Pic. 1

As you can see from the picture above, all document libraries and so-called Microsoft Lists (=Microsoft Lists) are shown here. For an office employee, this page looks like an office cabinet for storing a variety of documents. Microsoft lists are used to visualize documents stored in folders and for support purposes. In the same way, a notebook is used as a desktop document work in a team. Each employee has his own office there (see pic. 2). The idea behind Microsoft's workflow is that these two pictures are all that an organization's office staff should see. In this case, they do not need to know or be able to do anything other than the usual skills of working with programs such as Word and Excel. The movement of documents in the system is handled by machines hidden from employees, which are constructed from Power Automate templates. This solution has another important advantage. Microsoft is committed to continuous improvement of all components of the system and therefore, at any given moment, the organization receives the best system possible. Intermediaries who make their own document management systems often simply go bankrupt and disappear. And why pay them for something that is already in the Microsoft system?

Creation of the Department's Team

In order for everything to work without problems, it is necessary that managers have at least A3 licenses, and employees have A3 for students or A3 licenses. Unlike student teams, which need to create a team of type Class, these teams are created using the PLC template (second icon from the left after the “Class” icon).

PLC teams are designed for departments or institutes, while "Personnel" is suitable for administration, for example. There are three important features that contrast class teams with PLC and staff teams. The first is the different notebook targets that are created by default in these three commands. The Class Notebook is designed specifically for students. The Class Notebook for the PLC team, on the other hand, is prepared for teachers. Finally, the Staff Notebook is the simplest of the three. Any Class Team includes the Assignments program for scheduling and assigning tasks to students of different levels. This program is not available in PLC and Staff teams. Dataverse for Teams (formerly Common Data Service) is ready for use on PLC and Staff teams and is not available to student groups. Dataverse for teams is more than a cloud database. It includes several spreadsheet programs and can be used for the current records and operations of any university department. This service is available for A3 and A5 licenses. In fact, Dataverse for teams is also part of the Azure cloud, designed to store all kinds of tables and some applications that you can create yourself from samples. That is why, in order not to redo everything later, it makes sense to follow the recommendations of Microsoft and for the commands discussed in this manual, choose the PLC type. Teams with a small number of employees can be filled in manually, but if the number of employees approaches one hundred, then it makes sense to fill in the commands automatically. In any case, it's not like the students, as the teachers' staff doesn't change as often as that of the student team. Moreover, employees can enter this team themselves using a code generated by the owner of this team. Once all employees have signed up for a team, the team owner, using the automate described in §2.7 of my Microsoft book, can retrieve all the employee information that was previously entered into the system by administrators. This list must be stored on the OneDrive of the leader - the owner of the team. In Chapter 2 of this book, I explained the most basic features of a SharePoint team. This is a site that includes all the documentary part of the team and, in particular, a notebook for classes. Because each document, document library, or list in SharePoint has its own URL (uniform resource locator), all documents and lists in SharePoint can be opened in separate windows. This makes this site very convenient for working with documents. I click the settings icon, see pic. 3 and then "Site contents". This action opens a window with a list of all document libraries and SharePoint lists created on the team site. In practice, this list can be long, see pic. 1. To simplify management, SharePoint includes two important applications. One is for creating document libraries, and the other is for organizing SharePoint lists and libraries into blocks using URL links. 

Pic. 4

A Power Automate for SharePoint lists updates

Following Microsoft’s instructions given here, I copy my grade book to the department’s SharePoint site. The Microsoft Lists program creates a new list in the destination using the source list as a template, see pic. 6-568. For a right transaction, I un-hide all important columns in the source list first for a correct transaction. As a result, I obtain a new list with the same names and types of columns. No data from the source list are transformed to the destination list.

To get the destination list with the data, you can export the source list of all data to an Excel file, and after that create from it a new list with data in the destination SharePoint site. However, in this case you will be forced inserting list formulas for each calculated column in the destination list and format rows’ style again. In my case, there are three such columns. Therefore, it is more reasonable to apply the first method. Then I just use the flow from §3.5 of my book to copy the source list data to the destination. Moreover, if a big group of new students appears, you may edit the source Excel file for this flow to remove already present students in the Grade Book and run the flow again. All students from this group will be added to the Grade Book with correct permissions. 

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AThere is a free SharePoint application “Import Excel or CSV to List.” It can be used to import data from an Excel CSV file to the SharePoint list even if it is filled with some data already. This application does not touch the computational columns. One can get it from the Microsoft AppStore here or directly from the SharePoint Store, see pic. 12. However, it does not transfer the permissions. Therefore, I think that the best choice is the Power Automate described in §3.5 of my book. The module granting access to the list can be dropped or used to restrict access for other teachers to the copies of my Grade Books. Then I obtain a ready list and can give access to it for any owner of the SharePoint site.

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Pic. 15

A complete guide on using functions, including “length” and “body,” in expressions can be found here. I insert codes between the parenthesis of “length” to obtain the following code, see 4 on pic. 15:

length(body('Get_items')?['value'])

Finally, I press the “OK” button. After that I add the “Condition” action and insert in its left box the “Outputs” icon from the dynamical interface, see pic. 16.

