The world is changing faster than ever before. Artificial intelligence is transforming businesses and unlocking new levels of productivity. At Collab365, as a training company, we need to be at the forefront of this revolution. That's why we're thrilled to announce the launch of Collab365 Toolbelt - our ambitious project to leverage automation our business using AI, Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, Teams to name but a few!
Want to learn more advanced techniques like this to enhance your Power Apps, check out Paul Storks Advanced Power Apps Masterclass!
Picture this: what if you could automate your most repetitive tasks and free up more time to focus on what really matters? What if you could standardize and centralize AI tools across your team? What if you could learn to leverage emerging technology while sharing your knowledge with others? This is the future we envision with Collab365 Toolbelt.
The Spark That Started It All
The spark was seeing ChatGPT launch late last year. We had an immediate 'Aha!' moment about combining it with Power Platform, which we use extensively in our work training others. As a small team doing the job of a much larger one, we are always seeking opportunities to work smarter. We realized AI could help us eliminate tedious tasks, allowing us to spend more time guiding and empowering people to learn new skills.
Our goal became clear - build an app to standardize and reuse AI prompts in a governed and secure way. We want to develop Collab365 Toolbelt into an AI assistant that can automate repetitive marketing emails, content creation, data tasks, and more. And we want to take you along for the ride.
By documenting our wins and losses, insights and challenges, we aim to get people excited about emerging technology and the boundless opportunities it presents.
The Power Behind Collab365 Toolbelt
Built on a technical stack of Power Apps, Power Automate, SharePoint, and Teams, Collab365 Toolbelt centralizes prompts and tools to tap into the power of AI. Although launched with just a handful of features, our roadmap is extensive.
An example of an AI Tool we built in power apps.
Here are some highlights:
- Prompt standardization and reuse across the team
- Security and governance features
- Responsive mobile design - use it on the go!
- Integration with tools like social media, email, payments, and more
- Designed for non-developers - easy for anyone to leverage AI
- Training it on our own data to make the responses more accurate and focused around what we want to achieve.
We've already used early prototypes internally with great success, such as automating our multi-email sequences for our workshops. After long nights and weekends developing, we're thrilled to start sharing Collab365 Toolbelt with the wider world.
In case you're wondering, we store all of our AI Tools in a SharePoint List and expose them as a Gallery in Power Apps. We have then developed a custom code component that dynamically creates a form for the team member to enter information specific to the prompt. So in short, we turn this "I want you to create a summary on this {{topic}}" becomes this":
dynamic form based on tokens
This is a list of our AI Tools:
Our AI tools are managed in SharePoint and Microsoft teams
What Drives Our Passion and why are we doing this?
Ultimately, our passion stems from wanting to help equip people with skills to succeed in a Power Platform / AI-driven world. By 'dog-fooding' and increasing our own productivity through automation, we can spend more time teaching and guiding our community.
But as developers at heart, we simply love building innovative solutions to complex problems. We constantly push ourselves to learn new skills and technologies. Though not always easy, it's extremely rewarding.
We want to use AI, but don't want to allow tools like ChatGPT to learn from our data. Using the API has much stronger data privacy policies.
We also have a strong belief that AI is the future. It will reshape companies, eliminate jobs, and change society. Understanding its responsible use is crucial for everyone. We also strongly believe that those people who learn to work alongside AI, will do really well.
Join Us on the Journey
There's never been a more exciting time to learn about emerging technology. That's why we invite you to follow our journey as we learn, experiment, and create new possibilities with Collab365 Toolbelt and AI.
Engage with us. Ask questions. Consider joining our Collab365 Academy community (either on a free Community plan or as Platinum Member) to learn or collaborate. And get ready to be inspired as we share our successes, failures, and insights.
We will be sharing and discussing much more about the Collab365 Toolbelt in the Collab365 Academy, so join if you want to follow along and be the first to hear our progress.
The future awaits. Let's explore it together!