well hello everyone thank you so much for joining our office hour number 27 all about itbm ppm and microsoft teams integration um we're going to talk for the first 15 20 minutes maybe even 30 minutes where we have a senior subject matter expert sponsored from the itbm product success team with namita and team here to talk to us about that and then for the remaining half of the time it's open for you as customers to ask questions amongst these subject matter experts as well as amongst yourselves if anyone's trying certain things talk about the use case the goal is to have some open dialogue and help get you guys some good answers and study tips and tricks and things like that to make sure you guys are successful in the use of the particular product as always if there's any customers who didn't get a chance to attend this office hour right now and you're listening to the recording if you have any questions feel free to reach out to myself charles rayburn or you are assigned customer success advocate with any questions we'll try to get those answered post the office hour and then lastly for any of you who are here and listening as well any office hour topics that you'd like to see in the future please reach out to us and let us know provide feedback on uh particular topics and we'll try to line up the subject matter expert and then line up this office hour to support that in the future so without further ado namita the floor is yours i believe you're on youtube oh yeah i was thank you so much charles and welcome everyone to our next office hours here namata mishra i am going to present you the ppm collaboration with ms team so with this let me share my screen and bring up the presentation first okay so today um along with me i also have my dev lead kavita um who worked on this collaboration so she and i are here my quick introduction i have around 18 plus years of industry experience with servicenow i am here for around three years mainly responsible for these kind of integrations resource management and time card management from the product management side okay so what's there in the ppm collaboration with ms teams by the way this is our version two this is a store release before this we have released the first version in august 2020 i believe which was ppm collaboration just with slack today the focus is on the version 2 which we released on january 20th and here uh in the version two now we are supporting both slack and uh ms teams integration with uh ppm so basically uh ppm collaboration for microsoft teams is for project manager for the team members rather i would say task assignees is the right word and the stakeholders what they can do from them is teams they can view the task assignments they can share the project details they can chat as on any other collaboration tool they do and basically they also see some you know the daily status and the notifications so today my focus will be to show you in the application in my demo how when you as a project manager uh create a project you can decide whether you want to create a ms teams you know for this project or not and as and when you are in the ms teams if suppose you are assigning um sending a task to a person from your project or you are removing automatically your ms teams theme will also be updated you will see the daily project status and also we will show you some notifications and at the end when the project is closed uh automatically the ms teams will be the team will be channel will be auto archive okay these are some installation stop steps when you will get outside out after this presentation you will get the pdf this will help you but i'm not going through the installation steps one by one so what uh in the daily project status today my focus is to show you okay the first thing when we i was working with customers they said as a project manager most of our time go in you know kind of doing a follow-up is your project on is your task on time you know is something getting delayed and things like that so keeping that request in mind in this integration the first thing that we are providing now is that the daily project status this daily project status will provide you the project details any exceptions that you have overdue task delay task any task which is due today or within the next seven days so that as a project manager you can plan whom to do the follow-up what is the high priority task for you to work on other than the daily project status we also provide some chat notifications and these chat notifications are uh on the different areas for so so example for on the project whenever the state or the status of the project is getting updated project managers are getting updated or uh the project is getting closed the notifications are shown on the tasks as i said in the beginning also on adding or removing the task assignees or milestones or the key milestones when they are getting closed also when a task is getting deleted and suppose the person who is assigned to that task is no more on any other task that person will be removed from the team on the redact side which is nothing but the risk issue decision action items and the change request we take care of the risk which are whose probability is absolute or high and in the adac if the priority is critical or high whenever these kind of risks or issues decision action item or change request is getting updated a notification will be sent so that the project manager and all the team members from the ms teams get notified and they can take an action if if required okay so okay so now i will not walk you through with the slides rather what i'll do i'll just bring up my application here so let me end the show okay so here i have logged in as a system administrator not as a project manager because i want to showcase you something this is my project return to workplace and as you can see uh you know you you have created this project but in the related link you are not seeing any link to create the msteams channel why because as i said in the beginning this decision is only for