Frustrated with always opening the meeting invite and clicking on the join Skype / Teams meeting?
Want to know how to automatically start the meeting window on your desktop a few minutes before any meeting starts?
You are at the right place!
What you need –
- Microsoft Flow
- Pushbullet Account
- Pushbullet API Access token (don’t get scared, it’s simple)
That’s all you need to automate your online meetings.
Step 1: Get the access token for Pushbullet API
After signing up for Pushbullet, go to My account and click on “Create Access Token”
Copy this token and save it in some document / sticky note.
Step 2: Setting up the Flow
The Flow files for this can be found on github.
We will start with the Outlook connector trigger – “When an event is about to start”.
This will trigger every time an event in your specified calendar is about to start. You can also set the look-ahead time in minutes. It’s set to 15 by default, however, I would recommend somewhere less than 5 minutes so that you don’t get distracted with the window opening automatically.
Now, we need to find the URL of the meeting which is hidden somewhere in the body of the meeting invite. An example body would look like this –
<html>\r\n<head>\r\n<meta http-equiv=\"Content-Type\" content=\"text/html; charset=utf-8\">\r\n<meta content=\"text/html; charset=us-ascii\">\r\n</head>\r\n<body>\r\n
\r\n<div style=\”width:100%; height:20px\”><span style=\”white-space:nowrap; color:gray; opacity:.36\”>________________________________________________________________________________\r\n\r\nSegoe UI’,’Helvetica Neue’,Helvetica,Arial,sans-serif\”>\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n
\r\n\r\n
We need to find where the URL is starting and where it is ending.
To find the start , we will search for the position where the URL is starting which in this case is https://teams.microsoft.com/… . We will save the value of the position as an integer which will help us in the subsequent processing.
int(indexOf(triggerBody()?['Body'],'https://teams.microsoft.com'))
Once we have this value, we can use the substring function to get the body of the invite starting from https://teams.microsoft.com.
Now, we need the position of the double quotes which indicates the end of the URL. We will use the indexof function again to find that and then again use the substring function to finally get our meeting URL. The final expression –
substring(substring(triggerBody()?['Body'],variables('IndexForUrl'),1000),0,indexOf(substring(triggerBody()?['Body'],variables('IndexForUrl'),1000),'"'))
You could use the similar logic for Skype meetings as well (meet.lync.com).
Now that we have the URL, we need to push it to chrome using an HTTP request to Pushbullet.
Before we create the push URL request, we need to get the device id of the chrome browser where we want to push the URL to. For this, setup a different flow with a manual button trigger and an HTTP request to get device id.
Test the flow and check the output of the HTTP action for “iden” of chrome in the list.
We will use this iden in the push request in our previous Flow.
The complete flow would look like this –
The condition that I used above is to check if there is a meeting URL for that meeting or not. If you don’t do that, the Flow will just fail ( I hate seeing failing Flows! 😀 )
If I missed out on anything above, I also have a video made with detailed steps –
Thank you for reading and let me know if it worked out for you.
Some useful links –
Pushbullet Extension – https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/pushbullet/chlffgpmiacpedhhbkiomidkjlcfhogd
Pushbullet API – https://docs.pushbullet.com/
To download the Flow .zip file –
https://github.com/thatapiguy/Open-Meeting-Links-automatically-on-your-desktop-Microsoft-Flow
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