Email Thread Summarizer & Reply Drafter

Overview

This flow triggers when the connection owner flags an email in Outlook, sends the message body to Azure OpenAI for summarization plus a structured reply suggestion, and posts the result as a formatted HTML message to a configured Microsoft Teams channel. It's an "AI triage" pattern — flag a thread you want summarized, get the digest in your team channel a few seconds later.

Use Case

Long email threads chew up time when teams need to share status with a wider audience. People often summarize threads manually before forwarding to leadership or a Teams channel — slow, error-prone, and the reply suggestion is rarely worded the same way twice. This flow lets anyone flag a thread to trigger an AOAI summary that lands in a Teams channel, complete with a suggested reply the owner can review and adapt before sending.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Trigger is just 'flag an email' — no new workflow for end users to learn.
• Azure OpenAI handles both the summary and the reply draft in a single call.
• Output goes to Teams (not Drafts) so the whole team sees it without inbox forwarding.
• Teams channel + group IDs in env vars — repoint to a different team without flow edits.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Save draft to Outlook Drafts

Add an Outlook Reply to email (V3) action with Save Draft set to true after the parse step, before the Teams post.

Adaptive card instead of HTML

Replace Compose Teams Message HTML and Post Summary To Teams with Post adaptive card in a chat or channel.

Walk the entire thread

Add an Outlook List emails (V3) filtered by conversationId before the AOAI call to pass the whole thread.

Promote the system prompt to an env var

Replace Init varSystemPrompt with parameters('flowlibs_SummarizerPrompt').

Switch to a shared mailbox trigger

Replace the trigger with the shared-mailbox flagged variant or a scheduled scan over the messages endpoint with a flagStatus filter.

Add @mention to the Teams post

Use Post adaptive card and wait for response so the channel post tags a reviewer.

Log every summary to Dataverse/SharePoint

Add a Create item/AddRecord parallel branch after Parse Structured Reply so summaries are searchable later.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

triggerOutputs()?['body/body/content']

concat(variables('varAOAIEndpoint'), '/openai/deployments/', variables('varAOAIDeployment'), '/chat/completions?api-version=', variables('varAOAIApiVersion'))

body('Call_Azure_OpenAI')?['choices'][0]?['message']?['content']

json(outputs('Parse_AOAI_Completion'))