Beginner Archives - Microsoft Power Platform Blog

Discover, learn and create flows using in product help!

Priya Kodukula — Fri, 22 Jan 2021 17:00:00 +0000

Looking for guidance on how to get started with a trigger/action and popular scenarios with examples ?

Look no further. We have just launched a new set of documents by curating customer support asks and community asks to help you learn how to automate with top connectors in Power Automate. Whether you’re a businessperson who has never participated in an automation or you’re a “full stack” developer who wants to use Power Automate– this set of articles is for everyone who wants to learn or upgrade their skills with Power Automate.

What’s better? You can now access them while building flows. Just choose a connector/action/ trigger and launch the new contextual help pane (via ? in the title of the card) to see the corresponding documentation, community answered questions, blogs based on your selection.

We also launched an assistant for Power Automate to aid in authoring workflows in the form of a Power Virtual Agent bot (PVA bot) that provides the next level of assistance for customers in a question/answer interaction format. You can now get assistance in solving the most common workflows in Power Automate by accessing content in the form of templates, documentation, and community answers. Based on support tickets, we are starting with Email, Triggers and Licensing topics and will fast follow with SharePoint, Approvals and Forms. We continue to add more topics to PVA bot so please check back later for updates. If you have a question that isn’t covered in these topics, you can ask the bot and the bot will search for answers in docs/communities/blogs. Detailed documentation of both features can be found here

For easy access to all power automate documentation, bookmark Power Automate documentation – Power Automate | Microsoft Docs. You can find the newer documentation in below section

Be sure to check out related topics in sections below to learn how to get started, using the best practices and guides to troubleshoot the most common issues by connector.

We are planning to continually evolve these documents for better guidance. If you have any feedback on the documents, please feel free to make a feedback comment on the docs!

Finally, to make it easier to debug flows we have also added new options to Show raw inputs and Show raw outputs on the flow runs view.

The post Discover, learn and create flows using in product help! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Learn how to automate your business process

Taiki Yoshida — Tue, 22 Dec 2020 16:00:00 +0000

Do you want to use Power Automate to automate your business processes but don’t know where to start? Are you a pro developer looking for the best practices for planning and delivering a business process automation or RPA project? Or are you a Power Platform expert on your team who wants to help other people in your organization thoughtfully plan and execute a project with Power Platform?

Today is your day! We have just launched a new set of documents to help people learn how to automate their business processes with Power Automate – https://aka.ms/StartPowerAutomateProject

In these new articles, you’ll learn about the five basic steps of automating with Power Automate, using the best practices and knowledge from Power CAT (Customer Advisory team). The articles focus on the non-technical aspects of automating business processes with Power Automate, such as how to plan your Power Automate project, how to discover automation areas, how to assess business value, etc.

Whether you’re a businessperson who has never participated in an automation or RPA project before, or you’re a “full stack” developer who wants to use Power Automate to bridge between cloud services and legacy systems – this set of articles is for everyone who wants to learn or upgrade their methodology for business process automation projects.

We recommend that you start from the introduction and read through the document step by step. Or, you can jump to one of the five main sections as described below.

Planning phase

This section focuses on gathering important pieces of information, getting requirements for the business process you want to automate, and planning a software project. There are also business aspects covered, such as optimizing business processes and executing business value assessments. These best practices have been documented directly from our Customer Success teams. These are the same steps for planning a project for Power Apps, and so we have put the documents together.

Link to the planning phase

Designing phase

This section is split to two sections:

Process design, which covers the grand design of the automation prior to working on the technical aspects.
Architectural design, which covers the fundamental architecture: determining which automation methods to use, securing your data, reducing risks from errors, etc.

Link to the designing phase

Making phase

This section is split to two sections:

Process design, which covers the grand design of the automation prior to working on the technical aspects.
Architectural design, which covers the fundamental architecture: determining which automation methods to use, securing your data, reducing risks from errors, etc.

Link to the making phase

Testing phase

This section covers the testing strategy, as well as an introduction to tools and settings to help you test your automations.

