This is the second post of the series. In the first post, we covered the creation of the RunBook that will be updating our Auto Attendant. In this post, we’ll be creating a simple “On-Call” shift for demonstration purposes. Shifts in Microsoft Teams is a schedule management tool that helps you to create, update, and manage schedules for your team. For more information on Shifts, official documentation is always a good place to start.

For our purposes, we’ll create a fictitious “Awesome Support” team with the “on-call” personnel.

Team Members

Member Role
Lidia Holloway Product Manager, Team manager
Johanna Lorenz Senior Engineer, Team member
Henrietta Mueller Developer, Team member
Gradie Archie Designer, Team member

LidiaH as a Team manager will create a new “Awesome Support” team and will invite the rest of the team members. Then LidiaH will install the Shifts app and create the “On-Call” schedule for all members.

1. Create a team

LidiaH is going to login into Teams client (Web client for the demo purposes) and create our “Awesome Support” team from scratch. For step-by-step instructions on how to create a Team, please check the official documentation

Creating the Team:

Team Details

Adding members:

Team Members

2. Assigning FirstLineWorker App setup policy

Next, we’ll assign the FirstLineWorker App setup policy to our users. This policy would install the Shifts Teams application and pin it for each of the users. In the Teams Admin Center

  1. navigate to Users tab
  2. select our members
  3. click Edit settings
  4. Select FirstLineWorker for the App setup policy

Assign app setup policy

This would install the Shifts app and pin it for the selected members, e.g. App setup policy applied And since Lidia is the owner of the Awesome support team, she has the option to create the Shifts schedule for that team. i.e. Only team owners can create shifts schedule and there’s only one Shifts schedule per Team

Alternatively, Lidia could manually install the Shifts app manually and pin it, but then every member of the team would need to install the Shifts app, in case they would like to interact with the Shifts schedule. Setup Shifts manually

3. Create “On-Call” Shifts schedule

Now, Lidia is going to create the Shifts schedule and confirm the TimeZone, that could be changed any time later in the settings: Shifts TimeZone

After that, the default schedule with an Unnamed group would be created, with Lidia being the the only member of that group: Shifts Default Group

Let’s take care of a few things, like:

  1. Rename the group to “On Call” group Shifts Rename Group

  2. Add members to “On Call” group

Shifts Add members Shifts Pick members

  1. Create “On Call” shift Select any cell, click the ellipsis (those three dots) and select Add Shift. Once next panel opens fill in the shift details, like start/end times, Color, Notes, and Optionally “Shift Activities”.

Add Shift Shift Details

After all, details are in, click the Save button. Once the 1st shift is created and save, we can just copy&paste the new shift and assign it to all other users: Shift Copy'n'paste Add Shift

Hint: You can switch to Month view and copy&paste shift by an entire week or just use the Copy schedule dialog box.

Once the schedule is all set, at least for a few days in advance, click the Share with team button to publish the new schedule and share it with the team: Publish Schedule

After a team owner publishes the Shifts schedule, it becomes available to the rest of the team, for example Johanna Lorenz can see on which day he’s “On Call” Johanna's shifts

and if the need arises, then he also could offer to “swap” the shift with any of his colleagues. Shift Swap

This concludes the 2nd post of the series and we’ll continue with the next post, explaining how the “Microsoft Flow” glues our Runbook and_Shifts schedule_.