Help Desk in 3 hours. Automate simple business processes in PowerApps, Flow, and Teams

    Hello! My colleague wrote an article on the experience of using various O365 tools to automate small business processes. We took the HelpDesk automation case based on PowerApps, MS Flow and MS Teams technologies as a basis.


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    Details under the cut. Hope this article is helpful.




    My name is Andrew Brown, I am a leading software implementation specialist. Today I again want to share the experience of implementing one interesting case.


    The essence of the task is as follows - you need to implement a small HelpDesk system that will allow you to register applications from applicants. The general concept of logic is as follows:


    1. A letter arrives at the mailbox, which must be registered as a ticket in the HelpDesk system.
    2. The priority of the ticket is determined by the importance of the letter. The customer is determined at the postal address, and the SLA assigned to the customer to address this request is determined by the customer. Then a ticket is created.
    3. The ticket can be transferred to work, closed, delayed execution.
    4. There should be a small dashboard to track changes in ticket work.
    5. A ticket can also be submitted through the chat bot.

    It turns out such a classic HelpDesk system, but with some interesting solutions, which I’ll talk about now, but first things first.


    First of all, we create the list structure on the SharePoint Online site. We will need lists:


    1. Support Issues - appeals from applicants.
    2. Products - a directory of products that receive requests from applicants.
    3. Customers - a directory of applicant companies from which letters may come.
    4. SLA - A directory with SLA information for each applicant company. If the applicant does not belong to any of the companies listed in the Customers directory, then the standard response time for the application is 3 days.

    We envisage the possibility of creating a call manually by a technical support employee. To do this, we make the simplest form possible using the Microsoft PowerApps tool and display several details on it, as shown in the screenshot below:



    The created ticket can be taken to work by pressing the button fixed at the bottom of the form, as shown in the screenshot below:



    Further, in the course of work on the appeal, the technical support specialist conducts correspondence with the applicant through the mail and, after resolving the issue of the appeal, closes the ticket in the system.


    But the main way to file an appeal for the establishment of a ticket, all the same, will be mail. Office 365 mailbox will be used to receive mail, and for the processing of incoming mail, a process made using the Microsoft Flow tool.


    Microsoft Flow is a cloud service that allows you to create workflows for exchanging data between applications, services and online services. These processes can be used to collect data, synchronize files, receive notifications, and other purposes.


    The advantage of the Microsoft Flow tool is a large set of connectors to various systems and services. For example, in our case, we can use a trigger that will analyze new letters in the mailbox and, for each of them, execute a certain logic.


    The trigger itself will look as simple as possible:



    Further logic defined in the process is responsible for generating a unique registration number, creating a ticket in the HelpDesk system on the SharePoint Online website, as well as sending an email notification to the applicant:




    Based on my experience with Microsoft Flow, I can say that this is a convenient and reliable tool for creating automated workflows for the purpose of exchanging data between applications and services. Currently, a large number of popular services and services are supported, such as Google, Dropbox, Slack, WordPress, as well as various social services: Blogger, Instagram, Twitter, Youtube, Facebook, Vimeo and so on. Of course, in addition to this, simple integration with Office 365 applications is available.


    Of course, without drawbacks, it was not without:


    1. When you add blocks of conditions or cycles, the readability of the process decreases several times. After adding even three conditions, it becomes difficult to understand the logic of the process due to the fact that the designer of the process displays these blocks in a not entirely obvious way.
    2. Triggers that start the execution of the process do not work out immediately, upon the occurrence of an event, but once in a certain period of time. That is, you need to be prepared for the fact that the trigger process does not start immediately, but after a few minutes.
    3. The names of action blocks are a kind of identifier for these blocks. Therefore, if the data from the block you want to rename is used in the following blocks, then renaming the original block will not work. You must first remove all connections.

    But these problems are not critical, but rather they are my personal nit-picking. So move on.


    Now we have two ways of submitting a request: manually, by a technical support officer and via mail, by sending a message to a specific address. And it's time to add a third way. The third way is to submit a call using the chat bot. With the help of attracting developers, it was possible to implement a simple scheme of our bot, which allows the applicant to submit their requests directly through Teams or Skype.


    The appeal scheme is as follows:




    During this dialogue, the chatbot determines the basic information of the call, generates a letter to the mailing address of the support service, and then processing proceeds according to the scheme already known to us, using the Microsoft Flow process. The chatbot awaits the end of the registration of the appeal and writes a message to the chat about the successful registration of the ticket. This way of interacting with technical support is one of the most convenient, since for submitting a request it’s enough to open a nearby chat with a bot, in Teams or Skype and just send your message in a couple of seconds. Also, this bot can provide some advice and look for the information you need in the knowledge base:



    Interesting features of the chat bot implementation are:


    1. Using the Dialog Flow service from Google, which allows you to more accurately classify requests from users and provide the necessary information.
    2. The ability to integrate with all popular instant messengers, such as Skype, Teams, Telegram, Slack and others.
    3. The knowledge base for the bot is regularly indexed using Elastic Search, which helps keep the data for the search up to date.
    4. A bot can simply maintain a casual conversation.

    The final touch of the whole system is the implementation of a small dashboard on Power BI with statistics on established tickets. The data source for this dashboard will be SharePoint Online lists:



    Based on these lists, data models used in the graphs will be built.


    The data source on which the dashboard is built is regularly updated, which allows you to almost always be in the know about the real situation regarding the applicants:



    We place the final dashboard on the main page of our HelpDesk system:



    In conclusion, I want to say that using a combination of the above products and technologies makes it easy to create functional and convenient systems for various purposes.


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