Slack and/or Microsoft Teams Integration

[mbelinsky]

What is the general goal of the feature?
Get updates in Slack and/or Microsoft Teams as soon as someone submits a survey. Update should include the option to add a field in the notification, eg. Survey submitted by Alice.
What are the most likely user stories for how and when this would be used by someone on your team?
Monitoring when we can close the survey according to how many have been submitted
Can you sketch out graphically how you think this should look/work in practice?
Enter an API key and channel name to have information sent to
How useful would this feature be to other users or organizations?
Likely useful across organizations
What can you contribute to making this feature a reality?
User Testing

[Kal_Lam]

Welcome to the community, @mbelinsky! Is this something you are searching for?

KoBo - Tips & Tricks (Power BI, email notifications, listing projects etc.)

Hi everyone, Here is a collection of useful tips & tricks related to KoBo toolbox. Most of the examples are based on the UNHCR KoBo server, but still applicable on others. https://im.unhcr.org/kobosupport/ There’s a short tutorial on how to connect Power BI for analyzing data (and working with multiple choice questions/repeating groups), How to enable email notifications (for new submissions) through Microsoft Flow, a form that quickly displays all your active projects, a tool for downloading …

Maybe it should solve your issue.

[mbelinsky]

Thanks so much for sharing and for the warm words. Great to be here!

This is definitely helpful for some of the questions we had around PowerBI integration. However for Slack and Microsoft Teams, we still haven’t found any help.

[Josh]

Hi @mbelinsky, thanks for the suggestion you can try using our REST Services feature with Zappier (or similar) to integrate with those and other apps. We have considered official integration with Zappier to make this easier, but there’s nothing in the pipeline yet

[nat]

Zapier would be a good option if needing to do Slack integration.

However if you’re looking for Teams integration then you could use Microsoft Flow = Power Automate to trigger a Teams channel post. There are instructions re using KoBo webhooks to trigger automated emails using Flow - could presumably just adapt those to use the “Microsoft Teams” connector in Flow instead of using the “Microsoft Outlook” connector

Adding a feature in KoBoToolbox where the server automatically sends the survey reports in email?

Hi @anjan and all, just saw this post. FYI I have recently followed the instructions in the " E-mail Notifications (Microsoft Flow)" section of the UNHCR KoBo tips/tutorial and it works well to get automatic email notifications to an email address (either to your own email address, or by following rules). This could be a good option to try? The UNHCR page is linked from the below thread, many of the examples reference UNHCR server/setup but can easily be adapted for the rest of us! I didn’t…

[mbelinsky]

Love the Zapier suggestion. Thanks @Josh ! If it can be official, that would be helpful to a number of our use-cases. In our prototype, every time a survey was completed some people were notified via sms, others by email and others by Teams. All of this was possible via Zapier. Google Sheets integration might be easier for that too.

@nat Will definitely explore Microsoft Flow too. Organizational permissioning has at times made this difficult, but if it works with the Kobo REST services it can be a strong option. I’ll update once we try this!

[mbelinsky]

Quick update: I tried to implement this method of using Microsoft Flow and got Teams and email notifications functioning. However the Request Body JSON Schema isn’t functioning using this format. eg we receive the notifications but strings like name and title appear blank. Is there a different format for the JSON Schema for this instance of KoboToolbox for the various strings?
https://im.unhcr.org/kobosupport/#email

[mbelinsky]

Note: the Flow now breaks if the content type is not specified as JSON. This can be added to the top line before “type”: “object”, as follows:

"content-type": "application/json",

Unfortunately I still cannot get custom fields to appear in the sent message

[nat]

@mbelinsky

However the Request Body JSON Schema isn’t functioning using this format.

Hmm that’s weird - I can get fields to pull through. One thing to check perhaps is that the “type” is correct (“string” vs “integer” etc.) for each field listed within “properties”? I’m sure you’ve already checked that, but know that stymied a colleague of mine at one point. Al the best!