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Written: 24/05/2020 | Updated: N/A
I love Karuana’s series Coffee in the Cloud. I love Microsoft Mechanics.
If you have been following this long running series, it probably comes as little surprise that I love video. I love videos which are genuinely interesting and jam packed with useful content, well produced and palatable in terms of their length. Yet the one problem I have is that I do so much focus work these days that I always forget to check for updates and so I often end up missing out on some really great content. Of course, there was a period I used to check them. I used to spend too much time checking them every other day, regularly switching out of context which often took me out of the focus work I was doing
So why not just subscribe to YouTube? Well I could. I could get an email by subscribing to the channel, but then I’d have to spend time emailing the team when I received it. I might forget and besides, I don’t want to spend time emailing the team. I want all of us to be notified in the place we all work without having to do the grunt work and generating a ton of email in the process
Sounds like just the job for a nice flow then doesn’t it
WHY WOULD WE DO IT?
- To be notified when a new video is added to a YouTube Channel
- To keep up to date with interesting video series
- To avoid having to manually email notifications
PREREQUISITES
Users need Teams and Power Automate licences – usually via Office/Microsoft 365 licences. A YouTube Account is also required
HOW
1.) Sign into Power Automate at https://flow.microsoft.com
2.) Select Create
3.) Select Automated Flow
4.) Add the Title of the Flow (Here named YouTube Channel Add) and choose the YouTube trigger When a Video is uploaded by a channel. Select Create
5.) Sign in with your YouTube Account to connect
6.) Enter the Channel ID of the YouTube Channel. The YouTube channel ID is the text after /channel/
7.) Select New Step and then select the Teams Action Post a Message (V3) (Preview)
8.) Add the Team (Here defined as Power Platform Admin Team), Channel ID (Here defined as the General channel) and the Message. In my message I have used dynamic content to disclose the Title and Description of the video. I have also created a link back to the URL of the channel so that it can be a simple experience to get to the video
Once done select Save
9.) Check the Flow with the Flow Checker
Our job here is done.
When the next video is uploaded to the channel you will get a notification in the channel of the latest video and in one click be able to get to the video
This can be done for any number of YouTube channels which means you can literally create subscription services for the whole team. It cuts down on a load of email and it also saves on a great deal of time having to search to keep up with the latest content
If you haven’t got time to catch up you can always bookmark and save for later
A question you may have is why doesn’t the flow direct right to the video itself. The answer to this is that whilst you can use the dynamic content Video Web Link in the Teams action the link itself doesn’t render in the Teams Client which means you have to copy and paste the link
One I’ll raise to the Team for sure
Enjoy this flow. Don’t let the team miss out on another episode of Coffee in the Cloud, Microsoft Mechanics or one of these worthwhile series again!
