Create modern team or communication SharePoint site in Power Automate

In this article, we will demonstrate how to configure a Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) that will automatically create a new site in SharePoint on an item creation. This approach works in SharePoint Online (Office 365).

In this flow, we are using Create Modern SharePoint site action from Plumsail SP connector, which is a part of Plumsail Actions. This action allows you to create modern team and communication sites.

When you create a modern team site there is automatically created an Office 365 group. With Office 365 Groups your team can collaborate and communicate easier using all or any of the following:

  • Shared Planner for tasks management: to create new plans, organize and assign tasks, share files and chat about what you are working on

  • Shared Outlook Inbox for emails and conversations

  • Shared Yammer Group to chat

  • Shared Outlook Calendar

  • Shared SharePoint Document Library

  • Shared OneNote Notebook

Let us take a simple example of a project management system where an administrator creates a new list item for a project in a SharePoint list specifying a Title, an URL and a Description for the new project site.

Create a modern SharePoint site

Create a Projects List

First of all, let us create a new Projects SharePoint list with the following structure:

  • Title  -  A default text field.

  • Site partial URL  -  A single line text field. A partial URL for a new project site (for example, project1 value can be used to create a subsite with an URL like this: http://yourdomain.sharepoint.com/sites/project1)

  • Description  -  A single line text field. A description of a new project.

This is how looks the form to add a list item:

Project form

Now, we are ready to create the flow.

First use of Plumsail Actions

Adding the Plumsail action for the first time, you’ll be asked for a Connection name and Access Key.

New connection

You can type any name for the connection. For example, “Plumsail Actions”. Next create an API key on your Plumsail account page, copy, and paste it to the “Access Key” field.

Create a modern team site

We configure a flow that starts on an item creation in Projects list. To do that, we just add When an item is created action from SharePoint connector and specify Site Address and the name of our Projects list.

On the next step, we add Create Modern SharePoint site action to the flow and use Title, Site partial URL and Description from the output of the previous action to specify the fields values.

This is how our flow looks like:

Create a modern team site

We defined our Office 365 group as public, but you can choose to make the group private so others in your organization can not see inside it.

We simplified this example to keep it clear. You may add more fields to the projects list to work with your projects. For example, you can add fields Classification or Is Public to use this information in the action.

Create a modern communication site

You may use a similar approach to create communication sites with help of the same Create Modern SharePoint site action.

Please see an example of a configured flow below:

Create a modern communication site

Conclusion

That is it. These few simple steps can help you to manage your company’s projects more effectively.

Hint

You may also be interested in this article explaining how to Create SharePoint site by a custom template and grant permissions in Power Automate (Microsoft Flow) and Azure Logic Apps.