SharePoint (and Project Server) Shenanigans

I am a Project Server and SharePoint consultant but my main focus currently is around Project Server. I have been working with Project Server for nearly five years since 2007 for a Microsoft Gold Certified Partner in the UK, I have also been awared with the Microsoft Community Contributor Award 2011. I am also a certified Prince2 Practitioner. This article has been cross posted from pwmather.wordpress.com (original article)

As Microsoft Teams is the place to be currently I thought I would blog another option for integrating Office 365 Project Online data in Teams. My previous Teams post example was to create a Team and channel for a Project as seen here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2019/06/12/create-a-microsoftteam-for-a-projectonline-project-using-microsoftflow-office365-microsoftgraph-ppm-workmanagement-powerplatform-azuread-collaboration-automation-part1/ & here: https://pwmather.wordpress.com/2019/06/13/create-a-microsoftteam-for-a-projectonline-project-using-microsoftflow-office365-microsoftgraph-ppm-workmanagement-powerplatform-azuread-collaboration-automation-part2/ This time we will look at adaptive cards in Teams.

Adaptive cards are not new so I wont go into detail here but if you have not used adaptive cards before, start here: https://adaptivecards.io/. There are two handy Microsoft Flow Teams actions for adaptive cards:

Using Microsoft Flow, I’ve built a simple Flow that posts a card in the specified channel if the published project matches the criteria, in this example I’m posting a card for projects that have a red RAG status field. I designed the card using the adaptive card designer:

The Flow is very simple as seen below:

This Flow is triggered when a project is published – this is a full project publish from either Project Online Desktop or the schedule PDP. The Flow then uses the SharePoint HTTP action to query the ProjectData API:

Update the Uri as needed for your PWA configuration / fields you might want to use. Here we also pass in the project ID for the published project.

Next is a condition action to check for a value specific, in this example we are checking if the RAGPMStatus field has a value of “Slipped and cannot mitigate [Red]”:

If this is true, the Flow posts the card to the channel, if it’s false the Flow ends:

I’m posting to my example PMO Team in the Project Escalations channel. Once the Team and Channel are set, then the JSON is entered. The JSON defines the card:

As mentioned earlier on, I used the card designer to easily build my card with the correct JSON, I then copied this into the Flow action Message field then updated the content that needed to be dynamic such as the Project Name, Owner, RAG PM Status, Project description and action URLs. This is done using the expression option such as: body(‘QueryProjectStatusRAG’)[‘fieldName’]. Once a card is created, this is the output in Teams as you can see below for my two demo projects:

Your cards will look different based on how you design them, they will probably look a lot better too! On this card I have a background image, an image on the card, some project details then a button to access the project and another button to access the project site.

Another simple example of Microsoft Teams integration for Project Online!