The Webinar and Video Gallery is a place for community rockstars like you to share your knowledge and provide tips and tricks for all things related to Microsoft Flow, including interesting guides, template previews, and feature summaries. You can also watch our Microsoft Flow webinars live, or catch the presentation later on-demand. Most videos in the Gallery are designed to be short and easy to watch at work or while on the go on your mobile device.

All Video Gallery submissions are by active members who have been recognized for their understanding of Microsoft Flow and helpfulness within the community. If you’d like to become an approved submitter, send me (@JessicaC) a private message through the community with a YouTube link demonstrating one of your favorite Microsoft Flow tricks.

The post Announcing the Microsoft Flow Webinar and Video Gallery appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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A few years back, I added a donations page to Have I been pwned (HIBP). Now as I explained at the time, I didn’t particularly need them to cover my hard-cash outgoings because I run the thing on a shoestring, but as I explain on that page, it takes a massive amount of effort. If people want to fling me a coffee or some beers, that’s just great and I appreciate it enormously. Problem is, it’s hard to individually show that appreciation. Especially during a busy period, I can end up with a lot of coffee and I can’t realistically reply to each and every person by email thanking them or I end up with exactly the problem I describe on the donations page – no more time! But I did want to send them a thanks anyway, so here’s what I did:

Donations are primarily done via PayPal. I get some via Bitcoin as well but notifications of a payment via BTC don’t include any identifiable information about who’s sending it. PayPal, on the other hand, sends me an email similar to this one:

This is great – I love beer! I have a rule in Outlook.com to file these away into a “Donations” folder and normally, that would be that. But wouldn’t it be nice to send a little thank you? Here’s where Microsoft Flow comes into play. It’s a similar deal to IFTTT which I’ve used quite extensively over the years but as you’d expect, Flow plays a little nicer with the Microsoft things (i.e. native integration with Azure storage). I wanted to do some processing with these emails so I created a new Flow like this:

This is actually the execution of the flow and there’s a unique one for every single donation. I’ll drill down on that in a minute but for now, notice how it ran at 20:35:26 last Friday and the donation email from PayPal above shows a transaction time of 20:35:03. That’s their time stamp too so the 23 second period encompasses them sending it, Outlook.com receiving it, processing the rule to put it in the “Donations” folder then Flow picking up the message. You can see a “trigger” and an “action” in the diagram above, let’s take a look inside that trigger:

Here you’re seeing “Inputs” which define the trigger conditions for Outlook.com and then “Outputs” which is everything it can pull from the message. The inputs show that once a message appears in that “Donations” folder, it doesn’t matter what the importance is or if it has any attachments, it’s going to get processed. In the “Outputs” we see everything from who sent it, to the subject to the body and a bunch of other self-explanatory attributes. The question now is what should be done with this which takes us to the action:

This is taking the entire message and dropping it an Azure Storage Queue. So far, we’ve been looking at the output of when the Flow runs, but let’s take a look at the editor view to see how this works:

That’s it – just dump the body into the queue! Question now is what to do next..

I actually wanted to achieve 3 outcomes from this exercise:

1. Send a thank you email a little while after the donation
2. Store the donor’s address and PayPal transaction ID in HIBP
3. Include a link to subscribe to my blog (but only if they’re not already subscribed)

This was going to take some code because I was going to need to put data into HIBP’s relational database as well as connect to MailChimp to see if the donor had already subscribed to my blog (I didn’t want to bug them with that otherwise). I decided to do this with a WebJob and I’ve written about my love of these in the past. And so it all began like this:

public static void ProcessQueueMessage([QueueTrigger("donation")] string donationEmail, TextWriter log)

That donationEmail string is the entire body of the mail from which I could extract both the transaction ID and the donor’s email address via regex. Now in case you’re thinking “But you could get all this via the PayPal API”, I started down that path and found it painful for a number of reasons. In comparison, this was dead simple and does everything I need.

So a few lines of code go into the WebJob and I push it out to Azure. It’s now monitoring that queue the donation emails are being dropped into and I can watch WebJob execution via the Azure Management Portal. Over there, I could see the donation I showed earlier hitting the WebJob courtesy of some diagnostic outputs I added:

The workflow within the WebJob then goes as follows:

1. Check the HIBP database to see if the transaction ID has already been processed. I want this to be idempotent in case the same message comes in twice.
2. Hit the MailChimp API using MailChimp.Net pulled from NuGet. This is to check if the donor’s email address is already subscribed.
3. If the transaction hasn’t already been processed, prepare an email which may or may not also give them a link to subscribe to the blog.

