Did you know you can set person's status and status message in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate? Getting the status has been out there for some time now, but recently I saw posts in Twitter from Loryan Strant and Luise Freese where they set the status message in Teams to follow what they are listening in Spotify (yes, that is a fun and functional example – love it!).

Loryan has a great blog post about that how set status note based on what you listed in Spotify, check it out. Loryan referenced on his post to Damien Bird. Damien wrote a really good article how to set Microsoft Teams status and status message using SharePoint connector (Send an HTTP request to SharePoint) in Power Automate. And no, it does not require special licenses since it is a standard connector.

Because there are already such a great articles out there written by those awesome Microsoft Teams community members I don't see any point rewriting that technical information to this post – go ahead and check those details on Loryan's and Damien's posts.

Instead I want to share information that it is possible and then put your mind to work on something

What (business process) integrations this can be used for?

This little piece of information truly opens interesting possibilities to get started thinking how you could use this capability in business. It hasn't been once or twice but many times after my Get Presence article was published that how it is possible to also SET presence.

The obvious examples I am thinking instantly are

  • Service desk / call center integration: making Teams be aware if person is busy on some other tool.
  • Physical work location integration automatically updating person away when moving away from the desk, in case physical location is tracked. Or even busy / DND when going to specific area – like a board meeting room.
  • On variation from the previous one is to Connect security / door system to Teams status and using the note automatically: when you are at the office you would be made online and putting status as "in the Office building 17- room 01, section D" for example.
  • Integrating calendar information to the status note. This is especially interesting with upcoming working days information in Outlook. When you set that you are working from home on specific days, there could be a process updating your status message accordingly: At Office, at Home, at Leave and so on. This would add to hybrid work scenario about every company is facing.
  • Frontline workers may have different duties or positions on different days – using this to selected employees might be making it easier to their peers and managers to reach them out in the physical world or to remind others about their working hours (Working on morning shift 06:00 – 14:00). In short this is a variation of previous examples but for more specific use.
  • Integrating a physical world button to change status in Teams. You might have a device already you use to control door lights and you want that to reflect your status in digital world (in your "digital twin" in a way).

And I am sure there are plenty of more examples out there. That list is just scratching the surface and meant to wake you up to think how you and your business could use this one. Automating status and status note enables to use it to share information about you to others, without making it intrusive. And the good thing is that you can always write your own – even when it has been set by the program.

Of course there are some blockers at the moment: Only you can change your own status and note. The (security or others) system can not set your status message – at least not yet. It means that building some of these examples can be theoretically possible but they can not be deployed to large audience widely.

If you configure the Power Automate to trigger based on some event and run it using your own identity you can change the status and status note. You could quite easily build those calendar based processes, for example, for yourself.

Some personal fun examples for champions and power users, who set this up using Power Automate on their own, could be (besides that Spotify, of course)

  • Sharing productivity / Teams tips automatically – changing daily or weekly
  • Sharing available hours for new work
  • Sharing info about available positions in your team
  • Letting people know your working hours (from your calendar)
  • Sharing info where are you working from

Some of those you might want to write, but how about building a Power Automate Flow that takes some of the info from a list and changes your status hourly? That would definitely get attention.

And being a power user, you should experiment and get started with some kind of example. The note message is powerful since it will be displayed to everyone chatting or atMentioning you – ideally your status makes it easier for others to choose if you should be atMentioned or messaged at all (for example: seeing that you are working from home, they don't need to ask you to participate in the lunch at café..). If we automate it, it gets used!

Graph API for set presence is already in beta

There is also an another API: your system could use it to set employee presence programmatically. Using Presence Graph API, currently in beta, it is possible to set specific user's presence. It doesn't support everything at this point but it can be used to set user to Available, Busy (in a call, in a conference call) or away. Unfortunately setting status note is not included.

It works with application permissions, making it ideal for connecting presence information to security systems (are you in the office, if you are: available) or to other systems like call center nexus (automatically set you on to call even when you are not in a Teams call) . Check out the Docs for information about Set presence. I expect this API to get more features in the future and I predict eventually it will be the one to be used – especially with business automation and integrations.