Microsoft Teams helps us bring together content from different Microsoft 365 services for easier collaboration. In Microsoft Teams connected SharePoint site, SharePoint News connector would help receive news updates from the site. In this post let us see how to create Notifications about new News post with deep link to the post from a communication site in an Adaptive card on a Teams channel using

1. Adaptive card
2. Stage View
3. Power Automate cloud flow

The users from a Teams channel would be able to read & engage on the News post by click of a button as shown below

Adaptive card:

Adaptive Cards are a platform-agnostic method of sharing and displaying blocks of information using JSON across various host applications like Teams, Outlook, Bots etc. The above adaptive card has following information from the News Post

1. Title
2. Description
3. Banner Image Url
4. Author Profile picture
5. Author Name
6. Published Date
7. Deep Link to the post

The card can be designed based on your requirements from the Adaptive Card Designer portal. The JSON content of the above adaptive card can be downloaded from here.

Stage View:

Stage View helps provide a seamless experience of viewing content in Teams. Users can view the content without leaving the context thus leading to have a higher engagement. For this post, I have used stage view through deep link for a SharePoint News post. Find the syntax below to deep link SharePoint News post

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/stage/teamsAppId/0?context={"contentUrl":" newsPostPageUrl","websiteUrl":"newsPostPageUrl","name":"Internal News"}

In the above syntax replace teamsAppId, newsPostPageUrl & title which I have named as Internal News.

teamsAppId: 2a527703-1f6f-4559-a332-d8a7d288cd88

newsPostPageUrl: The url of the News post in SharePoint.

In the adaptive card action set OpenUrl the following from the stage view syntax should be encoded

{
  "contentUrl":" newsPostPageUrl",
  "websiteUrl":"newsPostPageUrl",
  "name":"Internal News"
}

I have also tested stage view for Microsoft forms & Power BI. You can find the app id for other Microsoft 365 service here on this link

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/teams-configuring-builtin-tabs

Power Automate cloud flow:

The Cloud flow is used to send an adaptive card to a Teams channel with the SharePoint News post deep link whenever there is a new News post published in a Communication site.

Step 1: Let us start with creating the Automated cloud flow with SharePoint trigger When an item is created or modified. In the trigger, the Site Address should be url of the communication site and the List Name as the Site Pages Library GUID as shown below

Step 2: In the trigger settings enter the following trigger condition to fire only on the first major version of the News Post

@and(equals(triggerOutputs()?['body/PromotedState'],2),contains(triggerOutputs()?['body/{VersionNumber}'],'1.0'))

For more information on trigger conditions for SharePoint online, go through this blog post.

Step 3: The compose action Compose-StageViewURL with the following code

{
  "contentUrl": "@{triggerOutputs()?['body/{Link}']}",
  "websiteUrl": "@{triggerOutputs()?['body/{Link}']}",
  "name": "Internal News"
}

The trigger output Link should have the url of the News post.

Encode the content in the compose action Compose-StageViewURL using the expression encodeUriComponent() and form the remaining part of the URL.

https://teams.microsoft.com/l/stage/2a527703-1f6f-4559-a332-d8a7d288cd88/0?context= @{encodeUriComponent(outputs('Compose-StageViewURL'))}

on another compose action Compose-StageViewURL-Encoded.

Step 4: Add the action Get user photo to display the picture of the author in the adaptive card. The User (UPN) property of the action can be provided from the trigger output Created By Email. The next step is to convert the output of the Get user photo action to Base64 encoded string using the following expression

concat('data:',body('Get_user_photo_(V2)')?['$content-type'],';base64,',body('Get_user_photo_(V2)')?['$content'])

Step 5: Add the action Post Adaptive card in a chat or channel as shown below

In the adaptive card JSON, find below the mapping information of each property from the output of trigger or action

1. Title: {triggerOutputs()?[‘body/Title’]
2. Description: triggerOutputs()?[‘body/Description’]
3. Banner Image Url: triggerOutputs()?[‘body/BannerImageUrl’]
4. Author Profile picture: outputs(‘Compose-Base64ProfilePic’)
5. Author Name: triggerOutputs()?[‘body/Author/DisplayName’]
6. Published Date: formatDateTime(triggerOutputs()?[‘body/Created’], ‘g’)
7. Deep Link to the post: outputs(‘Compose-StageViewURL-Encoded’)

The export version of the flow can be downloaded from this GitHub link.

Summary:

The adaptive card with stage view to a SharePoint News post allows the users to open and view the content without leaving the context. The user can also Like or Comment on the News post. Hope you have found this informational & thanks for reading. If you are visiting my blog for the first time, please do look at my other blogposts.

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