Channel | WhatsApp Business

Hi there!

Would you like to automate inviting WhatsApp contacts to new events in your Outlook calendar? Then you are in the right place. Using tyntec’s concept flow in Microsoft Power Automate, you can send meeting invites to WhatsApp contacts right from your Outlook calendar.

In this tutorial, you will learn how to import our pre-built flow and add it to your settings.

• • Your tyntec API key from your tyntec account

• • Your WhatsApp Business Account Number that has been assigned to you by tyntec

• • Your WhatsApp Message Template for the invite

• • A Video Conferencing software of your choice

• • A Microsoft Power Automate Premium license

• • An Outlook account with testing contacts

We have created a custom proof-of-concept flow that starts with a new Outlook calendar event; fetches the attendees’ data from Outlook Contacts; and invites them to the meeting. It uses some filter tricks to make everything fully automated.

1. Go to our Github MS flow repo and download the InviteWhatsAppcontacttonewOutlookmeeting.zip from Outlook2WhatsApp folder.

2. Open Power Automate.

3. In My flows, click the Import button.

4. Click on the blue Upload button and select the InviteWhatsAppcontacttonewOutlookmeeting.zip from our repo.

5. Wait until your screen updates with import options.

6. Click on the Select during import link in the Outlook row. Select your connection and click on Save.

7. Click on the Select during import link in the tyntec-WA row. Select your connection and click on Save.

8. Scroll up. You will see an informational pop-up saying that all resources were successfully imported. Click on the Open flow link.

1. Now that you are inside the Flow designer, start by clicking on When an event is added, updated, or deleted trigger. From there, select your Outlook calendar.

2. Click on the Condition action and set your trigger text. Power Automate will use it to determine if you want to send invites for the meeting or not. In our example, any meeting whose name (Subject) contains “share” will continue in our flow.

3. Then, click on the If yes branch and open the Apply to each action. Click on the Get contacts action and select your Outlook contact folder.

4. Now, click the Send message action. From there, open the Send WhatsApp Template message action.

5. Set the from field to your WABA number, to field to your recipient’s phone number,  templateId to your invite’s template ID, and update the components parameters body text – 1 with the invite URL link. In our example, we are sending the Web Link value, however, you can also use the Location dynamic content.

6. Save your flow.

If you want to test your flow, add a new event into your Outlook calendar with yourself as a required attendee. In a few seconds, a notification for a new WhatsApp message will appear on your phone. Open your WhatsApp and join the meeting.

If your contacts are in Microsoft Dynamics 356, you will need to connect to the Dataverse to pull the data and replace the Get contacts action. We suggest using a similar filter to the Outlook one:

emailAddresses/any(a:a/address eq '@{items('Apply_to_each')}') with the Top count to 1. This way, only one contact with a matching email address will continue in your flow. 

Not all video conferencing solutions store the invite URL in the same place. If you need to extract the URL, please, look into Jay’s solution and adjust it to your needs. If you want to read more about expressions, you can visit the MS documentation.