topic Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings. in Product Forum

Creating MS Teams online meetings.

Mats__Pettersson — Thu, 07 Apr 2022 13:59:35 GMT

Hey Community.

I hope some of you might have experience working with automating the creation and distribution of MS Teams meetings.

My use case:
Every week we have to send out 1.000 MS Teams meeting invitations.
There will be two required attendees pr. meeting, a company facilitator and a costumer.
We have all data required to set up the meeting formatted in an Excel WB.

The following would be prefered in the solution:
- The RPA-user creating the meetings should not have the meeting present in own calendar.
- The unique meeting-url should be reported back as an output.

How would you go about getting this automated. Preferably, if you have worked on a similar solution, an in-dept explanation would be appreciated.

Best regards 🙂

Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings.

John__Carter — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 08:24:37 GMT

Hi Mats - it's no something I've done before, but Google suggests you can create meetings using VBA (macros) running in either Excel or Outlook. This means that it should be possible to adapt a BP VBO or create a new VBO to execute the equivalent .Net code. So maybe what you could try is:

Find VBA examples online
Copy the code into Excel and work on it until you are happy with the performance
Translate the VBA into .Net code. While not copy&paste, the code will be fairly similar and you can study the code in the Excel and Outlook VBOs for inspiration.

Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings.

ewilson — Fri, 08 Apr 2022 11:11:24 GMT

@Mats__Pettersson,

How comfortable are you with REST and the Blue Prism WebAPI feature or the Utility - HTTP VBO? The reason I ask is because Microsoft has a series of endpoints available in the Graph API for creating/scheduling online meetings. However, these are only available in the beta release of Graph at the moment.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/graph/api/resources/onlinemeeting?view=graph-rest-beta

Cheers,

Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings.

Mats__Pettersson — Sun, 10 Apr 2022 12:08:00 GMT

Thanks for the replies so far - I will be out in the woods for easter - responses might come a little late.

@John Carter I am considering going down this road, but I have not yet achieved to create the meeting without it being added the the RPA users local calendar.

@ewilson I have been fiddling around with the Graph API a bit, have made my app in Azure AD etc. So far I have only been able to create a connection with direct acces, but so far I have only been able to set up delegated acces for the Onlinemeetings.ReadWriteAll (or what it is called 🙂 on the user that will run the process. Therefore a working example, or screenshots of the setup could proberly help me in the right direction.
I am trying to get a direct acces approved, but it have been sitting with IT for 5 months and counting.

Thank you both for your inputs - and if someone else have examples or other suggestions, they are also more than welcome.

Happy easter to all 🙂

Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings.

AshisSahu — Tue, 12 Apr 2022 21:46:12 GMT

I too have one similar requirement. I am new to this tool. Could somebody help

Re: Creating MS Teams online meetings.

Mats__Pettersson — Fri, 29 Apr 2022 05:51:33 GMT

An update

I finally got the Graph API to work as intended on my own desktop / user account, only to discover that our BOT-user does not support the same calendar setup as us eployees.

I ended up doing a combination of VBA in Excel that creates an appointment in outlook, fills the details and converts it to a teams-meeting, and pulls out the body-text of the meeting for validation.

After validating that the teams-meeting have been added to the appointment, Blue Prism takes over and sends the mail through the GUI.

Each invitation takes roughly 7 seconds, and so far the stability have been 100% with the first weeks worth of meetings.

I am considering translating the code to VB and building it into a codeblock, but it might be a project for later 🙂

Thanks again for the input.