
Timeliness of communication this year may define the success of COVID-19 vaccination efforts. Appointments need to be kept, and doses need to keep moving.
This tutorial is great for those who want to add SMS notifications to vaccine workflows without having to write code. We’ll build a vaccine appointment reminder using Microsoft’s Power Automate and Office365. Governments and hospital systems can use this model to set up their own SMS notification workflow quickly.
Prerequisites
Generally, there are four parts to this project:
- A Twilio account with an SMS capable number
- An Office 365 account with Power Automate enabled
- An Office 365 Excel table that holds our data
- A Power Automate flow to message residents every day
One important note before we begin: For entities covered under HIPAA, ensure that security and privacy controls are in place to protect patient data. The products used in this blog: Microsoft’s Office 365, Microsoft’s …

The Internet of Treats
For the 2020 Twilio internal Solutions Engineering Hackathon, our team set out to do the impossible (at least, by 2020 standards): save Halloween. We combined Twilio’s programmable communication channels with Electric Imp, our platform for internet connected devices, to create the ultimate candy dispensing robot.
We set out with three goals:
- The robot needed to release candy without physical human interaction.
- The robot had to be modular so we could trigger it in many ways.
- And finally, it had to be doable! None of us are IoT experts, so we needed to keep it simple.
The final product:
Candybot dressed up for Halloween
Candybot’s remote operator board, with videos of how it works
In this blog post, we’ll cover the technologies used to create our robot as well as share some tips on how to make your own. We’ll start with the dispenser and …