Introduction
This document describes various items of automation that have been configured for Speakeasy. These are configured as “Flows” in Microsoft Power Automate. To access these flows in Power Automate, login to the navigate to Microsoft 365 Admin centre and from there, navigate to:
From the above location, the run history of each flow can be viewed, or flows can be edited
Power Automate Flow Overview
This section describes the function each of each the Power Automate flows that have been configured for use at Speakeasy.
Register staff or volunteer contact details
This flow simply takes the responses from the Microsoft Form
New Staff/Volunteer Contact Details and populates the
Speakeasy Contact List Sharepoint list, which stores all submitted staff and volunteer details. Note that the form does not supply values for all fields in this list – those that are not completed by the form will usually be completed as part of the new staff member or volunteer onboarding process, e.g. DBS checks.
The flow also creates a dedicate folder for each new member, named using a format of ID_name to make sure that it has a unique name (there may be multiple John Smiths!!). A link is provided in the volunteer list’s “Link To Documents” column – when clicked, a web browser will show the contents of the folder. It is recommended that volunteer-specific information such as DBS documents are stored in this folder.
Membership referral and notification
This flow takes the responses from the Microsoft Form called “
Speakeasy Referral Form” and populates the
Speakeasy Membership Sharepoint list, which stores all details of all PWAs and their associated carers. Note that the form does not supply values for all fields in this list – those that are not completed by the form will usually be completed as part of a new PWA’s triage process.
The flow also creates a dedicated folder for each new PWA, named using a format of ID_forenames_surname to make sure that it has a unique name (there may be multiple John Smiths!!). A button is provided when editing a PWA’s details (see
Membership Data Form) to enable this folder to be easily accessed.
A new task is added to the Tasks board in Teams (navigate to the Team Speakeasy…General and click on the Tasks tab). Tasks are divided into categories, known as buckets. Referral tasks are added to the “To do – member follow up” bucket, to keep them separate from, say, tasks. relating to flagged emails.
The flow also sends an email to the office mailbox, to notify them that a new entry has been submitted – each new entry in the list will be given a status that indicates it is a new referral. The list can be accessed using the Contacts Apps which are available in Microsoft Teams. The list is colour-coded based upon the PWA status. Once triaged, the PWA should either be accepted (status = Active), or rejected (status = Inactive). In some cases a further follow-up activity is required, in which case the status is set to “Follow-up required”
Register Staff or Volunteer or Trustee Contact Details
This flow works in the similar way as that for the membership referral described above. The flow takes the responses from the Microsoft Form called New Staff/Volunteer/Trustee/Student Contact Details and populates the Sharepoint list called “Speakeasy Staff and Volunteer Contact List“, which stores all details of all staff, volunteers, trustees and students. The form can be emailed to prospective staff/volunteers/students to gather their contact and emergency contact details. An draft email, containing a link to the form, can easily be generated via the “Speakeasy Admin Phone App”
Create planner task when mail is flagged in Speakeasy Office shared mailbox
This flow detects when an email in the Speakeasy Office shared mailbox is flagged for further attention and creates a corresponding task on the Tasks board in Teams (navigate to the Team Speakeasy…General and click on the Tasks tab). Tasks are divided into categories, known as buckets. Flagged emails are added to the “To do – flagged emails” bucket. This activity helps inform those users of who is actually performing the follow up activity – the task is initially assigned to the user who flagged the email, but the task can easily be re-assigned to another user and a note added to the task – when a task is assigned to another user an email is sent to that person.
To read the shared mailbox, an initial attempt involved logging in as a user who has access to the shared mailbox. However, the Flow step that detects new emails can only detects mails which arrive in that user’s inbox and
not in the shared mailbox, Therefore, this flow uses a direct connection to the office@Speakeasy-aphasia.org.uk account so that it has access to the office emails via the inbox. To achieve this, the shared mailbox was assigned a password via the following page:
https://admin.microsoft.com/Adminportal#/users. This password is stored in Bitwarden – see the entry named “Password used by Flow for Office@speakeasy-aphasia.org.uk”.
Note: whilst this flow is enabled, currently it assigns all tasks to “Speakeasy Office”, not the person who actually flagged the email. At this stage, there is no solution to this, but it may still be useful to have a list of follow-up tasks so it is being kept for now whilst consultation takes place with office staff. A staff member can view and edit the task and who it is assigned to. See the following link for more details:
Email reminder – volunteers/staff with no or almost expired DBS
This Microsoft Flow is configured on a monthly schedule to report on those active staff members or volunteers whose DBS expiry date is either not specified or has an expiry date within the next month. It excludes entries where a DBS check is set to “not required”.