Now it was just a matter of sending the email. I could have fired it out in a transactional way using SendGrid which I use for other HIBP emails, but I wanted to make it a little more personal. I decided to create another Flow:

This one kicks off with a “Request” action that fired at 20:36:33 so we’re now 90 seconds into it. This action quite neat as it stands up an endpoint you can hit from your own app. When I configured it, all I had to do was define a schema for the inbound request:

This is literally just the donor’s email address, the subject for the email and the body. The URL at the top of the image then has a great big obfuscated string and so long as I post to that from the WebJob above, I’ll have myself a set of structured data. So I literally just created a corresponding model in .NET, serialised it and chucked it into an HttpClient then posted it off. When it ran as a result of the donation above, it looked like this:

Within the email body, there’s a section about subscribing to my blog like this:

This is a link back to HIBP with a globally unique identifier that I saved on the donor’s record when the WebJob was processing the email. When it’s followed, I verify that the GUID is correct, pull the email address associated with it then hit MailChimp’s API and subscribe the donor’s email address. When all that works and they follow the link, they then show up in MailChimp:

So that’s that done, the donor is opted in, let’s get back to the Flow and you may have noticed earlier on that I have a delay in there:

The reason I’m doing this is that I didn’t want to just suddenly hit the donor with an email before they’d barely closed the PayPal tab. I figured I’d give them a half hour, come back then send them a nice little email that feels more organic. Here’s the action in the Flow that does that:

This is pretty self-explanatory and it’s using the Outlook connector again but this time, obviously to send the email. Because I connected it under my own account, the sent items in my local copy of Outlook shows the message:

And it’s a genuine email from my own account so no spam problems and if the recipient wants to reply and engage, they can.

I really like this for a number of reasons:

1. It took me less time to build it than to write this blog post! It’s dead simple.
2. It’s free for this volume of usage; you get 750 Flow executions per month and with 2 for each donation, I’d need to average more than 11 per day to exceed it.
3. If I exceed it because of too many donations, $5 per month will give me 4.5k executions. This would be a good problem to have!
4. Composing apps in this fashion where there are atomic units of work running independently and performing discrete tasks makes everything from troubleshooting to deployment to modifications dead simple.

This is a really neat little solution and the good news is that you can experience it firsthand yourself! All you need to do is start at the donations page… 🙂

The post How to use Microsoft Flow to manage donations appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The blog is your platform to share knowledge with peers, industry experts, and us here at Microsoft. We want to hear what’s got you thinking about Microsoft Flow and workflow automation! Blog posts can be anything from opinion pieces on the latest industry trends, to helpful tips and how-tos for your fellow Flow users, to even “trip reports” from your local Microsoft event.

We’ll post regular wrap-ups here on the Flow blog with highlights of posts by members like you. And of course, authors get a special badge on their community profile to mark them as a community leader and influencer.

Everyone is welcome to contribute! To get started, simply message me, @JessicaC, with a rough title for your post and a couple of sentences to describe your topic, or a link if you want to excerpt a post that already exists on your own blog. Together we’ll preview how your post will look once it’s done, and set a publication date.

Our first few contributions are already live — go take a look, and we can’t wait to read your posts!

The post Introducing the Microsoft Flow Community Blog appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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In Sweden there is a company called Hemglass that delivers ice cream to people’s homes in refrigerated vans. This company is very well known in Sweden, not only for its ice cream, but also for the music the van’ play to alert people they have arrived at their door. If you are curious about how it sounds, you can check it out here.

We are going to enter this market and try to beat them at their own game and for that we are going to use Microsoft Flow and Power BI.

Here is the game plan:

Using Flow, every morning we will collect the weather forecast and send it to our drivers using Office 365, so they know how much they should stock on their vans. We will, at the same time, send the data to Power BI so we can store it in our records. We can, after a while, compare the weather data with the sales on our vans and develop a stock strategy that is more accurate.

To do this, you don’t need to write a single line of code. Any business owner can do it.

If you prefer, you can follow along on this video too:

Let’s begin

Create a storage place in Power BI for storing the data

The first thing we need to do is to create a “container” in Power BI to store the weather data. For that, login to Powerbi.com and scroll to the bottom where you see “Streaming datasets”:

On the right-hand corner, click on Add dataset:

Give a name to your dataset and add the fields you want to store.

As we havent looked at what fields are available yet, you can create here the ones you would like to have and then correct accordingly when you see what is available from the weather service.

