On top of providing our community with a brand-new interface to share ideas, the migration will enable our product teams to be much more responsive to user feedback and better integrate your ideas into our product roadmap.

Fig 1. New Power Automate Ideas portal, available for desktop and mobile browsers

The Power Automate team is listening!

A new process for voting and managing ideas will be implemented as part of this change. Every month, our community team will review and triage all incoming ideas. Duplicate ideas will be grouped for easier search, and clarification may be requested from the author. Top ideas (ideas that get upvoted at least 50 times) will be sent to the Power Automate product team for review. During every planning cycle, the product team will review Top ideas and determine if and when they can be added to the roadmap.

Statuses for ideas will be updated as follows:

• NEW: New ideas recently submitted that haven’t been triaged yet
• NEEDS VOTES: Triaged ideas that need at least 50 votes before they are reviewed by the product team.
• TOP IDEA: Ideas that have gathered at least 50 votes, and are currently being reviewed by the product team for inclusion in the next release wave.
• IN BACKLOG: The product team has approved the idea for inclusion in the product backlog, without a committed date yet.
• PLANNED: The team has committed to building the idea which has been added in the official release plans.
• COMPLETED: The idea has made it into the product and has shipped!
• DECLINED: The product team has declined to build the idea at this time

With this new process, the Power Automate product team will be able to respond to your community ideas and incorporate more of them into the product.

Fig 2: Posting a new idea on the portal 

How will the migration happen?

On July 18, Power Automate Ideas will go into “read-only” mode. The possibility to post a new idea will be temporarily disabled while we transfer all existing ideas to the new site: https://ideas.powerautomate.com

Starting July 20, we will launch the new site and you will be able to resume posting and sharing ideas. All ideas posted prior to July 18 will be made available on the new site with their new corresponding statuses.

We thank you for your continued engagement in our community and look forward to your new ideas for Power Automate!

The post New ways to share Power Automate Ideas appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The process owner and system admins have the ability to remove viewer users from the process at any time.

Another pain point we heard is that many users feel friction from having to manually add other users to an environment before being able to share a process with them. Now, when a Process advisor user searches for a person in the share panel, they can search for any user in the tenant. If that person does not exist in the environment, sharing the process will automatically add the user to the environment, assign the Process Advisor User security role, and send an email notification. The security role only grants access to Process advisor tables, so if the user who has been invited to the environment wants to perform other actions in the Power Automate environment, they may still need to request a security role (e.g. Environment Maker) with the relevant permissions. Learn more about process advisor security roles.

Please feel free to share feedback at the Power Automate Community Forum. 

Starting your process-optimization journey has never been easier, and we would love for you to try out process advisor!

The post Get Quality Process Insights by Sharing Analytics and Inviting Tenant Users appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Meet Asuka Otani

Before Asuka embarked her RPA journey in 2018, she had been on a back office role for 16 years in the human resources and general affairs department of a manufacturing company in county of Aichi, with no IT background. Her work involved a lot of manual work – sealing stamps, sending Faxes, making phone calls and other paperwork. She did not even have her own designated computer to work with.

As work accumulated, she found herself often ending up working at the office after hours. Her proposals of optimizing the work kept getting rejected. And what made the situation even harder for Asuka was that her little son also had to wait for her in the daycare because she had to work overtime. With all that was happening, she felt unconfident, self-doubting and low self-esteem. Just when she felt she was hitting the rock bottom, she was about to start a new adventure, which was going to transform her career completely.

How her RPA journey began

In exploring ways to improve work efficiency, Asuka found an online article about Robotic Process Automation, which got her interested. She looked online and viewed more videos on how to automate with RPA, and she realized how intuitive it was for non-technical person to begin using RPA as all of the actions were with names that anyone could understand.

She had initially tried learning also from online forums for RPA, but still had no idea what people on the forum were talking about. The more she studied, the more isolated and lonely she felt. Using that as fuel for motivation, she then turned to Twitter.

“I found people through Twitter and the RPA communities, who were in the similar situation and skillsets like me. That’s where I started exchanging ideas with one another. I even found people who quickly became like my soulmates. There were many people in the community who wanted to change how they were working through RPA. It encouraged me, and also expanded my vision too.”