The report is in the form of an email, sent to the Speakeasy Office shared mailbox.
Defer sending of the Friday weekly Newsletter
This flows allows someone to create and queue the Friday newsletter email without actually having to log and send the email on each Friday. A user can send an email to a known pre-configured address earlier in the week and know that it will eventually be sent on the following Friday.This workflow has been developed to start on receipt of an email sent to the FridayNewsletterSender@speakeasy-aphasia.org.uk shared mailbox. The flow reads the email, then sends it back to the sender with the original content and details of when the mail will actually be sent to members. The flow then pauses until the following Friday at 8am GMT ( and 9am BST in summer), at which point it sends the email to the distribution list SpeakeasyFridayNewsletterRecipients (SpeakeasyFridayNewsletterRecipients@speakeasy-aphasia.org.uk). The distribution list has members which includes other distribution lists, e.g. SpeakeasyMembers, SpeakeasyCarers, members to various email groups, including carers, members, the Speakup group and those volunteers who have specified they want to receive the Friday newsletter.
Due to the way in which the email is forwarded after a delay, it is not possible to specify the SpeakeasyFridayNewsletterRecipients in a BCC setting – it is specified in the list of standard recipients. However, this is safe because the SpeakeasyFridayNewsletterRecipients distribution list, like most other Speakeasy distribution lists, is configured so that only internal Speakeasy email users can access the list. Anyone with an email address not ending in “@speakeaasy-aphasia.org.uk” will get an error message if they try to perform a reply all to the newsletter email. If the simply reply to the email, then that is received by the FridayNewsletterSender@speakeasy-aphasia.org.uk shared mailbox and the same flow forwards the reply to the Speakeasy Office mailbox. Thus the technique is safe from a GDPR perspective (we did have an issue where a distribution list was not blocked to external emails, which resulted in members of that group getting emails when someone performed a replayAll to the newsletter.).
Trustee Traffic Light Submission
This is a flow which takes from submissions from the Trustees Executive Summary Report Creator form and saves the responses to a file in Teams. An azure PowerShell runbook (see
Speakeasy Report Generation) includes these responses as a red-amber-green (RAG) summary as a section in an automatically generated Trustees report which also contains finance and membership data.
Create executive summary reminder task
This flow runs on the 1st of each month (but may change to quarterly). It simply creates a task against the Speakeasy Office mailbox to remind someone to complete the electronic form “Trustees Executive Summary Report Creator”. The task is configured so that it must be completed within 13 days, i.e. before the automated generation of the Trustees report, as the information in the form gets included in that report. The task is configured so that it includes a link to the form that needs completing.
Aphasia Forum: Member Registration
This is a flow which relates to the Aphasia Forum team. It is described in the Aphasia Forum team Wiki. It takes form submissions and transfers the data to a SharePoint list – it works in a similar way to the “Membership referral and notification” flow described earlier.
Aphasia Forum: Facilitator Registration
This is a flow which relates to the Aphasia Forum team. It is described in the Aphasia Forum team Wiki. It takes form submissions and transfers the data to a SharePoint list – it works in a similar way to the “Membership referral and notification” flow described earlier.
Email reminder – Members not contacted for a significant time (Disabled)
Note: this is currently disabled as it possibly needs refining to ignore those members who have recently attended one of the monthly sessions at Ramsbottom Cricket Club – it may be possible to update the last contact date the when a member is registered as attending a meeting – which will avoid the Flow having to be changed at all
This Microsoft Flow is configured on a monthly schedule to report on those active members whose case notes have not been updated for a significant time – currently this is set to 6 months. Note that this date will automatically become current as case notes are transferred from the old system, so it will take some time before this reminder reports any members.
The report is in the form of an email, sent to the Speakeasy Office shared mailbox.
Notify staff when the member status changes (Disabled)
This flow was triggered when the status of a PWA contact is detected as changed. It is currently used to detect when a status has changed to “Awaiting Triage by Julie”, in which case a task is assigned to Julie Hickin and an email is also sent to her. The task is given an expiry date so that reminders will automatically be generated as the task becomes overdue. It is no longer needed because the “Membership referral and notification” flow (see below) automatically sends an email to inform both Julie and the Office mailbox that a new referral has been received.