Trigger Flows when Keywords are used in Microsoft Teams

We have all been there, where information overload becomes difficult to manage. Whether it is emails, texts, phone calls or social media messages, it can be difficult to keep track of it all. But, what if we had a helper to watch our communication feeds and then elevate the important messages so they are front and center for us?

When it comes to Microsoft Teams, the challenges are no different. What was once seen as an alternative to email, it has become another channel of information that we need to manage. Now adays it is not unusual to be part of many different teams and channels within Microsoft Teams. But once again, how to we keep track of everything?

One strategy we can leverage is to use the When keywords are mentioned trigger that is part of the Microsoft Teams connector in Power Automate. This trigger will pick up on a list of keywords that exist within a specific channel or group chat. When that happens, our flow will get kicked off.

Naturally, we have many options to surface this event to ourselves including email, push notification, SMS message etc. In addition, can also use the Microsoft Teams connector to send us a direct message which we are less likely to miss.

For our scenario we will use the Microsoft Teams connector and the Post a message as the Flow bot to a user. Within this action, we will provide a Link to message which will allow us to click that link and be directly taken to the originating message within the appropriate channel.

Testing

To test this flow, we will create a message within our channel that we configured in our team and be sure to include one of our keywords (RPA).

Within a few seconds, we will get a notification from Flow bot indicating that a topic we are interested in has been mentioned with a link to the original message.

If we click this link, we will be taken to that exact post where we can now begin to collaborate.

Conclusion

In this post, we discussed how we can avoid some unnecessary noise within our communication channels but still be notified when something is important that we are interested in.

If you want to see this content in video format, please check out this YouTube video: Trigger Flows when Keywords are used in Microsoft Teams.