Does your team use atMentions for work assignments? Create tasks to your ToDo (or Planner) automatically when you are atMentioned.

Sometimes atMentions are used to assign tasks in certain teams. That Team might not be something you use daily, but when you get a atMention you don’t want to overlook it. 

Before doing anything else, make sure you know you can filter your activity feed with atMentions. Would that be enough?

No, it is not enough. I need atMentions in my ToDo (or Planner)

This is simple to do with Flow. Microsoft Teams got new triggers in the beginning of October, and this makes it possible to trigger a new flow when you are atMentioned in specific team channel. Note this

• This needs to be done per Team and Channel. You can’t choose multiple Teams nor all Team channels. 
• You do this to yourself. Not to your colleague.
• Outlook tasks and ToDo are connected. When you create a Outlook task, you are creating a ToDo task. 

With this, it actually makes some sense to create a ToDo (Outlook) task when it is keyed to specific team and channel – this way you can use this to create a lightweight task assignment that is automatically sent to ToDo – or to that Team’s Planner. We’ll stick to personal side on this post.

Of course this can be used to monitor all channel messages, but now we choose mentioning. There are multiple actions available in Flow for Teams as well.

These can be handy if you need to push something to Teams – but at this time we stick to triggers.

The start is simple. Choose team and channel. As you can see, if you use emojis on Team & channel names -> they are displayed here in Flow as well. 

What else is needed?

We have to add Html to Text conversion, to be able to get plain text content of the message body content. The original content contains formatting and at least in subject we don’t need that.

Outlook tasks have a lots of actions available, but we only need Create task.

After we have the plain text of content available and create a task in place, you can simply select desired info into your ToDo task.

Testing the task, we got the task right where it was supposed to be in: Outook tasks and in Todo. When I complete the task in Todo – it gets completed in Outlook too (as expected). 

You can also include more into the flow if you have to. Who created the atmention? Was there some keywords in the text? Was it marked important? 

This is yet one example how Teams + Flow can be your personal interface of work. You can tune it to your needs and practices – and creating a task from various sources (not just Teams) can make a staying up to date a lot easier.