Pic. 17

If the output of the “Compose” box is not zero (students’ grades were updated in the source list for students already present in the destination list), then the flow runs the “If no” section. I press “Add an action” in the “If no” box and select the “Update item” action. This automatically includes this form into the “Apply to each” action. I select “value” in the “Get item” part of the proposed icons and insert into the “Apply to each” box. Then I fill the “Update item” form. The ID field corresponds to the destination list. Other fields are filled with the icons corresponding to the source list similar to the first case, see pic. 18. The flow is saved and can be tested.

Pic. 19

A Power Automate to Announce new OneNote Pages

Pic. 22

The first part of this flow is shown on pic. 22. It is an automatic cloud flow, which is started by the OneNote trigger “When a new page is created in a section.” The first box indicates the desired Notebook and its section. The second box gets the list of group members. This box is followed by “Compose,” where the “Input” field is filled with the dynamical icon “value.” The third box is followed by “Apply to each” section, see pic. 23.

Pic. 24

One can fill in this box following the example shown on pic. 24.

Pic. 26

Then we initialize variable, see pic. 26. Its name is “URL Link,” its type is “string,” and its value is given by the dynamical icon “OneNote web url.”

Welcome to Approvals

When a file is added to a document library

Pic. 29

I enter “Approval” in the search list and get a long list of different flows which use the Approval program. Scrolling down the list, I find the required template, see pic. 30. It is a Microsoft modern template “Start an approval when a file is added to SharePoint.”

Pic. 31

In my case I do not have any folder in the "Approvals NSE" document library. Therefore, I leave field 2 blank. In field 4, I insert the email addresses of all approvers. I obtain the form shown on Pic. 32.

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Pic. 35

This action opens the document in Word Online, see pic. 35. If my signature is required for the approval, I open Word in Desktop App, see the check mark on pic. 35.

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Pic. 39

This picture appears if I start this template.

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Then I open “Versioning settings,” see pic. 43, and change the default settings to those, shown on pic. 44.

Pic. 45

The first box is a trigger. The second one checks if the item created in the document library is a folder or file. If the item is not folder, see pic. 46 (IsFolder is equal to false), then the flow follows the “If yes” option. Otherwise, it is terminated.

Pic. 47

In the “If yes” part, I only fill the fields of “Site Address,” and “File Identifier.”

Pic. 49

This time both branches “If yes” and “If no” are similar. We adjust our flow exactly at this place. Namely, in the “If yes” branch I change the title in the first box “Set content approval” to “Set content approval status to submit.” This can be done through the ellipses of the box. Then I add to this box another one with the approve status. The “If no” part has the same structure with the difference that "approve" is changed to "reject." The result is shown on pic. 50.

Pic. 51

This is "Checks for content moderator error in approve."

Pic. 53

Add a description here.

Pic. 55

I can change the approval status here, write a comment. I press the “Confirm” button and the status of the document is changed to “Approved.” If I change “Approve” to “Reject,” then after refreshing of the library, see 1 on pic. 56, I get the list of the documents with the approved/reject status. In particular, the rejected document is underlined in red. This flow is very convenient since both the applicant and approver see the current state of every document.

Pic. 57

Welcome to a Power Automate registering incoming emails

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Pic. 63

In the “Folder” section of the “When a new email arrives” trigger, I select my mailbox “Inbox,” but in its place can be any other mailbox that Outlook automatically redirects business mail by using the appropriate filter. In the “Delay” action, I set the delay to one minute, see 2 in pic. 63. This is necessary so that the flow has time to record all the output data of the action “When a new email arrives.” In mail systems, messages are recorded in the Html format. To avoid codes in the “Body” column, it is necessary to convert the message text from Html to Text. This operation is performed by the action “Html to text,” see 3 in pic. 63. I fill the conversion field with the dynamic Outlook icon “Body.” To be able to select the current time icon, I insert the action “Compose,” see pic. 64. In the “Body” field, you must place the icon for converting from Html to Text. In the “Date and Time” field, we place the dynamic icon “Outputs.” To get this icon, I insert in the “Inputs” field the expression “addHours(utcNow(),+0).” Then the “Outputs” icon contains the UTC time, The “Apply to each” section is filled in as shown in pic 65. The flow is ready for operation. However, you must configure the correct time in the SharePoint site since by default it is set to the time zone of the corresponding server. The sequence of actions is shown on pic. 66-69. Notice that the output of the formula “addHours(utcNow(),+0)” is the UTC time. Pic. 69 shows another formula “(UTC+06:00) Astana,” which inserts the current local time into the column “Date and Time.” You should check your spam folder daily. Some messages from outside may end up there. When redirecting them to Inbox, the flow does not consider them as having arrived by mail. Internal mail messages rarely, if ever, end up in the spam folder. The manager can open and save the files received in messages in any folder. Those that need to be sent to other employees can be added to the Microsoft List of sent messages. There is another very popular Power Automate. It automatically saves all files attached to messages in a specially created folder on the manager's OneDrive. Using the search field in Power Automate site, you can find many templates for such flows, see pic 66.

Pic. 65

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Pic. 71

Welcome new team member

Pic. 73

I select the required team in the first box and insert the dynamical icon "User Id" again to connect it to the team chosen. It is possible to change the welcome message in the third box. The flow can be saved and is ready for use.