Automations I've created in Microsoft Flow/Power Automate
Copying shifts from Microsoft Shifts over a predefined time period to Outlook or Google Calendar (two different flows).
NOTE:
⚠️ This script has not been maintained and currently will no longer be maintained as I'm not currently using Team's shifts - for this reason the script exists mostly in an archival state and can serve as a base template in case you'd like to take a go at using Power Automate to achieve a team's calendar sync.
Links:
Shifts to Outlook Calendar
Shifts to Google Calendar
You can find these flows on the Releases page of GitHub as well; if there are updates they will go there!
Setup
In order to setup these flows, you must download them from above and import them (more info for this can be found here) and select the data connections for the following:
- Microsoft Shifts Copy to Outlook Calendar or Microsoft Shifts Copy to Google Calendar -> Ensure this is "Create as new" (found in dropdown under import setup link if not already selected)
- Microsoft Teams Connection -> Select your Microsoft Teams account or set it up as a new connection after clicking "Select during import"
- Office 365 Outlook Connection -> Select your Outlook Connection or set it up as a new connection after clicking "Select during import"
- Office 365 Users Connection -> Select your Users Connection or set it up as a new connection after clicking "Select during import"
Hint: you can copy this flow after you've created it if you want to have a separate calendar which syncs everyone's shifts in addition to a calendar that syncs just your shifts!
Suggestion: use the day interval for the recurrence and you can specify the hours you want the flow to run! See limitations for details...
Requirements:
- Microsoft Power Automate account to use these flows!
- Either a Google or Microsoft account
- Be part of an Office 365 Organization (run the flow and see if it works)
Features:
- Add everyone's shifts or just your shifts
- Custom event name
- Fetches Calendar ID and Teams ID from "friendly" name
- Delete/remove events from your calendar using the name you give the event
- Remove shifts already created as events
With those last two features you get the ability to change the name of your shift event at a later time by removing all the events with the previous shift name and adding shifts again as events with a new name
I highly recommend creating your own calendar for this (especially a separate calendar for each team member's shifts and your own shifts) in either Outlook or Google Calendar. I am in no way responsible if your events get deleted!
Please read over the limitations to ensure you know what this Flow cannot do!
Configuration
There are multiple parameters for this flow. Some of the default values may be different for the Google Calendar Flow but they mean the same thing. You can dig into the flow and change the location of the event, color, and alerts if you'd like as well (colors and alerts for Google Calendar in the Calendar settings at calendar.google.com)
| Parameter Name | Meaning | Default Values (may be different if Google Calendar Flow) |
|---|---|---|
| Recurrence | Frequency for running Flow automation | 1 Hour |
| Event Name | Name for the event in Outlook/Google Calendar | CRW |
| Calendar Name | Friendly calendar name you see in Outlook/Google Calendar | Calendar |
| Microsoft Teams Team Name | Friendly team name you see in Microsoft Teams | og_crw |
| Get everyone's shifts (true) or just my shifts (false) | Choose to get everyone's shifts if true or just your shifts if false | false |
| Delete calendar events (true) or not (false) | Choose to delete existing calendar events matched to the event name parameter if true or not if false | true |
| Remove existing work shift events from calendar (true) or not (false) | If true, won't add new events to the calendar. Can be used to remove all work shift events from calendar (and possibly more so be careful); useful to change the name of your shift event after you've already synced | false |
| Calendar Time Zone | Necessary for Outlook Calendar but not included for Google Calendar. If you don't know your time zone string, you can add the action Convert To Time Zone to get it. | (UTC-08:00) Pacific Time (US & Canada) |
| Get past time - Begin Date | Set the date in the past to start getting shifts and creating events | 0 Months (now) |
| Get future time - End Date | Set the date in the future to start getting shifts and creating events | 3 Months |
Limitations
- Running the flow too frequently may end up not showing your shifts consistently; because this flow relies on deleting the previous events to avoid duplicating them if you view your calendar within the window of its updates then you may not see your shift as events. If you use the day interval for recurrence (instead of the default 1 hour), you can set which hours it'll execute. I have multiple copies of these flows running (one for personal shifts to Outlook, one for Teams shifts to a Google Calendar, and one for personal shifts to a Google Calendar) running at 3am, 4am, and 5am, once a day, respectively.
- Microsoft Teams actions are currently in preview action and don't support pagination; the maximum amount of shifts you can grab at a time are 100. One unfortunate circumstance I discovered is that any shifts you trade with a coworker get appended to the end of a time period (meaning that a shift that occurs tomorrow but was swapped will not show up if your time period is too long). In my experience, with a ten person team, I needed to change my time period to 1 day in the past and 1 month in the future to return about 90 shifts). If you have trouble getting all the shifts you want, you'll need to tweak the begin and end date to a shorter interval. You don't want to have 100 shifts as then swapped shifts will be missing.
- No current easy way via Power Automate to copy over the color of the shift to the calendar color. This isn't an option in create an event for Google Calendar or Outlook Calendar
- Possible timeouts may occur while iterating through the shifts though I haven't personally experienced them and have had instances run 20+ minutes (so you should run it when nothing else is happening as the latency is long).
- You must currently manually import the flow; I've submitted a request to put these flows in the Power Automate public gallery and hope they're approved so it's easier to setup!
Any issues and please open one up on this repository; I can't guarantee that I'll be able to fix your issue, but please open one up anyways!