Realizing the opportunity, Asuka was committed to making the changes she’d wanted in with RPA. No one else in her company had knowledge about RPA, so she started self-teaching by learning from dozens of books she bought.

Her company did have understanding of importance to invest in IT, and approved her to use up to 900 dollars to try RPA out. Asuka sat down with her colleague to discuss the processes that they wanted to automate on, and prioritized what they felt was the most stressful for them. Some of the automations that they did through RPA was:

• Sending PDF documents to over a hundred customers
• Retrieving manufacturing results and aggregating by each department for reporting
• Emailing employees who had forgotten to register their time on timesheet management system

By implementing RPA automations, she managed to reduce work from 200 hours to just one click of a button by automating 10 of her tasks.

“When I showed my colleagues the automation, they were really amazed because they knew me as a non-technical person.”

Struggles during COVID-19

Despite the success she got in automating creation of manufacturing reports and customer invoicing., she was informed by the company to terminate the RPA licensing as other higher investment priorities came after COVID-19 hit Japan and impacted the company’s financial situation. She thought of even quitting the job, until her colleague told her:

“You have tried so hard up to now to automate your work through RPA. You shouldn’t just give up! It was you, who made us realize that we should be automating our work through IT.”

So, she started to look for alternatives where her current employer ASAHI Accounting Robot Research Institute – a Microsoft Partner for Power Automate replied back to her Twitter that there is another less expensive RPA – WinAutomation (Now known as Power Automate ).

Asahi Accounting Robotics replies on Twitter to Asuka about Power Automate:

“WinAutomation (now Power Automate Desktop) allows you to start at $40 per month. It includes Power Automate, and you can also link with Power Automate (cloud flows). If you already have Microsoft 365, you can further transform the way you work.”

Starting over with Power Automate Desktop

Asuka once again started the RPA journey, and learned Power Automate Desktop from zero. She struggled with the differences from the old RPA to this new one. At the time, WinAutomation was only available in English (now provided with dozens of other languages including Japanese) which made it even more difficult for Asuka but also saw some pleasant new learnings.

“I signed up for an e-learning service to learn about Power Automate Desktop. Although it was hard in the beginning because of the differences, I then also learned new features like For Each loops which I couldn’t do before and I immediately saw the potential possibilities which I could automate, and I realized I can do a lot more than I previously could through Power Automate Desktop.”

In addition to the book, she also went further to sign up for online chat support, which helped her upskill in Power Automate Desktop quickly in three months.

“I was surprised by myself for how much I could learn and accomplish in matter of three months. RPA is like just building blocks. All the names are easy for me to understand, like “Launch Excel” or “Start up application”. Although I didn’t have the skills to do coding, I felt I could ramp up with RPA easily.”

Actions have names that are easy to understand for anyone

After three months of trying out Power Automate Desktop, she had a good understanding of things like For Each, and was even able to customize the UI elements on her own for more complex scenarios.

Diagram showing how Asuka used the UI selector

New opportunity via single tweet

Despite all the accomplishments, Asuka was frustrated because no one in her company fully understood the value of her work. She didn’t have her own computer, the company didn’t appreciate her efforts, she one day from the toilet tweeted:

“Today, I felt I should leave this company as soon as I can.
But before I leave, I’m going to get my RPA approved.
I’m going to get this done as soon as I can. This is my only hope.”

This tweet caught attention from ASAHI Accounting Robot Research Institute. They had followed Asuka on Twitter as she shared her thoughts and learnings about how to implement RPA in a small/mid-size business. Asahi asked if she wanted to have a chat with them. After discussion, Asuka was offered a position to work there fully remote – as her home was over five hundred miles away from the company’s office.

Contributing to the community

Asuka has always felt that there are many people out there in the world, who is in the similar situations like hers, where they would not know how to improve their work or realize the opportunity RPA could provide, so she tries to contribute as much as she could to the community.

“I shared my experience telling the community through presenting at events and through Twitter that I was just an office worker in HR, but I could transform the company through Power Automate Desktop. Not only did I change that, but it also changed my career journey. People reached out to me after presenting saying how they felt empowered and that really made me happy.”

New role, new business card

When Asuka first onboarded in Asahi, she was asked to commit on becoming an engineer. It was sometimes difficult for her to understand what her new colleagues were talking about as they come from different backgrounds, but surprise awaited her.

