Flowing Kaizala custom forms responses into SharePoint list and Teams

Kaizala allows one to create surveys and custom actions. The simple custom action is a form, that can be used in a group to collect information. Let’s say you have a Kaizala group for your company and anyone can request a demo session from there. I didn’t delve into all details about these groups yet, since they are changing anyway. This is about using Flow with custom actions in Kaizala.

Create and publish Kaizala form

Creating a form is simple. Go to Kaizala custom actions and create a new form. Add suitable fields and then go ahead and install & publish it into your Kaizala groups and add it in your Kaizala app as action.

Note: if you make later changes to the form, then you need to pay attention that you

• Publish it into all groups
• re-add the action in Kaizala app
• Update your flow to use the latest version of form

I had some problems when I was trying to get flow initiated after making changes to the form, and on the latest step the readding action into Kaizala in mobile app finally fixed the issue.

Prepare the list and Flow it

Create your SharePoint list and add suitable columns. If you are not prepared to fiddle around with multiselects and phone numbers then just convert everything to string and push the info into the list. Depending on your need you may have to convert some response fields into correct format. Start Flow with a correct Kaizala trigger (someone responds to a custom action)

As you see, you need some work on multiselect responses. I did it simple: just adding selected products into one string variable and writing that to SharePoint list and Teams. You can create more logic inside the apply to each loop, which is created automatically.

Let’s test

And since the flow run successfully we got the response to both SharePoint list and Teams.

Learnings

Something to note from this exercise:

• Flow has preview connectors that can work with Kaizala. For simple forms you can use Surveys, or you can create more complex forms easily from Kaizala UI.
• There is a need to do some datatype conversions when moving data from Kaizala into other systems like SharePoint and Teams
• Custom Action Forms are a bit touchy about published version – you need to make sure that you are really “listening” on the latest form. This step can be easily overlooked.

What I really like, is that with actions and Flows you can start creating more value with Kaizala – and it does has it’s place and uses in a work interface alongside with Teams. Teams part was actually really simple here, but essential to get team involved. And what would stop from adding planner task to most suitable demo responsible person automatically?