Check that all your fields are in, activate “Historic data” and click Done.

Create your first Flow

Now, lets navigate to flow.microsoft.com. Create an account if it is the first time you login. There is a free plan available for you to try the service.

We are not going to create a flow from scratch if we don’t have to. First of all, check if there is a flow available similar to what you want to achieve and modify it instead.

We search for “weather” and the following flows appear:

The one we want to reuse is: Get a daily notification with the weather forecast, so we click on it.

Click on Use template and continue and the service will be available for you to edit:

Lets edit the Recurrence Step. Here we only need to add the location (Stockholm ) and the time we want this to start working and also the time it will be sent.

For the next step, we need to add the location of the weather station, in this case, Stockholm, Sweden and we will change the units to metrics.

We dont need the last step, so we will delete it:

and instead we will create a new step:

Search for the Power BI service, and click on Add rows to a dataset:

Configure the service

1. Select the workspace where you published the streaming dataset in the first steps
2. Select the name of the dataset: StockholmICE
3. Select the table: Realtimedata
4. Click on the Location cell and
5. select Location from the fields available in the weather service and repeat with Date, Temperature and Conditions.

Now we are going to configure the email to our drivers. Choose Office 365 as a service and select Send an email from the list:

Configure the email as below:

and finally we are ready to create our flow:

Just to verify that everything has gone well, click on Manage:

and check that the flow was created and it has run already:

Check your data and start analyzing

Now we can finally check if we are getting any data. Lets go to powerbi.com:

and check our email:

Everything is up and running, so we are ready to launch!

The post A fun guide to using Power BI with Microsoft Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Your image can be a detailed drawing, or even just a quick Paint doodle. Our graphic designers will polish your design up before we start printing, so it doesn’t have to be fancy. Simply submit your image in the contest gallery and share it on Twitter with the hashtag #DataInsightsTshirt.

You can still Kudo your favorite t-shirt designs until April 13, 2017. The designs with the most Kudos and Twitter likes will be reviewed by a final judging panel, and their selections will be printed for the Data Insights Summit on June 12 – 13, 2017, and given away as part of Flow community events over the next year.

The winning designers will get a Super Swag Prize kit and bragging rights within the entire Flow community. Don’t forget to submit your designs by 11:59 p.m. PT tonight, and Kudo your favorite t-shirts!

The post Design Your Own Swag contest ends today — submit your shirt! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Your image can be a detailed drawing, or even just a quick Paint doodle. Our graphic designers will polish your design up before we start printing, so it doesn’t have to be fancy. Simply submit your image in the contest gallery and share it on Twitter with the hashtag #DataInsightsTshirt.

You can still Kudo your favorite t-shirt designs until April 13, 2017. The designs with the most Kudos and Twitter likes will be reviewed by a final judging panel, and their selections will be printed for the Data Insights Summit on June 12 – 13, 2017, and given away as part of Flow community events over the next year.

The winning designers will get a Super Swag Prize kit and bragging rights within the entire Flow community. Don’t forget to submit your designs by 11:59 p.m. PT tonight, and Kudo your favorite t-shirts!

The post Design Your Own Swag contest ends today — submit your shirt! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Your image can be a detailed drawing, or even just a quick Paint doodle. Our graphic designers will polish your design up before we start printing, so it doesn’t have to be fancy. Simply submit your image in the contest gallery and share it on Twitter with the hashtag #DataInsightsTshirt.

You can still Kudo your favorite t-shirt designs until April 13, 2017. The designs with the most Kudos and Twitter likes will be reviewed by a final judging panel, and their selections will be printed for the Data Insights Summit on June 12 – 13, 2017, and given away as part of Flow community events over the next year.

The winning designers will get a Super Swag Prize kit and bragging rights within the entire Flow community. Don’t forget to submit your designs by 11:59 p.m. PT tonight, and Kudo your favorite t-shirts!

The post Design Your Own Swag contest ends today — submit your shirt! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In the past you’ve asked for us to try some different platforms for our webinars, and this Spring we’re pleased to announce the addition of YouTube live video to our lineup! Subscribe to my YouTube channel to get automatic updates and reminders, or use the “Subscribe and join live” links below to be taken right to the event. Please note that all webinars are listed in Pacific Time.

Microsoft Flow Best Practices and Examples for Business Analysts by Jon Levesque

Microsoft Flow can create workflows, notifications, automation, collect data and synchronize files between practically any application, services and most data sources. In this webinar, Jon Levesque, Senior Program Manager Flow team, will focus on those activities and talk about design patterns that enable business analysts to get the most out of this do-anything software tool.

