Automatically Create an O365 Planner Task from a Selected Teams Message

I’m used to working with Kanban boards day to day. Even when I'm not on an agile project, I like to have everything I need to do logged in one place so I can stay focussed and keep track of tasks.

Since planner is available to me I've been using a planner board for this purpose and in the interest of efficiency, trying to automate as much of the task creation and management as I can.

The obvious tool for automating anything Microsoft is Power Automate. Thankfully, there’s already a bunch of templates for things like “email to planner” task creation, but I wanted to be able to flag a specific teams message and create a planner task from that.

This is the Power Automate flow I created to make that happen.

1. Log into Power Automate
2. Click Create and select Instant Cloud Flow
3. The flow name you choose will pop up in your teams right click menu
4. Choose the “for selected message” trigger and click create

5. Add a new step “Substring” with the following settings

• Text: Plain Text Message
• Starting Position: 0
• Length: 50

(This step gets the first 50 characters of the message and will be used for the card title. If your message has fewer than 50 characters the flow will fail so set this to whatever you like based on your needs)

Planner Task Title Variable Creation

6. Add a new step “Create a Task, Planner”

• Group id: The name of your planner board
• Plan id: The name of your planner board
• Title: Use the substring variable we created in the last step. You can add in whatever else you like including sender, date etc.
• Bucket Id: The name of the bucket you want new tasks to be created in, this needs to exist in your board

Create Planner Task from the Selected Teams Message

7. Lets add the body of the teams message to the planner task description. Add a new step, Update Task Details

• Task Id: use the dynamic Id field
• Description: Plain Text Message, Link to Message, Anything else you want

Update the Task with the Message and a Link

8. Save your flow, give it a few seconds to show up in teams and then flag a message to test it

9. The flow should be all green in Power Automate and you should have a new card in teams :)

Yay Success!

Yay More Work!