the project manager only the project manager can decide whether you want to create a msteam's channel or not so let me go back and log in as a project manager here go back to my project once again and this point in time i should see that link so this is one thing i wanted to make sure sometimes people get you know irritated oh why am i not getting the link because you are not the project manager or you have not logged in as a project manager now you see you are getting enable ms teams collaboration so when you click on this enable ms teams collaboration what system will do in the background system will try to create a channel a team for the ms teams and you will see this update here still in progress so it takes couple of seconds you just have to refresh your screen and if this integration is successful you will see that that enable msteams integration link will no more be shown there so which means let me just click on this again okay so let me go back here go back to my this thing okay so here you see i just refreshed my screen and you see now return to workplace a team has been created so how we are creating this theme the we are just taking the project id and then return to workplace is the name of the project this is the ms teams they cannot take the uh the spaces in between so that is why spaces are you know replaced with underscore so that that's being said that's fine if you now go back to your managed team in the owner you will see two people one the project manager and second obviously the administrator of that um ms teams and on the members and the guest list you will see all your task assignees who are there on your project so let me go back and see one more time uh so if you see here vegeta amita graval are coming right so if you go back here and if you say you don't want amit agrawal but you suppose change it with namitha here so amit agrawal at this point in time should also be removed from my ms teams provided i believe that he's not on any other task so let me just refresh this piece once again oh he's still there maybe he is part of some other task that's why but that's fine so as and when you are removing the assignee from the project that sid will also be removed from here so that's the first part i wanted to show you the second thing is that every day as i said at 8 00 am we are showing the daily project status so how that daily project status is being done at the at the in the background for this integration we are using um we are using the flow designer so flow designer has some flows and those flows are by default deactivated why because we do not want this this integration to come automatically but if you want you have to go ahead as an admin and activate those flows so one of the flows which is there is to which runs every day and let me bring you let me share with that so you just have to go to the flow designer and the flows and search with the ppm collaboration here on the ppm collaboration as you see here uh daily project status teams is here so you just have to go on to this and because it is not 8 a.m right now so i have to execute it right now so i just have to say okay so i'm just testing it take some time so give two seconds has been executed okay so now let me go back here and you see the project status has come here so what does project status contains here project status contains a couple of things the first it contains is the overview of your project which means you know the name what is the start date state status and all those things then it contains the more information such as what are the tasks which are due today what are the overdue tasks right what is the delay task which is not coming here but that because my project doesn't have it but otherwise it shows you and then the key milestones or the milestones which are due within the seven days so i also would like to touch base here that if you are thinking what is overdue task and the delay task so basically overdue tasks here are the tasks uh that are not started on the planned start date which means you know the plant is started maybe before today but are not in either vapor closed state they are not yet started right maybe pending or open whatever and the delay tasks are those tasks which are not completed on the planned end date which means you know the plan end date is before today and state is still not closed it can be cl it is a work in progress so anyways this is on the daily project status now let me also go and show you some couple of more things as i said in the beginning i have to be the project manager here so and i have to go back again as namita here so the second thing which i would like to show you is that when you go here and update any of your redac entity it will notify you so let me go ahead and take create one of the risks in front of you and if i say this is my new rest which is see the budget challenge the probability has to be absolute or high let me make it absolute in this case all other fields i will fill certainly but for now i just save it so when this is done you go back to your ms teams and you will see here one second it must be coming up yeah so new risk with absolute probability has been created and if as a team member or as a project manager you would like to see from within the team what is this this is the url which will take you back to that risk so from the ms team you can always come back here and you can make the changes whatever you want and then come back here so this is on the risk side similarly on the issue decision change request also let's pick one of them not everything but yeah at least one i should show you so if you go back here onto the project again let's say this is an issue and okay and i simply say priority is high or critical and i save this so once i do that that will also over here so let me just refresh it once again it comes it takes some time a couple of seconds to come here yeah again it's a link you can always go back and you can see that from here so yeah so this is on on the msteam site uh which as i covered in my um this