“A pack of business cards arrived my home, and when I opened it, my title was “Technical Evangelist”. I felt the title suggested the company doesn’t just expect me to become an ordinary RPA engineer, but together, use my past experiences as an end user and share how fun it is to transform work through Power Automate Desktop, and also understand the pain and support the end-users when implementing this. It was a new role in the company, made just for me.”

With her new role, she presents at webinars (online seminars) focusing on people in HR and general affairs role on how they could change the way they work using Power Automate and Power Automate Desktop. One of the things she has created is an employee welfare check system built with Power Automate Desktop. Since Japan often suffers from earthquakes, the system would send email notifications to employees in case of an earthquake to gather the latest situation of each employee by collecting results using Microsoft Forms, consolidate them to Excel online, and send support if necessary.

“It was important to make the solution using cloud services like Power Automate, as if the system was on-premise, the servers could face issues from the damage during the earthquake. I now distribute this as a template to my customers, so that they can immediately see the kind of value Power Automate has. I could only think of this idea because I was in HR.”

With experiences as an HR professional and now specialized role in RPA, she hopes to expand her contribution.

“I’m starting to understand better on the technical side of things now, so I hope to act as a bridge across end users and professional developers as citizen developer. I have many ideas in my head, and now, I need to make them into real life solutions.”

Message to the world

With her career transformation story, she gave the message to the world, aimed to those who also wants to change their careers through Power Automate Desktop:

“As I began as an end user at my previous company and started worked on implementing RPA, people from the community, from Twitter all supported me throughout my journey to transform the company I was in. And despite I was in this not well-known company, I am telling this experience to the world and that made me feel that the person who seriously try and achieve something can empower others, and that experience becomes a great power. This was an amazing experience for me so what I would like to tell everyone is, is that there is this amazing tool called Power Automate Desktop – a tool that even office workers can use.

I would like everyone to try using the tool and pass on to your colleagues what you experienced. I’ve used this tool for two years, and it was amazing to see my colleagues also changing along with me. So try transforming your company with Power Automate Desktop and there are even opportunities like I had, to transform careers too. I hope everyone uses this more.”

Interview available in Power CAT Live

Want to know the whole story? You can watch the interview with Asuka on Power CAT Live!

The post From HR to evangelist – career transformation using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Join the Power Automate team and be inspired by exciting new features, see amazing demos, learn about our roadmap, and connect with your peers from the awesome Power Automate Community! The official event starts at 8:00 AM PDT, however, the Power Automate sessions begin at 11:45 AM PDT.

Power Automate Featured Sessions:

FS103: Empower everyone to automate common processes with Power Automate

CON-ATE103: Ask the Experts – Power Automate

See your favorite Power Automate team presenters and new announcements!

We’re also celebrating the launch of our new user group experience on our Community Platform!  We invite all new and existing user group leaders to sign-up and have your user groups created and your events listed in the new user group experience! Visit Power Automate User Groups – Microsoft Power Automate Community to find your community, add your user group, sign-up, and accelerate your participation! Follow us on Twitter – MSPowerAutomate.

There’s so much more for you to experience, and enjoy!

Register here: https://aka.ms/mbas
We’re looking forward to seeing you! 

All the best,
Your Power Automate team

#MSBizAppsSummit #CommunityRocks #PowerAutomate #FlowFam

The post Join us for Microsoft Business Applications Summit! May 4th, 2021 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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.

Whats up Flow Friends?! 

This weeks post comes from awesome community member Bryant Boyer! 

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. 

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

Phillip is a Senior Enterprise Business Intelligence and Analytics Architect with my Microsoft Certified Solutions Associate in Data Management and Analytics and Certified Public Accountant designation. As a diverse hybrid, I have a deep understanding of the interface between business and IT with advanced technical skills in cloud based and on premise applications including SQL, Azure SQL Data Warehousing, enterprise data warehousing, OLAP cubes, SAP HANA, Dynamics 365, OBIEE, Azure Machine Learning, Azure SSAS, SSRS, Tableau, Power BI, SSIS, PowerPivot, Power Query, PowerApps, Flow, and Excel. Currently, He is developing with program language including C#, R, jQuery, JSON, REST API’s, OData, HTML5, JavaScript, MDX, and DAX. My goal is to support others in the community through shared knowledge as I seek to strengthen my skills in key areas of enterprise operations and the technologies transforming them, including data architecture, process automation, governance and strategy, future state enterprise data warehousing, and computer science.

