Some recipes are simple. A user-friendly UI is enough: Steve publishes a request, Wandering Traders reply with recipes, deal done.
But some recipes are complex. Specs are unclear. Steve doesn’t know exactly what he needs. There’s back-and-forth: questions, clarifications, files, photos, technical drawings.
We need proper channels. Share specs. Exchange files. Chat in real time.
Discord would work in the gaming world. But we’re building on Microsoft cloud.
So we use Modern Workplace, AI WORKFORCE suite: Teams, SharePoint, and the whole M365 family.
The Challenge: Connecting SharePoint, Teams, and Dataverse
As experienced consultants, we know the options:
Option 1: Server-side sync Quick. Efficient. But locked – not flexible when you want to extend. And no Teams integration.
Option 2: Dynamics 365 Teams Integration The out-of-the-box “Collaborate” button. Sounds good, but: it creates a separate Team or channel for each record. For our solution, that means a new channel for every single Request. Hundreds of channels.
And it’s not automatic – users still need to click “Collaborate,” choose to create new or merge to existing. Manual steps. Extra friction. Our users aren’t ready for that level of complexity just yet!
Our Use Case
As customer-oriented Redstone Engineers, we know adoption is everything. We wanted:
- Fully automated
- Zero clicks from user
- One Team, multiple channels (one per tender)
- Documents synced to the right place
The Solution: Power Automate
We know how OOB sync works under the hood. There’s a Document Location entity – the infrastructure connecting SharePoint to Dataverse.
We also know that when you create a Teams channel, SharePoint auto-generates a document library for it.
So we wired it up ourselves.
When a Tender is created:
- Teams channel created under the main Tender Team
- SharePoint folder structure generated
- Document Location record created in Dataverse
- Everything linked. Automatically.
Fully customized. Total freedom. Zero lines of code pro code. (Shoutout to FetchXML Builder from XRM Toolbox – making us look like we know what we’re doing since day one.)
Categories: #Redstone Realm, #low-code