Cloning Teams and Configuring Tabs via Microsoft Graph: Prelude
Last updated on October 16, 2021
Microsoft Teams has become an extremely popular product among my customers — yours probably too! They are excitedly using it for all kinds of collaboration purposes, and have already come up with their own, well-working processes and structures.
What I’ve noticed is that quite often customers want to use a specific kind of a Teams team for a certain purpose over and over again. For example, whenever there is a new project, they want to use the same channel structure as in an earlier project. Or if they want to offer a collaboration space for external stakeholders, they want all of their stakeholders to have a similar experience.
For this purpose, the clone team operation has become particularly handy. The operation is available in both the graphical user interface as well as via Microsoft Graph.
Cloning Teams and Configuring Tabs via Microsoft Graph
Even though using the clone operation is simple via the UI, more often customers prefer to invite cloning to be a part of their whole process pipeline. For example, when a new project is created in Project Online, a new row containing the relevant project information is added to a SharePoint list. From there, an automatic workspace provisioning process is triggered, which then clones the team for the new project automatically based on the provided information (and usually does a lot of other things too).
With the clone operation, you can clone the team settings, channels, apps, tabs, and even members. What doesn’t automatically happen with cloning though is the configuration of tabs.
Some of the channels might have pinned tabs that display important information for the team, and you want to clone those too. Examples of such tabs are the default OneNote from SharePoint, a Planner plan that displays tasks for the project, or a custom SharePoint list that contains important information.
The tabs themselves get cloned, but they aren’t automatically configured to display the information from corresponding places in the new team. There is just the Set up tab button, and the user is expected to click on it and search for the correct resource to display themselves.
Searching for the right resource to display can be difficult at times, so I’m happy to tell you that it is possible for us to automate the configuration of the cloned tabs via Microsoft Graph. And that is the bread and butter of this blog post series.
In the first part of this series, we’ll take a look at how you can clone an existing Teams team programmatically via Microsoft Graph, as that is the foundation for the rest of the chapters.
Hi Laura,
What a nice series about cloning Teams.
We have built a great team in Teams to facilitate our onboarding of new clients in a consistent and effective manner. In the team, we use tabs like; Files, Planner, Wiki and SharePoint Lists/Pages.
As I read your blog series on this matter, I see that most of our needs can be met by utilizing Microsoft Graph API for cloning the team – as you are also aware, the built-in GUI-options are relatively rudimentary.
My question to you is: Would you use this same approach today, or is there anything you would do different – reflecting upon the time past and features added since you published the blog posts?
To be more precise about our practices:
Files are used to store template files, which will be completed by the client
Wiki is used to store static information, relevant for the onboarding
Lists are used to build checklists/SOP for different purposes
OneNote is used for meeting notes
Thanks again!