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ProvisionGenie – an open-source provisioning engine for Microsoft Teams

This post has been republished via RSS; it originally appeared at: Microsoft Tech Community - Latest Blogs - .

Once upon a time

 

I teamed up with my friend and partner in crime Carmen Ysewijn. We both work as Power Platform developers and Microsoft 365 consultants, and got both tired of doing the same things over and over again:

Organizations would roll out Microsoft Teams, and either not make too much fuzz on meeting user's needs and just assume that changing working behavior would magically happen or they would get a business consultant (us) who would then sit with each and every single team and explain

 

Our idea

 

Now, when #poweraddicts really get tired of doing something, they will spend a huge amount of time on automating this. Our idea was to create a process, that

  1. walks users through these considerations
  2. ask them how the "team of their dreams" would look like:
  1. as a result provisions the Team for them.

We agreed on making this both open-source and enterprise-grade, which affected all of our

 

Architecture decisions

 

We also needed to make some hard decisions, like

 

No Microsoft Planner provisioning

 

As the Microsoft Planner API doesn't support application-level permissions, we chose to not provision a Planner part with ProvisionGenie until Planner comes up with a fully working API. This meant, that we needed to come with an alternative for user to manage their tasks. Optionally, we provision a Microsoft List, that mimics the experience of Planner and introduce users to the gallery view.

 

Deleting the Teams Wiki

 

The Teams Wiki isn't everyone's darling and we don't like it for some reasons- but the fact why we decided to delete it as part of the provisioning process for all channels is that, once the Wiki is (accidentally?) removed, all content is hard-deleted.

 

Making ProvisionGenie a deployable solution

 

To make this solution available, it was not enough to only provide the (opaque) .zip file for the canvas app. We provide

As a result, the app looks like this:

 

 

We open-sourced ProvisionGenie 🧞 and just shipped our first release, you can find the repository here - with guidance how to get the app and how to contribute to it: https://github.com/ProvisionGenie/ProvisionGenie

 

We would love :purple_heart: to get your feedback and improve our solution!

 

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