Time to take that well-deserved vacation! Request time off from your manager using our new AtBot template. He’ll even add it to a SharePoint calendar so you, your manager, and your colleagues can track who’s in and out of the office.
Note: some screenshots reference AtBot’s old name, Bizzy. Functionality is identical.
Prerequisites
This is a useful Skill for AtBot to have if you don’t already have a time-off request process and it’s especially handy if you’re using a SharePoint calendar to track time off today.
To get the most out of it, though, there are a couple requirements:
- Those who plan to use this Skill need to make sure they have a manager identified in Active Directory. Otherwise the approval workflow this Skill goes through won’t have a recipient to request time off. (If you’re not sure, ask your IT department or submit a help ticket to ensure the information is there.)
- The Skill ends by adding the approved time off into a SharePoint calendar. If you don’t have one, create one. (Or, if you prefer not to track in SharePoint, you can remove the step from this Skill later.)
Creating the Skill
1. Log in to office.com with your user name and password and add AtBot to Teams if you haven’t already.
2. Browse to the AtBot template for ‘request day off’.
3. Click Continue at the bottom of the screen.
4. On the Power Automate editor screen, indicate which SharePoint calendar to use.
You’ll notice this is a reasonably complex Flow.
But there’s only one step that you have to update. Scroll to the bottom and find the Create OOO Event step.
In the Site Address drop-down menu, select the site where your SharePoint calendar lives. In the List Name drop-down menu, select the calendar.
Fair warning, sometimes the list of available sites is incomplete and the site you want may not be displayed. If this is the case, copy the SharePoint site’s address and paste it in this box as a custom value.
And, another fair warning, sometimes Power Automate doesn’t display all of the lists that are available in the site. If you don’t see your calendar, type the name in exactly as it displays in SharePoint. Wait a second for the step to load the fields, then select Use ‘[calendar name]’ as custom value. If you don’t wait to click that option, the content will be cleared and the fields go away.
You’ll also want to update Start Time and End Time fields to be in your time zone, as opposed to Greenwich Mean Time.
5. On the Power Automate editor screen, click Save flow.
Test it out
Jump into MS Teams and start a private chat with AtBot. Tell him “request day off” to test out the new Skill. (Or say “help” and he’ll tell you the keywords you can use to kick off each of his Skills.)
You’ll notice that AtBot asks if you want to send a note along to explain your request, so I did. Once AtBot’s got all the information he needs, he’ll send the request to your manager.
And once your manager responds, hopefully it’s in the affirmative! You’ll get a notification from AtBot like shown below.
Click the notification, or jump to private chat in Teams, and you’ll see the response from your manager, plus a link to the calendar.
Why use AtBot to request time off?
AtBot is useful if you don’t have a formal process for taking a day off, especially if you might be using a SharePoint calendar already. But even if you do have a process in place, AtBot offers a nice replacement because you can simply request the time off right from MS Teams.
Add to that you can include the SharePoint calendar as a tab right in Teams, so you can have quick access to it using a web page tab.
Remember, this is just the start
Take a look through all the steps in Power Automate and you can find ways to configure this more to your needs. Perhaps you want to include multiple recipients who could approve your request. Or maybe you want to add an Outlook appointment updating your status so nobody invites you to a meeting. Or maybe you want to request periods of time rather than single days. This is all doable.
Even more complex, but still very possible, is tracking available time off hours. Power Automate and SharePoint could be used in the background to add time off hours every pay period and AtBot, through this request process, can subtract them when they’re used.
We’re hopeful you can put this new Skill to work keeping track of who’s in and out of the office in an easy and organized way.
AtBot brings AI within reach
AtBot is the premiere bot-as-a-service solution for the Microsoft cloud. Built completely within Azure, AtBot is your out-of-the-box, easy-to-configure bot for Teams, SharePoint, or the web. Teach AtBot tasks using Power Automate, make him your corporate source of knowledge with QnA Maker, help him understand almost anything your colleagues could ask thanks to LUIS, and manage his features with the AtBot Admin Portal. Get going with AtBot Free or start your free trial of AtBot Premium today.