Link to the testing phase

Deploying and refining phase

Lastly, this section covers how to make sure the apps you created are used, ensuring users have the right visibility to the apps, and making sure feedback is collected so you can enhance the app in future.

Link to the deploying and refining phase

We are planning to continually evolve these documents for better guidance. If you have any feedback to the documents, please feel free to make a feedback comment in the docs!

The post Learn how to automate your business process appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of the Week: Generating Flows From Visio

Jonathon Levesque — Sat, 09 Feb 2019 18:33:20 +0000

This post comes from Microsoft Flow MVP Daniel Laskewitz.
Daniel is a Business Productivity Consultant & Microsoft Business Solutions MVP who is very enthusiastic about all things Office 365, Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Azure & SharePoint (Online).
Since the preview, Daniel has been working with Microsoft Flow and later on with Microsoft PowerApps. That led to him being awarded an MVP Award for Business Solutions. He loves to blog, present and evangelize about improving productivity in the modern workspace with these amazing tools!
Here is his post!
Many people have asked for this, and it’s finally in preview: the ability to generate Flows from Visio. After the Word Online Connector for Microsoft Flow and reusable components for PowerApps, In my opinion this is the next big announcement from the Microsoft Power Platform this year.
Let that sink in for a bit. The Power Platform is on a roll, and that’s something incredibly exciting!
Today, I’ll explain what you can expect from the ability to generate Flows from Visio. For the SharePoint-people: it’s not the same as it used to be with the SharePoint Workflows. It’s just a start.
Let’s start with the inevitable: the licensing! If you want to use Microsoft Flow with Visio, you have to get the Visio Online Plan 2 license. So make sure to get that license if you want to play with this feature.
From Visio build 11231+, which is available in the monthly channel (targeted), you have a group of new actions to your disposal.

After opening Visio, make sure to select the Basic Flow BPMN Diagram template or if that’s not available like in the image below, search for it.

At the moment of writing, there are four templates available:
– Basic Flow Diagram
– Microsoft Forms Feedback Analysis
– Manager Approval Process
– Purchase Order Workflow

Make sure to try out all the different templates to get a better view of how you can create some Flows from Visio. For this Flow of the Week select the Basic Flow Diagram, the right units (Metric or US) and click create.

Now we end up with an empty canvas where we can start building our diagram. Let’s start by adding the start event from the BPMN Basic Shapes at the left side of the screen. You can do this by dragging and dropping it onto the canvas. Double click on the start event and give it a name. I am naming my start event ‘When a file is added in SharePoint’. When you click next to the start event, the textbox closes, and the text you just entered is the label of the start event.

Hover over the start event with your mouse, and you see 4 arrows, on the top, right, bottom and left side of the start event. These arrows help you to define the next step.

If you hover over one of the arrows, you get options to add new parts to your diagram. For now, let’s select the top one – which is a task. A box appears, and you can drag and drop this to a convenient spot. Double click on the box and add a label. The label I am using is ‘Start an approval’ since that is the Flow action we add to this task later. Hover the task we just created, hover over the arrow on the right with your mouse and select the second symbol in the row, which is a gateway. Next, add two actions on two of the remaining two of the three sides of the gateway that is not used by a connector. Make sure to add the labels and make it look like the following image.

Now we go back to the group of new actions. You can find the group of new actions in the Process tab. The first Microsoft Flow action that is available there is Prepare to Export.

Select that action and two things happen:
1. A sidebar appears where you can map the BPMN gateways to Flow Conditions and apply Microsoft Flow triggers or actions to different shapes in our BPMN Diagram
2. Icons appear next to the shapes of our BPMN Diagram to indicate that we can map these shapes to triggers or actions in Microsoft Flow.