Be sure and leave some comments below, letting him know what you thought of the post!

A robust, Client-specific approval workflow and write-back engine is not a standard feature of many ERP systems, which requires BI architects and data engineers to think outside the box to deliver scalable solutions. Microsoft Flow can meet these enterprise level requirements, and can do it at a fraction of the time and cost of any other solution on the market. This article will tackle the current business requirements pertaining to enterprise level solutions around on-premise SQL data warehouse write-backs, robust tiered approval cycles, and sales order approval requests.

The Approval Scenario

1. The Business requires an on-premise SQL Data Warehouse utilizing Dynamics 365 data loads and needs all the approvals to be written back to their on-premise data warehouse.
2. Requestor completes a sales order form and routes the form to the first level of approval (the “Owner”). Once the owner has approved, it is sent to the second level of approval (the “Approver”) who will authorize the release of the sales order the request.
3. The authorized owner and approver names and e-mails (owner and secondary) on each sales order number are included in user-defined fields in the DimEmployees entity in Dynamics 365 and data warehouse.
4. Only open sales orders will be brought into the approval cycle to avoid duplicated e-mails to the approvers.
5. Every sales order could include numerous products. One of the requirements it to provide a comprehensive list of all products within each sales order, and provide them to the owner. Therefore, sales orders will need to be grouped and provided in the body of the approval.
6. The owner and approver require their being able to review and approve a sales order without having to access the system (i.e. via their phone or e-mail).
7. The sales orders pending approval will remain in the approval cycle (loop) until approved by the final approver.
8. If the sales order is rejected, it starts the approval cycle over again and comments are written back to the on-premise SQL to highlight the change(s) that need to be made before the manager will approve.

Overview of the flow

1. Trigger the flow through Recurrence.
2. Execute the SQL stored procedure to mark sales orders as ‘Pending’.
3. Select the desired columns for deduplication and parsing later.
4. Join the array into a single text string with a strategic delimiter.
5. Start approval cycle and loop until the sales order has been approved.
6. Execute a SQL stored procedure to write-back the approval status, approval date, modified date, and any comments from the approver to the owner.
7. If sales order is rejected, notify the owner and write-back to the data warehouse while remaining in the approval cycle.

The scenario described in this tutorial will operate on a SQL stored procedure and Approvals, but you are more than welcome to substitute any data that produces an array within Flow so that you can follow along: a SharePoint list, a list of documents in OneDrive, tags from Computer Vision API, etc.

Please see attached link to the AdventureWorks data warehouse to follow along with the blog post.

The next article I write will use the new Excel Connector and Common Data Service.  

The trigger

I will walk through how to build this flow from scratch, but you can also use this template to follow along yourself.

1. “Recurrence”

You can use the Recurrence trigger as we will be using an OData filter to find open transactions only.

2.  “Get Rows” & “Execute Stored Procedure”

Insert a step after the Recurrence and search for “get row” and select the option for “SQL Server – Get rows.”

Use an OData filter to return Sales Orders that are ‘Open’. We will immediately mark these rows as ‘Pending’ with the Execute Stored Procedure.

Insert a step after the Get rows and search for “Apply to each.”

Insert a step after the Apply to each and search for “SQL Server – Execute stored procedure.”

Running a SQL Procedure to update the rows that are ‘Open’ to ‘Pending’ is important because we do not want those records re-entering the Approval cycle again, thereby effectively keeping them in the Approval cycle until approved (or rejected). Upon rejection, they will remain in the loop. Therefore, only new sales orders will be picked up by the approval cycle.

Creating variables and arrays for the approval

3. “Select the desired columns for deduplication and parsing later.”

Insert a step after the ‘Apply to Each’ and search for “Data Operations – Select.”

Click into the From field and use the dynamic content box to choose the results of the “Get Rows” step.

Based on the business requirements, we need to group all Sales Orders by the column SalesOrderNumber as the approvers would like to see the comprehensive list of products that make up the sales order.

There are two columns in the section for Map: “Enter key” on the left and “Enter value” on the right.

