bit longer than usual. All right, so I’ve got the message. Success.
PowerApps is ready. You can see we’re in the build section. And now you can see you can build your own apps within Microsoft teams. So this would be my PowerApps teams. Click Save and now you can see it’s a similar environment to the one you’ve been used to. So you can insert on the left hand side, you can connect to Data and you can also connect to Media there. So this is how you can build Power apps natively in Microsoft teams. Now if we go to the apps again and have a look for Power Automate, so again I will just click on Add and this is the home page that you get again, looks very familiar, except all of these are related to teams.
So they all have a teams connector. And then you can create including on the right hand side, create from blank to get to a very familiar page. And then again if we go back to the apps and have a look at Power Bi, so open that again, we get to a very familiar interface. So once you have opened them for the first time, if you click on the dot you’ll see them under Recent as well. So you no longer have to go down to the apps to have a look at those things that you have opened moderately recently. So this is how you install Microsoft teams on your desktop and how you can add PowerApps, Power Automate and Power Bi into Microsoft teams.
2. 6. Determine when to use Dataverse for Teams
Now in this video we’re going to have a look at data verse for teams. And dataverse for teams is created automatically when we go into PowerApps. So either find PowerApps in this list or maybe you’ve got it open and I can click on new app. So when I click on new app I need to select a team for the app. So I’ll use my Power Platform team. And what’s happening behind the scenes is that a new environment is being created. Now, the environment name is the same as the team name. I’m going to create this app, I’m going to call it a team’s app and just say that. Now the environment name is the same as a team name and any data, apps, chatbots and flaws created in the Power Apps app inside a team area will be put into the team’s data verse for teams database and that has 2GB of database and file storage. So let’s say I wanted to create a table in my data verse for teams.
Well, you can see we’ve got lots of very familiar things here. We’ve also got data. And while we can do other things, like for instance, we have an environment, we have connectors and if I click C connectors, you can see we have a big list. But what we can do directly here is create a table to set up our database. So if I create a new table, so this will be table contacts, let’s call it or external contacts. Now you can see that this is a real cut down version of what we had in the Power app studio. The only advanced setting is the plural table name. So I’ll click on Create and here we can add rows, in other words blank rows. We can add columns, we can show and hide columns and that’s it. So we start off with name. So if I edit this column, you can see that we can change the name.
It will always be a type text and if I click Add we can create a new column name. And again it seems to be a cut down version from what we’ve been experiencing in the Power Apps portal and it is. So I’m just going to create name and I’m going to have a number. And so this is my number. I’m going to create a very simple app. So going to put in my name and number one and other data and so forth. So you can see I can also delete records. I can insert roles below and insert roles above. Now it says none of the records could be saved. I think that was from earlier.
You can see now it says saved. So if I close that, you can see we’ve got this external contacts and I can edit the data and there is our data. Now, with all this having happened, if I go into the portal, the PowerApps portal and go to the gear, the settings and Admin Center. You can see in the environments that we have our Power platform team, it’s in Microsoft Teams environment, so you can identify it as a different type of environment. It’s not something that you can edit in the Power Apps portal. You can see I don’t have that option. Now, I should point out the idea for all of this. Creating Power Apps within Power Apps for Teams and using data first for Teams is because you want to have something that’s a bit more private. You don’t want it being accessed by everybody who’s got access to the Power Apps portal. Indeed, you can actually create apps in Microsoft Teams and use them in a web browser, but only if you got a trial or paid for version of the Power Apps license.
So what I’m going to do here is I’m just going to add a layout and you can see various layouts and scenarios are available. So I’m going to create a list, a gallery that we’ve had previously, and I’m going to edit this as before. So we need a data source. At the moment it just has sampled data, so let’s use external contacts. So there is our not very sophisticated app, but we know how to create apps. So I don’t need to go through all of this. So going to click save. You notice there isn’t a file over there. I click Save, I can preview it so I can have a look at what it looks like and I can publish to Teams. So this version of the app will be published for everybody to use.
So I can add it to a particular channel. So I can add it to the general channel. For instance, so I’ll click Save and close. So now if I go to my Teams and go to my general channel, there we can see my new Teams app. And after quite a few minutes here, you can see it. Now, if you want to launch it in a web browser, you can’t see it in the Power Apps portal. You have to go over to here with the Goto website and that launches it in a standalone browser. You can also click on opening browser in the Power Apps mobile app and that’s basically it. It’s a standalone database. Now, there are a couple of things perhaps you may be interested to know.
So if we go back to the Power Platform Admin Center and click on my Microsoft Teams environment, you can see that we can upgrade it to the dataverse. So there are certain limitations. For instance, there’s a two gigabyte space of database and file storage. So you can upgrade a data verse or teams environment to a full data verse database environment if you so wish.
Additionally, you can also backup or restore your environment. So this is the data verse for Teams. It’s used in PowerApps. It’s created automatically so you can add your own data inside a particular Power app for teams and therefore it is separate to all of the other environments that you can see here in the Power Apps Portal. You can see it’s not listed here, but it is available if you go into the Admin Center and into environments.