There are a couple of actions we need to do before we can export our BPMN Diagram to Microsoft Flow.
– Click ‘if yes’ in the map condition part in the sidebar to make sure that the if yes part of the Flow condition gets mapped to the right part of our BPMN Diagram: the approve path after the gateway
– Select the shapes in the BPMN Diagram one by one and make sure to map it to Flow triggers and actions via the triggers and actions tab in the sidebar

Map the shapes to the following triggers/actions:
– Start event: SharePoint – When a file is created (properties only)
– Action (start an approval): Approvals – Start an approval
– Action (remove file): SharePoint – Delete file
– Action (send email): Office 365 Outlook – Send an Email (V2)
If you mapped the shapes correctly, your BPMN Diagram looks like this:

Select the Flow Mapping tab in the sidebar, click the refresh button on the top, and you can see there are no issues to resolve.

Click the Export button and make sure to log into the account you want to use to export your Flow. Fill in a creative name for your Flow and click ‘Create flow’ to create the flow in your environment.

Head over to Microsoft Flow in your browser and go to the My Flows section. Edit the Flow and make sure to fill in all the properties correctly. Save the Flow and your Flow will start working.

This was a quick tour of the Visio features that are now in Public Preview. I hope this will make it easier for you to get started.
If not, the Visio team prepared some great content. Enjoy the new features!

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: Generating Flows From Visio appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Microsoft Flow Online Conference is Tomorrow 12/12

Jonathon Levesque — Tue, 11 Dec 2018 20:57:48 +0000

Hello Microsoft Flow Fans!

We are SO Excited to have you join us tomorrow for the ALL DAY, Online, Free, Microsoft Flow Conference with some of the VERY BEST Speakers in the world on the topic!

Starting December 12, 2018 – 8AM PST

To Join the Live Webcast, Please use the following Link: https://aka.ms/FlowConf

Also, Please join the live chat on the right side, or if you prefer, ask questions on Twitter with the Hashtag #MSFlowConf

The post The Microsoft Flow Online Conference is Tomorrow 12/12 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of The Week: Create and manage a request backlog with Microsoft Flow

Jonathon Levesque — Thu, 29 Nov 2018 13:17:27 +0000

Whats up Flow Friends?!

This weeks post comes from awesome community member Bryant Boyer!

Bryant Boyer (@BryantBoyer) is a Product Manager at BrainStorm, Inc. (http://www.brainstorminc.com) and specializes in successful rollout and adoption of Microsoft applications, especially Office 365. His expertise and interests are with Microsoft Excel, Flow, Power BI, Dynamics 365 CRM, citizen developers and no-code solutions.

Introduction

What would your day look like if you were entirely in control of where you spent your time? It should be ridiculous to even ask that question, but the reality is that workplaces are trending more agile. With the added emphasis on the ability to be nimble, folks are more likely to lean on one another to reach their goals.

Here is an example of my own. When I get to work each morning, I write down the three things I want to accomplish, and I dive right in. It isn’t long before an email, a private message or call in Teams, or even a visitor at my desk pulls me out of my deep thinking and sets me on a different path. And once I’ve been pulled into the ether, there is no telling when I’ll find my way back to what I was working on. And at this moment, y’all are nodding your heads–this isn’t uncommon.

What’s the best way to stay focused and accomplish what you need to? I don’t want people to stop bringing questions to me. But I wish there was a way to wait until I had time to allow the distractions in. I’ve experimented with pausing my inbox, going on do not disturb in Teams, and a few other strategies, but the only real solution is going to involve a new sort of communication and collaboration contract with my coworkers. Here is one such solution that I’ve found to be successful in filtering requests on a team level and could absolutely be applied on a personal level as well.

This Flow is going to leverage Microsoft Forms and a connection to Planner. There are also two variations: the first is an integration with Teams for visibility on a broader scale, and the second includes an approval step prior to creating a card in Planner. Let’s dive in!

Create a Form

Since this is going to connect Microsoft Forms and Microsoft Planner, you’ll need to have created each of those first. Let’s begin with Microsoft Forms. Navigate to https://forms.office.com and create a New Form.

Forms is pretty intuitive, and it’s up to you exactly how you want to gather information about your requests. Let’s start by taking a look at the Forms settings, which you can find by clicking the ellipses icon on the top right of the navigation bar.

