Capgemini Speed-Coffee Power App
Speed-Coffee is a new app, built solely on the Microsoft Power Platform, that aims to connect users to another member of their team for a 10–15 minute coffee-break chat.
Naturally, remote working has made it more challenging to maintain human interaction, which is how the idea for Speed-Coffee was born. Aiming to reduce the effects of pro-longed periods without human interaction, Speed-Coffee is a nice way to have a break and converse with someone.
It’s also a great way for us all to get to know someone new in our constantly growing team and widen our network within the business unit.
Myself and three of my fellow team members worked together to create this app at the beginning of April and, whilst challenging, it was great to see it come together and start working — and even better to see its success within the Microsoft Team on first launch.
How does it work?
Users of the app will be prompted to pick a time and date for the coffee-break and then press the ‘Speed-Coffee Me!’ button to send the request.
The app will then select a team member at random and send them an invite to have a coffee-break over Teams with you, with the option to approve or reject. The time and date selected will appear in the recipients email along with requesting party’s details.
Once accepted, the user will receive a confirmation email letting them know that their Speed-Coffee invite has been accepted and who it will be with! If the recipient rejects, a new member will be picked at random and a new email will be sent to them. Recipients are completely anonymous until they accept a request, so they need not worry about rejecting, as the requesting party will never know.
Functionality
To create this app, we used:
- Power Apps
- Power Automate (formerly Flow)
- SharePoint Lists
The App consists of 3 screens:
- Schedule a Coffee
- Confirmation
- Help
Once the ‘Speed-Coffee Me!’ button is pressed in the Power App, the Power Automate Flow is triggered. This Flow is responsible for retrieving a pre-populated contact list from SharePoint and selecting a random user from the list, to send the request to.
Once a recipient has been picked from the list, the approval request will be sent to them. The Flow will wait 4 days for the recipient to respond.
The flow then has three outcomes:
- Should the recipient Accept the invite, the Flow will end as completed and the Speed-Coffee meeting is arranged successfully.
- Should the recipient Reject the invite, the Flow will re-run, finding a new recipient for the Speed-Coffee meeting. This process will continue until a Speed-Coffee invitation is accepted.
- Should the recipient Ignore the invite, the same process as the recipient ‘Rejecting’ the invitation will begin, however the Flow will wait the stated 4 days until triggering this re-run.
Speed to Market with Power Platform
Our project had just been extended and we were in-between starting the new phase of work. We were approached with the idea of Speed-Coffee and had 3 days before we started back on project work to get something together.
I agreed to take on the Power Automate Flow as this was an area I was not overly familiar with and wanted to improve my skills. After a while of watching YouTube videos and exploring the Microsoft Learn Material on Power Automate, I was ready to begin creating in the Maker Portal.
I mention this, as the Power Platform consistently impresses our clients with the speed in which it can take you from an idea, to an app, or a piece of automation. Yet still, in times like this, I am myself impressed with how we are empowered to create low-code/no-code solutions in a matter of days.
Conclusion
We learned a lot from creating this app — even though we had been using Power Apps and Power Automate on our project, creating a Flow for this app was a challenge, but a very rewarding one.
I really enjoyed sharing this mini project and speaking about it on our internal cascade to raise awareness. It has already been a well-received success in the Microsoft Team and I hope will be just as successful throughout our business.
Thanks for reading.
Fancy a Speed-Coffee? Join The Microsoft Team!