Subscribe and join live!
When: 5/2/2017 10:00AM

Introducing a New Flow Feature to Better Enable People-based Automation

This is an exciting webinar — we’ll be debuting a new feature live, on-screen! Microsoft Flow helps you automate a variety of business processes, including streamlining approvals. In this webinar, Merwan Hade, Senior Program Manager on the Microsoft Flow team, will announce and walk through a brand new Flow feature that you can use to quickly set up personnel-dependent workflows, enabling time savings through automation. The specific feature details are being intentionally withheld for pending announcements — join us to be the first to find out.

Subscribe and join live!
When: 4/20/2017 10:00 AM

Getting Started with the Common Data Services by Jono Luk

This topic is based on requests from early webinars! The Common Data Services (aka CDS) is a relatively new and unique opportunity for managing data. We will learn about the value of CDS for many purposes and how to make the most of the out-of-the-box entities, as well as learn some basic principles around when to, and how to, create your own custom entities!

Register today!
When: 4/18/2017 10:00 AM

About Jono Luk

Jono is the Group Program Manager for the Common Data Service, the data and app platform for the Microsoft Dynamics 365 service and applications. The CDS is tasked with enabling the broad spectrum of business customers and partners, from citizen developers to high-end ISVs, to adopt and thrive on the Microsoft business app platform. As GPM, Jono is responsible for the definition, development and execution of the product vision and usage of the CDS, with a focus on feature and business development for the Core Entity Model, Data Access, Data Integration & Connectivity, Security/Trustworthiness and Collaboration & Productivity, Admin and ISV scenarios.

Webinars for related products:

Getting Started with PowerApp Forms by Audrie Gordon

Subscribe and join live!
When:  4/11/2017 10:00 AM PT

Getting Started with PowerApps Controls

Subscribe and join live!
When 4/25/2017 10:00 AM

Getting Started with PowerApps DevOps Workflows by Laura Onu 

Subscribe and join live!

When: 5/4/2017 10:00AM

Power Apps in-depth by Archana Nair

Subscribe and join live!
When: 5/16/2017 10:00AM

Using R Script with Power BI by Leila Etaati

Register today!
When: 3/30/2017 12:00PM

Marketing Insights with Power BI webinar by Ken Puls and Miguel Escobar

Register today!
When:  4/06/2017 10:00 AM

Deep dive into data modeling using Power BI desktop and SQL Server Analysis Services

Subscribe and join live!
When: 4/13/2017 12:00PM

What’s New, Exciting, and Coming Next for Power BI Embedded by Aviv Ezrachi

Register today!
When: 5/18/2017 10:00 AM

Power BI visualization best practices by Marco Russo

Subscribe and join live!
When: 5/2/2017 10:00AM

The post Community Webinars in March and April: Flow Best Practices, Common Data Services, Surprise Feature Release, and more! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

To enter, post an image of your shirt design as an entry in the contest by March 28, 2017, and then share it on Twitter with the hashtag #DataInsightsTshirt. Your image can be a detailed drawing, or even just a quick Paint doodle. Our graphic designers will polish your design up before we start printing, so it doesn’t have to be fancy. The designs with the most kudos and Twitter likes will have higher consideration by the judging committee, who has final say on the winners. Note that designs must pass legal muster, so no copyrighted material or profanity, please.

And don’t forget to kudo your favorite shirt designs! They’ll be given out as contest rewards and promotional items in the future, so let us know which designs you want to see and wear.

Look at the entries now, submit your own design, and vote for your favorites!

The post New this week: Design Your Own Swag t-shirt contest! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The AMA will take place in the Flow Community AMA board on Thursday, February 2, 2017 from 10:00am to 11:00am PST.

An Ask Microsoft Anything (AMA) is the same as an “Ask Me Anything (AMA)” on Reddit, or YamJam on Yammer. It provides the opportunity for the community to ask questions and have a discussion with a panel of internal and external experts on a particular topic. In order to get the best value out of this hour, take a look at the flow and etiquette guidelines.

The Microsoft Flow Community is a place to connect, learn, and discuss with business intelligence experts and peers. Whether you need help and support, want to explore exciting new features or have tips and best practices to share, the community is the place for you. To get started take a look at this guide for tips on registration and exploring the community. Please let the Microsoft Flow Community team know if you have any questions.

We look forward to seeing you in the community and at the AMA!

The post Join us TODAY for the Flow Ask Microsoft Anything event! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.