One huge plus with using Microsoft Forms with your co-workers is that Forms will grab the name and email address of the person submitting a response (that is if the “Record name” box is checked). That means that you won’t have to ask any questions related to who is submitting the request.

The second important setting to note here: keep the “One response per person” box unchecked so that your coworkers can submit more than one response.

In terms of questions for the form itself, I always include something about priority, and perhaps a category to easily bucket requests. Check out the “Eisenhower Box” for a good strategy to prioritize tasks. Also, think with the end in mind—this will eventually be a Planner card, so ask for what you would need to fill out a card (title, description, etc.).

Create a Plan

Alright, now that we’ve got our Form, let’s move on to Planner. Navigate to https://tasks.office.com and select New plan.

Give it a title like “Bryant’s Prioritized Tasks,” select the privacy, and click Create Plan. I would recommend creating your plan as “Private” as you and those you specifically add to the plan should be the only ones prioritizing your tasks. Now, for your buckets.

Tasks in Planner are in a card format, and they are meant to be moved from bucket to bucket depending on their status, progress, etc… The best bucket format I’ve found is to mirror agile frameworks and create an “Not Prioritized” bucket, a “Backlog” bucket, a “Working On” bucket, and a “Complete” bucket. I’ve also experimented with other buckets, like “Current 6 Tasks,” “Next 10 Tasks,” and “On Someone Else’s Plate” to give me a better sense of how new requests will affect my current plans, but do whatever works best for you.

Just for kicks, click one of the plus signs to add a Task. Here you see that you can add the task name, a due date, and an assigned person. However, once you create the task you’ll see that you can also add the Label (colored tabs to the right of the card), Bucket, Progress, Start date, Description, Checklist, Attachments, and Comments (note: you cannot currently add checklist items or comments to Planner cards via Microsoft Flow). Does this change what you might ask in your Form? I think asking for a due date makes sense as we can add that to the card here, so I went back and added it. Go back and tweak your questions on the Form if you’d like.

Create Your Flow

On to Flow! Go to https://flow.microsoft.com and click My Flows > New > Create from blank.

In the blank flow, add the Forms trigger When a new response is submitted. In the “Form Id” field, find your Form from the dropdown. Note: If your Form doesn’t appear in the dropdown then select Custom and find the Form Id in your Form URL as the string of characters after the “FormId=”. Enter that here.

Next, add a new Forms action to Get response details. Again, fill in the Form Id as you did above. When you click in the “Response Id” field, the Dynamic content box should pop open. If not, click Add dynamic content.

Wait, there’s no content to insert? Click See more to display more items and click List of response notifications Response Id.

Here’s where Flow does some lifting for you. You’ll notice that an “Apply to each” container has been created for you. Assume that two Forms responses are submitted simultaneously. Which response should the action be taken for? In this way, you’ll perform the action on all responses for the Flow check period.

Next, within the container and directly below the “Get response details” action you just placed, click Add an action. Now, we need to get details about the user that submitted the Form response. So, navigate the Office 365 actions and click Get user profile (V2). For the “User” value add the “Responders’ Email” as a dynamic value. This will allow us to get the user’s department name, display name, and more. It’s just cleaner to use the responder’s name rather than their email. And, if you choose to send any emails as a part of this flow then you can address them by name.

Here’s where we are going to connect to Microsoft Planner. Search for and click Create a task to add it to your flow.

Select the plan from the “Plan Id” dropdown, or select Custom value and get the custom plan id from the Planner URL (just like above with the “Form Id”). For the task “Title,” I’m adding the question where I asked the user to give a summary of their request. You could also just write “Task submitted by “ and include the responders’ name from Office 365 dynamic content. Up to you.

For the Bucket Id, pick Not Prioritized. This is where the task will be created. Leave the “Start Date Time” field blank, because we don’t know when we’ll start this task. In the “Due Date Time” field, I’m going to add the dynamic answer to the question “What is the due date (if any)?”. Just be sure that any question you are pulling into this section is formatted to be a date question in Microsoft Forms—text answers won’t work.