thing right next thing is whenever you are closing a milestone or you know the clicky milestone then also it comes over here so that is on what all things are getting updated um when whenever you are making changes into the project now the second thing which i would like to share here is that a couple of things like let me go back to my presentation so this all i have shown you right let's go quickly turn the gears to the technical aspects so for the ms teams integration to work with ppm there are two spokes that are required they have to be activated first is microsoft teams graphics book and second is microsoft azure ad spoke so along with this as we know because we are using the ppm integration so yes obviously you need to have the ppm standard plug-in also gets it activated in your system okay next one is uh the rows and the tables the first role which gets automatically installed when we activate the ppm collaboration application is the collaboration user and second is the collaboration owner so basically collaboration owner is the one who gets the complete create update like access delete access on a table this table is entity channel table and this table also gets automatically installed basically this is the table which stores your list of ids and the names of the channel right so if you go back here let me just end this show so if you think from the ms teams right when this channel is getting created when the steam is getting created there is a table which stores this name project id and the channel id so that next time when you do some update in the project this channel gets updated so this is there next thing is on the on the floors by default as i told you that all the flows are not activated they are main flows are deactivated so flows are activated so as an administrator you have to activate them and also they are pretty simple right so if suppose somebody says i want to change some condition yes you can always go and change the condition so for example if you want any risk gets created you should get a notification not just on to the probability critical or high absolute yes pretty much you can go there you can change the condition and whatever you want to do there so yeah so that is pretty much on to on to the um onto the roles and tables installed then the flows i have updated here which which are there on the floor designer these are different flows some are for the ms teams and um corresponding there are also for the slack so today because our focus is on ms teams these flows name which are here is on the ms teams i will stop you know presenting now and i would like to know if there is any question from anyone great thanks nimita all right the floor is open for any questions from a customer please raise your hand and kind of uh just go ahead and unmute yourself and ask the question or you can actually put one into the chat window and i can ask it on your behalf so john looks like you unmute it yourself first you go ahead first and then everyone else just go ahead and follow up after john hey charles thank you hey namita um hey yeah so we haven't really done any of these kinds of integrations before so i don't even know what spokes are exactly i can probably guess uh what kind of technical skills would we need to be able to implement this i i looked at trying to do it in my my personal developer instance and i gave up very quickly i knew i was going to be out of my depth very quickly um do you need somebody with with fairly deep microsoft technical skills as well as somebody on the servicenow side my assumption and because i i am not a technical person john but i have done this integration on my system so i don't expect you to be an ms teams um you know you need you need not to have a good knowledge of that expect except that you need to have something like how to create the users right that kind of knowledge is required other than that uh nothing much you require but today we have kavitha on the call and kavita is actually the dev lead on this so kavitha would you like to share some experience from your site so uh hi john so you don't need any technical uh experience to i mean knowledge to install this spoke and anything it is very user friendly you just have to go and install these books and you don't need any uh knowledge on ms team side also because we assume that you will integrate with ms teams if you have that setup right so we assume that you already have those users created in your microsoft azure directory so yeah even if you don't have so that is fine you can just go ahead and install those two spokes that that should be enough right yeah yeah is there any security considerations around that i don't know whether teams is a kind of security around it to lock down api connections would we have to open anything up like that uh no we don't need any sets okay okay thank you yeah all right uh brenda you go ahead and ask your question next thank you john hi um my question has to do with um access once the team site's been created um you mentioned that access is automatically granted to anyone that's a task assignee what about like other fields such as um sponsor or something like that are they included and then can i add additional people to that team site within teams yes good question brenda so sponsors are not right right now they are not included but as i said in the background we are just using this flow so you can add this field sponsored very easily if you want to add them that's the first thing second thing yes you can add additional members to the team and those members will be added here also yep and then just one more follow-up um is there a link in the project record that one could click on to access the team site is that created yes we wanted to do that in this release but we missed it uh that is in my backlog and you will see that in the next version brenda perfect thank you thank you thank you all right good question brenda uh other customers any other questions that you guys have right now the floor is open nope brenda you could go for it again okay