Extending Microsoft Teams Praises with Adaptive Cards and Power Automate

Praising is an excellent way to give credit to your colleagues and create a good feeling in your organization. Praises can be used in chat groups and in Teams channels, you can even praise your external guests.

What if your organization is having an external system for rewarding, like peer-to-peer rewards or monthly rewards? Would it be possible to use praises for notifying a rewardee publicly on a Teams channel?

Let’s start with what is a praise. Praise is an adaptive card sent by Teams Praises app. Code snip below is an actual praise card content captured with browser developer tools, bolded section is the actual Adaptive Card.

[
    {
        "contentType": "application/vnd.microsoft.card.adaptive",
        "content": {
            "$schema": "https://adaptivecards.io/schemas/adaptive-card.json",
            "type": "AdaptiveCard",
            "version": "1.0",
            "body": [
                {
                    "type": "ColumnSet",
                    "spacing": "large",
                    "separator": true,
                    "columns": [
                        {
                            "type": "Column",
                            "width": 2.6,
                            "items": [
                                {
                                    "type": "Image",
                                    "horizontalAlignment": "center",
                                    "size": "auto",
                                    "altText": "Courage",
                                    "url": "https://statics.retailservices.teams.cdn.office.net/ui/static/praise/master/all/assets/badges/en/CourageBadge.72a772bd01.png"
                                }
                            ]
                        },
                        {
                            "type": "Column",
                            "width": 6,
                            "spacing": "medium",
                            "items": [
                                {
                                    "type": "TextBlock",
                                    "wrap": true,
                                    "size": "small",
                                    "isSubtle": true,
                                    "text": "Matti Paukkonen sent praise to"
                                },
                                {
                                    "type": "TextBlock",
                                    "wrap": true,
                                    "spacing": "small",
                                    "weight": "bolder",
                                    "size": "medium",
                                    "text": "Matti Paukkonen"
                                },
                                {
                                    "type": "TextBlock",
                                    "spacing": "small",
                                    "wrap": true,
                                    "text": "Test message"
                                }
                            ]
                        }
                    ]
                }
            ]
        },
        "cardClientId": "deea5ef098394989a6db5ec55f77ee1a",
        "appId": "d832a33f-28c2-4969-8ad0-4fee681dc5b4"
    }
]

Look quite simple and easy to implement with Adaptive Cards and Microsoft Teams Flow Bot actions on Power Automate.

Creating praise Flow with Power Automate

Flow trigger, of course, depends on your solution calling this flow. You need to pass at least an email address of the person rewarded, name of the person who gave the reward and a message. For my example, I’m just using Flow button to trigger the Flow for testing.

For posting a card to a channel Post your own adaptive card as the Flow bot to a channel action is used. Pick a team and a channel, where you want to post your praise card.

For the Message, you can copy contents of the content block of the adaptive card example above (bolded section). Modify name of the person who sent the reward, person who was rewarded and a the message with values from your trigger. My tip is to use mentioning in the card itself, you just need to add <at> tags around rewardee email and Teams will handle it you automatically.

If you want to personalize your custom praise icon, just store it some public location, for example on an asset library on SharePoint Online, and change the picture url on your card.

Customizing the card

Use Adaptive Cards designer (https://adaptivecards.io/designer/) to customize your card. Just copy your card content to Card Payload Editor, select Microsoft Teams as the host app and you can straight away see how your card looks like.

I’d prefer adding a heading on top and with Adaptive cards designer it is easy just to drag a text box in place, add text and configure text styles.

Once you’re done with your changes, just copy card payload back to the Flow action and you’re done!

Afterword

Adaptive cards are really powerful way to display notifications, ask for inputs and visualize data on Microsoft Teams. Find out more about Adaptive Cards here: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/adaptive-cards/.

Customizable Praise Badges are currently in development on Microsoft 365 roadmap (https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/roadmap?filters=&searchterms=64978) and feature is estimated to be available on September 2020 . Organization can configure their custom Praise Badges on Praise App settings on Teams admin center.