Finally, I put my own email address in the “Assigned User Id” field. At this point, your flow should look like this:

Now hang on, there’s a lot more information on the Planner card that the fields above. How do we add a description? Add a new action within the container and select the Update task details Planner action. In the “Task Id” field insert the Id from the “Create a task” section of the dynamic content. For the “Description” field, add the question that best applies from the “Get response details” section in dynamic content. In my case, that’s “What is your request?”. But there’s probably more you want to put in the description of the card, right? Well, it’s easy to add more text and fields into the “Description” field. Just hit return and keep on typing. Insert dynamic content where it makes sense. Here’s what I’m ending up with:

Notice here that you can also add references to your Planner task card. Imagine asking for a valid URL in Forms and then inserting that here as a reference. That could be cool.

Now you’re good, right? Wrong. I’ll submit a test action to illustrate something.

It failed?? Clicking into the failure, it looks like the “Update task details” step couldn’t find the task I had created in the previous step. Basically, here’s what happens: you tell Planner to create a task, and then you ask to update the task before it actually gets created. To avoid the issue, insert a “Delay” action between the two. 5 seconds should be enough.

Now, I don’t need to submit a new response. Instead, I’ll click Test in the upper right corner of the window and resubmit the data from my failed test.

Success! Now I’ll go to Planner and check out my new Planner task.

Here’s some variations and pro tips for customizing this to meet your needs:

If you want to update the “Progress” of a task, use the “Update a task” action in addition to the “Update task details” action

Add an added notification if the task has a high urgency or is due today or tomorrow
Create an Outlook task for requests with high urgency to surface it more quickly
Add an approval step for your manager to approve all requests for your time or for you to approve requests
Add an automated email a few minutes after the submission to send back to the user thanking them for the submission and that you’ll be in touch with them soon about it
If this is for a team, consider posting the submission in a Teams channel as well

There is a limitation to using Planner: there are no Flow actions for when a task moves between buckets. What that means is that you’ll need to manually email users when you begin working on or complete the task they requested. Now, you could easily do this with a SharePoint list, so look into managing your tasks from a SharePoint list if that’s a must for you.

Now, go out there and have a more focused work day thanks to Microsoft Flow!

The post Beginner | Flow of The Week: Create and manage a request backlog with Microsoft Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of the Week: Using Forms with Flow to Automate Onboarding

Gabriel Hollandsworth — Wed, 29 Aug 2018 11:29:58 +0000

Hello Flow Community!

I’ve had to onboard many new Flow Community Blog authors since I went through onboarding myself, months ago, here at Microsoft. The process that used to be in place involved me reaching out to potential author contacts via email to ask them if they would like to come to be an author for the Flow Community Blog. Then we would discuss what ways that they were using Flow and what ways they wanted to showcase that within their articles. I was essentially getting the information that I needed from my potential authors one.. question.. at.. a.. time.. This clearly isn’t the most efficient way to gather this information and honestly, this method was error-prone due to having to dig through old emails for information.

I have always been the kind of person to address inefficiency head on, so I decided to come up with a better process for onboarding Flow Community Blog Authors. I was struggling with thinking of a way to get all this information from the potential authors I knew of without having to actually ask them the questions prior to onboarding. I continued with the tedious and monotonous process of asking the potential authors all the necessary questions until I witnessed one of my co-workers, Jon Levesque, deliver a demo during his session at the Microsoft Business Applications Summit in Seattle.

During this session, he displayed an amazing use of Microsoft Form and Flow in a way that I honestly did not know was possible. He had a form with multiple choice answers and he let the audience fill out the form on their mobile phones. He then used Microsoft Flow to take the data from all the multiple-choice questions and turn it into a streaming data set for Power BI and he had all these pretty little pie charts for each of his multiple-choice questions. Then the Flow sent out a simple and sweet thank you email to the person who submitted the form to finish it up!

Needless to say, this is where my inspiration came from! So, let’s jump in!