i i guess i have one more question then um our environment um we have some requirements on setting up team sites for example we have to have two owners and there's just some stuff behind the scenes that they require um do you think there might be any issues with that where we might have to make some changes to accommodate those those the way we've set up our team site it's a total question because you don't know our yeah but i was about to say that brenda because we need to understand more on this question and maybe we have to see the environment yeah am i right here or you would like or you got the question you want to say something here uh yeah i mean i cannot say for sure but i yeah i think there will be an issue if you have multiple owners as that should be enough okay perfect yeah thank you great thank you there john you have another question i do it sounds like me and brenda are going to dominate the uh no worries actually following on from her her question um where are we at in our journey we actually have very few people that are managing tasks on a project but we are mandating that they create resource plans so that we can at least do resource management against projects um from what you've said the like any allocated resources they don't get added to the um to the team site automatically is that something that you'd look you're looking at is um bringing across the resources on resource plans um onto the team's channel certainly john that is another item we started but because of the time currents we have to drop that item so um let me ask you this question when um as a requirement i was thinking just to add the allocated and allocated members not the confirmed members what do you think about i i was thinking the same thing uh allocated certainly um i think probably yeah confirmed you're probably not um i mean the direction we're giving to our project managers is confirm your resources as you come out of the planning phase of a project but recognizing that that could be a couple of months before you actually start executing that you wouldn't allocate the resource plans until project execution actually starts so i think only having those allocated resources on the team site probably would be right it could get a little confusing otherwise because you could have resources added to the team site and then they get pulled off the project before it actually starts so i think that that makes sense perfect yeah so i was also thinking and this is in our backlog uh again maybe in the next version you will see the allocated members on to the team's channel okay okay excellent thank you thank you okay all right so thank you one more thing i would like to say if no more questions are there that this also works when you copy a project or when you apply a template on a project i don't know who will do that but in case you have assignees from your template coming into the project then those assignees gets added here and similarly if you're copying a project then also your assignees uh when you enable the ms team's channel they would be added there just fyi okay looks like john might have another question i do sorry i i don't know if this would be technically possible but um i mean one of the reasons we actually started down the path of of using teams for collaboration around projects was so that um documents could be created in teams and collaborated on is it possible to have the integration going the other way so that if a document is created in teams the link can be published back to the um to the um the work work notes on on the project so john do you have access to my backlog um no but i would like to yeah so all these things these are the good things right today we don't have that but these are a couple of things which we which we will work in v3 and certainly you will see this piece also coming up how are you thinking sorry if this is getting uh off topic to how are you thinking that would work because i'm not quite sure if every time a document was created it was instantly made available on the project but i don't know how else you could do it with whether there'll be like a publish button or something like that yeah so today the challenge why we couldn't do it in this v2 is that this is one-way sync so whenever you are making any updates on the project those updates are going to the ms teams but if you make any change in the ms teams right that doesn't go back to the project so that was the challenge because of which we couldn't take up this item but certainly what we thought is that we have to do some more investigation to see that how adding up adding anything like um adding a document onto the ms teams uh it should be also populated onto my project okay yeah we were thinking and john by the way we were thinking to do that automatically but if you feel no automatically it's too much and we have to put a button there is that what you're asking my thought was that while the team is collaborating and actually creating the document it would just be in teams that it didn't need to be reflected on there but when a document is finished and it's kind of considered as published that then you would put the link onto um interservice now otherwise you just have so much kind of just like noise i mean certainly you end up with these kind of like just working documents draft documents um like pdfs and documents from suppliers all go on to the team site which you just most of the project team just don't really need but team's a good place to put it i wouldn't want every single one of those to be um included in service now makes sense makes sense no we will take up this point into consideration yeah i i'm not quite sure exactly how you would control which ones you want to which ones you don't but yeah that that would be what i'd be looking for i think yeah we don't have answer for that john right now because we also don't know how we will do that but yeah it's a spike for us okay yeah okay next one thank you all right uh looks like brenda you have another question go for it yeah it is the john and