Like the title says, is anyone here utilizing the Teams/Planner API to create tasks in Planner with events in Epicor?
We are trying to leverage Teams and the Planner functionality to help consolidate workflows between different sales groups and it looks promising.
this sounds interesting. where can I learn more about this?
That’s where I’m starting
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We used Planner for our Cloud upgrades.
What do you want to do? Sync work flow steps with Planner? (Or with To Do?) Do you want to have M365 to update your Epicor Tasks?
The plumbing is basically there (Graph and Epicor Functions) especially if you’re using Azure AD authentication.
The workflow for offering out our product to our customers is pretty loose and individualized between territories. I want to have those groups create a standard workflow and the Planner board would reflect the buckets where each of the workflow tasks go.
for example, our orders start as quotes. When the quote is matched with a particular inventory, the workforce user offers the inventory to the customer. The customer is allowed to accept or decline the offer. From there, we await to hear if the inventory will be released to finished goods or not.
This complexity is well suited to the bucket approach, so perhaps when a quote is assigned a wip inventory item, it can create a task in the plan assigned to the quote owner, etc.
Just trying to consolidate and standardize processes and leverage the tools we have. I recently won the battle to not have multiple products (Trello, some google products, etc) as part of 3 different workflows for 3 different groups all doing the same thing and I think Planner should be integrated with Epicor to make their jobs easier and the process standard
I like the idea of using M365 with Epicor. I think the real breakthrough will be WebHooks in Epicor in 10.2.600. This will make integrations so much easier as it’s a pattern used throughout the web today.
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Well, I created a Web API that would take a request and then turn it around and call the Graph REST API to get a token and create a Planner Task. The problem is, the Planner API does not allow something called Application permissions, only Delegated permissions. To accomplish this, I had to use the ever unpopular and un-recommended way (according to M$) to grant a token based on a username/password.
The REST API method of interacting with the API was relatively good, minus the lack of clarity of calls needed to accomplish certain tasks. I was able to get it to create tasks, but wanted to try the SDK method of doing so if that were to more supported.
After reading a bit about it, I then decided it might be better to use the Graph SDK and in my opinion, it’s way way harder with even fewer examples of how to use it in my particular scenario. I’m sure a real developer would have little trouble with it, but for me, it’s extraordinarily difficult to follow the patterns in the few examples they demo.
I’d love to get this working, especially as I promised the feature to my team (Epicor posts a message to Teams using the Incoming Webhooks connector, the post has a button to “create a task”, the button click calls my API which then calls Graph API to create the Task), but seems I’ve stumbled into a bit of a quagmire.
Thanks Mark I’ll check it out.
I am determined to get this working, even just as a learning experience. I think a lot of the things tripping me up are more fundamentals like Dependency Injection (which is relied on so heavily in ASP.NET Core) rather than the actual API usage, but I’m getting further into it and it’s making more sense.
My goal is to post it here when I’m done, make get some feedback along the way.
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Finally got it finished, although I am sure I have lots to improve upon. Please feel free to take a look and give feedback!
This API exposes a simple endpoint to the calling application and orchestrates the creation of a standardized Task with Task Details in a specific Planner/Bucket. I designed it with Epicor in mind so that, for instance, either a client customization of BPM could call this API to create a task. The Planner and Bucket could be known at the time of invocation and stored/configured within Epicor, yet the Microsoft Graph authentication and specific calls are all handled by this API.
I don’t think I’m going to use Planner though, there are too many functions missing that are present in other planning software. Additionally, Planner has some goofy quirks like if you create a new Planner from another planner and delete the copy, it deletes the original with zero way to recover it. Ask me how I know! 
Thanks
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