First, you’ll need to create your Form! Go to https://forms.office.com and sign in! From there, click “New Form”. This will open the Form editor and give you options for a Title, Subtitle, etc. This part of the process is pretty straightforward and easy if you know which questions you’d like to ask. So, for your sake, I won’t go into details about creating forms in this article. Here’s the link to my Form if you’d like to take a look at it for an example, or maybe you’d just like to apply as a Community Blog Author! Anyways, once you’ve created your form and you are happy with the way it looks in “Preview” mode, go to the Flow website and get to the “Create From Blank” page. This is where I’ll start including screenshots!

The first thing we will need is the Microsoft Forms trigger that detects when a new Form has been submitted. You’ll need to make sure you’ve selected the correct form from the drop-down list:

Next, you’ll add an “Apply to Each”:

Your “Output” will be your “List of Response Notifications”:

Click “Add an Action” inside the “Apply to Each” Box:

Search for “Forms” and select the action called “Get Response Details”:

Make sure you select the correct “Form ID” and the “Response ID” will be “List of response notifications”, found when you click “see more”:

Click “Add an Action” inside the “Apply to Each” Box again and select the “Send an Email” Outlook 365 Action:

This is where you open the Dynamic Content panel again and click “See More”. Insert the “Responders’ Email” address and write your thank you email:

This is really an awesome way to use Flow and Forms together to create a seamless experience for whoever is filling out your form. And if I would’ve incorporated some multiple choice questions I could have streamed the data to Power BI for analytics and pie charts but for this purpose, I have only text answers to give the potential author more freedom with their answers. I will show you how Forms automatically arranges the data it receives in an Excel spreadsheet in order for more efficient results review and reporting. This is just some test data that I used to fill out the form:

If you obtained some knowledge or use out of clicking on and reading through this article, please let me know! Also, please come to visit the Microsoft Flow Community Page and see what kind of awesome interaction you can have with some of your fellow Flow users from around the world! The Flow Community is also an amazing place to go and get help with technical questions or roadblocks that you’ve come across on your Microsoft Flow journey. The users of the Flow Community can range from the most beginner cloud-based software users to the very developers that build this kind of awesome stuff for a living. I hope to see you there!

Thanks for reading!

-Gabriel Hollandsworth

Microsoft Flow Community Manager

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: Using Forms with Flow to Automate Onboarding appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of the Week: Stay Up To Date With The News

Jonathon Levesque — Wed, 27 Jun 2018 11:58:18 +0000

This weeks post comes from Pieter Veenstra, Microsoft Flow MVP

To learn more about Pieter, and to see more of his blogs about Microsoft Flow. visit his page at https://veenstra.me.uk/category/office-365/flow/

Without further ado, here is his beginner Flow of the Week!

Often Microsoft Flow is used in relation to SharePoint. This week I created a flow which doesn’t touch SharePoint at all.

Do you want to keep up with the news and post tweet about interesting news articles? In this post I’m going to have a look at creating a flow for this.

There are three parts of this flow.

1. Get the news article feed

2. Create an approval step

3. Send out a tweet with details from the news articles

Get the news article feeds

To get my news articles I’m going to use the bbc news rss feed.

http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml

In Microsoft Flow the trigger When a feed is published can be used

Ok, this is easy, isn’t it?

Ready for step 2.

Create an approval step for each feed item

Now, for each news item you will get an approval task in Microsoft Flow. Have you noticed the new reassign option?

These approval tasks are of course painful as you will need to login and go to the flow approval screens. There is an easier way to approve these tasks.

Straight from your email you can click the approve or reject button and we’re ready to send out the tweets. If you want to publish news artciles on your SharePoint site rather than using an RSS feed then you could do that. But remember this is a post without SharePoint.

Sending a tweet from Microsoft Flow

Now the final step. sending out a tweet, but only after I have approved the tweet.

Don’t make the mistake of just adding the send tweet after the approval step as shown below.

You will find that all approved an rejected news articles are published on twitter. A condition will be needed to send out only the approved news articles.

Summary

In this post I’ve gone though the combination of RSS feeds, Approval steps and posting tweets. This might not immediately fullfil your business needs. If you take a look at each of these separate steps however you might find some valuable uses for Flow.

