2017-04-02

I want to show you how quickly you can setup a Microsoft Teams Channel to automatically add a new message when a blog post is published.

The blog post can be anything, e.g your company blog, partners blog, technical blogs or in our case the blogs aggregated from Collab365.Today.

In the image below, you can see that we have a Channel called “Today Feed” which has a tab called “Conversations“. Every hour a process runs within Microsoft Teams to check Collab365.Today for new content. If it finds a new post it will add it as below.

That’s pretty cool and what’s even cooler is that it took less than one minute to do.

So here’s how…

Step 1 – Create a new channel in your Team and call it something like “Feeds”.

In my example, I created a new channel (called “Today Feed”), but you can just as easily add it to an existing channel, it’s totally up to you.

Step 2 – Add a new Connector

Once the Channel is created find the ellipsis at the top of the channel (next to the star in my image). Click and you will get this :

In case you are wondering, a “Connector” is something that allows you easily bring in content from 3rd party services. The list of connectors is pretty cool already. You can bring in data from services like :

  • Trello
  • Mailchimp
  • Facebook Pages
  • Dynamics 365
  • Google Analytics
  • GitHub
  • RSS
  • plus many more.

Step 3 – Select the ‘RSS’ Connector and add it to your Channel

In our case, we are going to utilize the RSS Connector. So select that and then add relevant values. If you don’t know your RSS Url then use the Collab365.Today one as an example :

  • Enter a Name for your RSS Connection : Collab365 RSS Feed
  • Address for RSS Feed: http://snip.ly/dashboard/rss/gen/58e5e3c076ae56262b4fb8fd
  • Digest frequency: Every hour

(BTW … if you would like to stay upto date with 350+ SharePoint and Office 365 Bloggers then subscribe to the Daily Digest and we’ll email you 20 daily updates (Monday to Friday)).

Here’s what your screen should look like :

That’s it, once it’s setup you should have something looking like the first image I shared on this page.

Other ideas / uses

Connect to SharePoint?

  • SharePoint Lists can also be exposed as RSS so why not add a feed that sends a message when new items are added? (Note, I am not quite sure how the security would work on this, so if you’ve done it, please let me know!)

Get your developers on the case

  • If you have custom Line of Business applications that you would like to trigger team alerts from, then why not get your developers to create an RSS feed?

About the author 

Mark Jones

Collab365 Founder helping people learn Microsoft 365 via these:

👉 Collab365 Summits - Massive virtual conferences for Microsoft products
👉 Collab365 Today - Aggregation site for the best community blogs
👉 Collab365 Community - Huge blog site including plenty of Microsoft content

I want to provide a friendly online community, where we can learn and grow together:

👉 365ers - coming very soon!