Follow up on a Teams message – Automation

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If you get a lot of Instant messages in Teams for help or to answer questions even when you are in a meeting or status set to Focusing, this automation is for you!

Most of us IT workers get IM’ed a lot these days with everyone working from home and new changes to Office 365 services flowing in everyday. If you are busy in another meeting or wrapping up the last line of code and want to get to the message later, there is no out of the box easy option. I missed getting back to quite a few people because I was busy doing something when they reach out and by the time it strikes to me about missed message, it is too late 🙂

So here is a way to Automate follow up reminder on Teams messages. Everything is available out of the box and anyone who has required license can set it up themselves.

So here we go.
  1. Go to your Teams Desktop app or web app. Click on Apps and search for ‘Power Automate‘. If you have already added Power Automate Teams app, skip to Step #3.

  2. Add and Pin it to your Teams for quick access.

  3. Open Power Automate app in Teams and select ‘Create‘ tab.

  4. Search for ‘Follow up on a message‘ template.

  5. Select the template, name it appropriately. Wait for the connection to resolve with your credentials. Click on Continue.

  6. Using the template you will get notified about a Teams message within a selected period of time. But you can extend this template to add other actions. Click on ‘Edit in advanced mode‘ to add or update actions or to just take peak at the template.

  7. You are all set to test it once the Flow is created.

  8. Get back to Teams chat tab and pick a chat you want to be reminded about later. Hover over it to select the 3 dots (ellipses) -> More actions -> Follow up on a message (Your Flow title).

    Note: It will take some time for your flow to show up in your Desktop Teams app. If you are anxious to test, try in Teams web app. It will show up there fairly quick.

  9. Actions available with out of the box template are displayed. You can easily edit the Flow to add/update these actions.  Select the time and Submit.

  10. You will be reminded after the selected time frame with a friendly chat message from Flow bot.

  11. You can review and update your Flows setup in Teams by going to ‘Power Automate’ app in Teams. All your Flows and flows shared with you are displayed under Home tab. You can share your flows with others as well.

    Complete your work first and then get back to respond to your messages. This trick helped me work towards increasing my Productivity!