How many people look a news during the day?
How many businesses have processes including many complex approval steps?
Are you active on social media?

Flow gives a lot of options to automate your processes and the options are almost unlimited.

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: Stay Up To Date With The News appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of the Week: How to Extract Email Data and Send to SharePoint List

Anh-Thu Chang — Wed, 07 Feb 2018 14:24:21 +0000

The following is a FOTW blog written by Flow Community member Courtenay from Parserr.com. This tutorial highlights how the recently added Parserr connector can be used with Microsoft Flow. Let’s begin.

Hi there, Courtenay from Parserr.com here – let’s jump straight into it!

Parerr is an easy connector for Microsoft Flow that allows you to easily extract email (and attachment) data and send it directly to the application that actually needs it.

In the steps outline below, we will show you how to select the exact data you need from your email body and add it straight into a SharePoint List. However you could take your extracted email data and add it into any one of the 3rd part connectors supported by Microsoft Flow!

How to Extract Email Data and Send it to a SharePoint List:

1. Sign up for a free Parserr account and confirm your email address:

2. Click on the confirmation link in the email and login with the details you provided previously. Once logged in, you should be presented with the setup screen. Click the “Great. Lets get started” button

3. The next screen will provide you with your incoming email address. This address is where you will forward all your incoming inquiries that you wish to extract to SharePoint. Go ahead and copy the email address provided. Then make sure to forward a valid inquiry or email you wish to extract and make a note of your unique Parserr inbox (eg. BSB8GEBA@mgparserr.com) as shown below

4. Once you have forwarded the email to the assigned email address (ending in mg.parserr.com), Parserr will detect the email and then ask you a few onboarding questions. In our case we would like to extract information from the body of the email:

5. Choose “Microsoft Flow”.

6. Next Parserr asks us where we’d like to extract our data. Choose SharePoint and click “Finish”.

7. Depending on your email, Parserr may be able to automatically set your rules up automatically. In the case below, Parserr has detected that there are some parts of the body that may be able to be auto-extracted. If you don’t see this screen, not too worry, parsing rules are very simple to setup. Choose the rules you want to setup. If you arent sure if you want the rule, simply create it anyway. You can always delete it later. Click the “Yes, create the rules I have checked above” button.

8. Next, you will have the option to create further rules, or if you have no rules yet, an option to create a rules. Creating rules is really easy once you get the hang of it. The idea is to “chain” a number of steps together to extract the content you need. For instance in my rule for “First Name” above, the following steps happened:

a) Step 1: Get row containing text “First Name”: This gets me the row in the body of the email that contains that phrase, First Name

b) Step 2: Search & replace: So simply remove the part, “First Name” so i can end up with the value that I need:

Give your rule a name and click “Save”.

9. Once you have your rules sorted, go have a look at your parsing results. You do this by clicking on “incoming emails” in the left navigation and click the small arrow icon to open your first email:

10. Now its time to jump into Microsoft Flow and connect Parserr to SharePoint! Choose to create a new Flow and choose the Parserr connector and the trigger “Parserr – When an email is received”.

14. Next you will be prompted to add your username and password for Parserr. Please use the same username and password as would when you login to Parserr. This step needs to be 100% correct or the integration will not work correctly.

15. If you are connected properly to Parserr (previous step), you will see your Parserr email address appear in the trigger step. If you don’t see a value, don’t add your own custom value. This means your username and password were incorrect previously. Go back a step and try and edit your connection (username and password) to Parserr:

16. Click “New step” and then click “Add an action” as shown below:

17. Choose SharePoint and “Create Item” as your action.

18. For this example, we will add the rule we created in Parserr, “First Name”, as the “Title” field in SharePoint (Site address has been obfuscated for this example). The “Dynamic content” box shown on the right of the screen represents the rules created in Parserr and are available to be used as fields within your SharePoint columns. This is how we map Parserr extracted email data to SharePoint

19. Once you are complete, save your Flow. You should now be ready to test the entire process. Exciting! Firstly send through a new email to your Parserr email address (eg. 43HGH43@mg.parserr.com). Then check your Parserr incoming emails to see that Parserr has received the email and that the data has been sent to Flow (under Flow Data)

If you don’t see the “Flow data” this means the data has not been sent to Flow. To resolve this, check that your Flow has been saved and that you have followed the steps correctly above.