brenda show um i um i'm wondering about whether there's any upgrade considerations so if i put this in production today what would i need to potentially look for or test for when we upgrade to rome um you don't so this is a store application um brenda and this works very fine with mnopq with paris and quebec okay so in the rome when you will upgrade to rome um kavita it should keep working right yeah it will work it will work right okay unless an until we will provide version three at that point in time you have to take the latest version otherwise it will keep working yeah got it okay so nothing special in terms of testing um when there's a new version or a platform upgrade no no not really okay okay great any other questions oh um i think we're i think we're okay and good then so what i'm going to do is i'm going to launch a poll for you guys i have one question oh who has no connection with a project but like i would like uh him or her to edit will that be possible yeah certainly so let me share my screen here this is ms teams feature here so if you see um on my channel here right if i go to manage teams you will have ad member here so you can add a member here on to the on to the um channel here right from the ms names you can add perfect okay sure so if there are no more questions what i would like to show is because i was thinking if you ask anything i have kept my project open but looks like there is no more questions so let me also show you what happens when you close the project when you are closing the project at the in the back end again there is a flow there is a flow designer which keeps running and what it does it basically let me go back here it tells you that again it's taking some time that this project has been closed and you know the teams the channel will be archived in 15 days so basically we have kept it open for 15 days why because uh we have seen while working with the customers that they have some some conversation which keeps going after after you know closing the project oh sorry i i did not close the project one quick second it's coming up and here it is so let me just go ahead and close this project okay and this is our standard message that when you close the project all tasks get closed so nothing is special with this integration that's a standard message perfect so now if you come here and you will see here that you will see the message saying that this project is now closed all the milestones it will show all the tasks right and it will also show you that the themes the channel will be you know it will be open for 15 days within 15 days whatever you want to do as john was saying like right uploading the documents updating the documents or anything else you can do again what you can do if you want to do it right away or if you want to increase decrease these days go ahead change it in the flow uh in the flow designer in the flow and it will be done easily so that was the last part i wanted to show on this demo closing the project okay i have one more question sorry um sure brenda are there any implications if someone went into teams like say the project manager and they changed the name of the team's project or the the team site within teams do we need to leave them the same no there will not be you can always change the name okay perfect in the table we are using something known as the society or something yeah so yeah which will not be changed yeah perfect okay good there's another question from stacy stacy i am so i have a quick question about what you were just speaking about um about the team's channel being archived so for our use what we were thinking is that people would use this to house their auditable documentation for the project because right now servicenow is our system of records so people are required to attach their auditable documentation their project documents for audit purposes and when you say archive um and then after it's archived you have that 15 days to access it what then happens to everything is that something you can go back and access like if we're using it as a repository for that project uh you mean to say stacy from the ms teams yeah because i think what we were thinking when we first saw this is awesome we can because people do set up teams channels for their projects separate from servicenow but we thought if there was a plug-in to it great because now as part of the pmo when i'm asked by audit to look at a project and pull information for them i can just go in and share with them that team site because that team should have been filing away their auditable documents and so if it's archived i've not done that before in teams so i don't know what that means if it's just somewhere and i need to go unarchive it to allow somebody access i guess that's my question like after the project's closed being able to access your information is it the right place to do that if this is what this is for right so even after 15 days when it gets archived anytime the members who are on that team channel can go and access the docs they are stacy you don't have to unarchive is the answer okay so they're they're there they live there they're not going anywhere so if i wanted to give somebody the link to that team's channel or give them access they could access all the documents that were attached there yeah okay cool sure thank you okay great any last minute questions thank you guys so much for uh filling out the poll for those of you haven't please feel uh take a couple of minutes to fill out the poll that i just launched um that we'll use that to help us with the feedback for these office hours any other last minute questions from the anyone on the bridge great any last words nemita no i would just would like to see if you people use it please share your feedback with us and if you have more questions charles and i and kavitha are always there to help you thanks for joining us today thank you all so much have a great friday and the rest of your weekend take care thanks charles thanks numero thanks everybody thank you thank you thank you cheers