If you do see the “Flow data” tab, this means that the data has been sent successfully to Flow. If you load up your Flow dashboard, you should see some successful runs of your new flow:

Thanks again to the Microsoft Flow team for collaborating with us to bring you the Flow of the Week!

If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below or post your questions in the Flow Community!

Until next time.

P.S. To never miss another blog post from the Flow blog – Use This Flow

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: How to Extract Email Data and Send to SharePoint List appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Beginner | Flow of the Week: Build a Flow using only Non-Microsoft Connectors

Jonathon Levesque — Thu, 04 Jan 2018 17:43:15 +0000

Whats up Flow Fans!

This week we are bringing you a Flow of the Week in Video Form! This Flow focuses on using services that are not a part of Microsoft’s offerings. I created it as a response to a challenge I received on Twitter because Flow is an awesome tool no matter if you have an Office or Dynamics Subscription… or not! Anyways, check it out and let us know what you think!

Well, How was the video? Do you like the format? What services are you trying to connect in meaningful ways?

Do you want to challenge me to do something different with Microsoft Flow? Follow me on Twitter, talk with me on the Flow Community, or leave me a comment below!

Also, do you want to add your own tutorial videos to our collection? Please go ahead and add them HERE.

Later Flow Fans!

– Jon

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Beginner | Flow of the Week: Planner Approval Flow

Jonathon Levesque — Wed, 29 Nov 2017 19:08:21 +0000

Hello Flow Fans!

This weeks Flow of The Week comes from a Flow and PowerApps MVP – Melissa Hubbard @Melihubb

Check out her post and be sure to leave her a comment below!

— On November 8^th new Flow triggers for Planner were announced.

This Flow uses the “When a task is completed” trigger to send an approval email to the PM, stakeholder, or person of interest to notify them of the task being marked as complete and ask for their approval. If it is approved, an item is added to a SharePoint list to track the completed tasks for reporting purposes and a message is posted to Teams notifying them of the task being successfully completed. If it is rejected, a message is posted in Teams alerting them to take further action on the task and contact the PM or stakeholder for more information.

This Flow is useful because often on project, someone wants to be notified when a task is marked as complete. This Flow also gives them the chance to approve or reject the task being marked as complete. Also, as a sidenote, some users may have a business need to store completed Planner tasks in a SharePoint list for reporting purposes.

To begin building the Flow choose Create from blank. For the trigger search for Planner and select When a task is completed. Select the plan you want the Flow to be triggered by from the drop down.

Click Add an action and search for Start an Approval. Enter the email address of the person you want to approve the completed task and the subject to something that makes sense for your organization. Click advanced options to change the body of the email.

Click Add a condition then click on Add dynamic content and enter Response is equal to Approve.

Under the If yes section, click Add an action then search for Create item in SharePoint list.Note: you will need a SharePoint list that has the fields shown below.

Click Add dynamic content to use the Planner task metadata to populate the SharePoint list item fields. Click Add an action and search for Teams and select Post message. Select the Team and Channel you want the message to post to when a completed task is approved. Enter your message making sure to use the Title of the task.

Under the If no section, click Add an action and search for Teams and select Post message. Select the Team and Channel you want the message to post to when a completed task is rejected. Enter your message making sure to use the Title of the task.

And that’s it! An approval flow that runs off planner and notifies in teams in just a few minutes. If you like this post from Melissa and want to learn more about her, check out her blurb below and be sure to follow her on Twitter!

Melissa is an Office 365 and SharePoint consultant who specializes in simplifying and automating business processes using Flow and SharePoint Designer. She is experienced in managing projects throughout the entire lifecycle as well as developing and implementing SharePoint and Office 365 solutions. User adoption, governance, and training are topics she is especially passionate about! Check out her other Flow blog posts here.

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