Click into each row in the “Enter value” column and use the formula below:

coalesce(item()?['SalesOrderNumber'],null)

Navigate to https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/canvas-apps/functions/function-isblank-isempty for more information on the coalesce function. This is one of my favorite functions because if all of the arguments are blank, then the function returns blank, rather than an error.

4. “Union the desired columns for deduplication.”

Insert a step after the ‘Select’ and search for “Data Operations – Compose.”

The select step has reduced the get rows step to the sales order number, but the data is still a table. In order to turn the table into deduplicated list and finally an array to be grouped, we need to union each row.

union(body('SelectLIDCODE'),body('SelectLIDCODE'))

This union function returns a single array or object with all the elements that are in the array or object passed in. For parameters, this function only requires either the array or object from where we want all the items. The parameters for this function can either be a set of objects or a set of arrays, not a mixture of both. If there are two objects with the same name, the last item with that name appears in the result.

5. “Variables – Set Variable.”

Insert a step and search for “Variables – Set Variable.”

The Variables connector is one of the more important connectors. To use a variable you will first have to initialize a variable. Here, we will start our flow with a list of initialize variable actions as we not yet able to initialize variable actions in a single scope box.

To do this, we will initiate a variable to track whether the owner and the approver have approved a sales order.

Type will be Integer and the Value will be set to 0.

6. “Variables – Set Variable for the sales order number.”

Insert a step and search for “Variables – Set Variable.”

Add variable->”Initialize variable” action, Name set to Initialize LIDCODE, Type set to Array and set Value to the Output from the Compose.

Below is an extra screenshot to show where which Output to use.

Now that we have set up the ex-ante variables and arrays, we will now start the approval process, which will proceed until all the sales orders are approved. Watch this awesome tutorial by Jonathon Levesque about kicking off the approval process to include timeouts and escalations, read this article by Merwan Hade on setting an approval expiry, and this article by David Blyth on approval reminders.

Setting-Up the Approvals

7. “Send every sales order in a batch with all the details”

Insert a new step and navigate “Apply to each.”

Now that we have a unique list of sales order numbers, we can add an “Apply to each” on the list of sales orders and create an approval and write-back the response to SQL. An apply to each loop makes it possible to control the list that you repeat over.

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Compose.”

Use the compose operation to retrieve the sales order number from the apply to each.

@items('Send_each_sales_order_indivdually')['LIDCODE']

It is very important not to forget to make your “Apple to each” execute in parallel by going to options and enabling “Concurrency control”.

8. “New step and Do Until loop.”

Insert a step and navigate “Add a do until”

We set up the “Do Until” where the exit condition is when the isSecondApproved variable becomes 1 and the sales orders array is empty (meaning they have all been sent out). The variable will be checked at the start of every loop iteration, and once the approval is complete and variable set to 1, it will exit the loop iteration. 

Do until loop. This loop will continue until both the approver(s) have approved the sales order. That will start out looking like this, once you add the approval step in:

@equals(variables('isSecondApproved'), 1))

9. “Filter for the first sales order to be sent for approval.”

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Filter array.”

The From will be the original get rows step and we will click on the Edit in advanced mode.

@equals(item()?['SalesOrderNumber'], outputs('SalesOrderNumber'))

10. “Select the sales orders that will be grouped.”

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Select.”

Again, we use coalesce to avoid any errors in the output.

First level of approval – Owner approval

11. “Check if there are any owner level approvals pending.”

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Compose.”

We are checking if anything is currently open for the owner. If there is, we will set up the approval to begin with the owner, otherwise, the approval process will start with the secondary approver.

length(body('MasterSelect'))

12. “Data Operations – Join to get the owners.”

We need to create an array that captures the approvers who will be responsible for approving the sales order. By creating an array and then joining them, we will be able to add the output to the approval.

Similar to step 3 above, we will select the columns we need to deduplicate and join.

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Select.”

Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Compose.”

Insert a step and search for “Approval.”

Utilizing the output from the compose data operation above, we join all potential approvers that are on the sales order.

join(outputs('a1EmailUnion'),';')

Full shot:

Insert a step and search for “Condition.”

We are going to set the condition as Response is equal to Approve.

If you are working in sharepoint and would like to know how to get a dynamic list of approvers, check out this flow of the week about sending parallel approval requests for a dynamic set of approvers.

Once the owner approves the sales order, there is a stored procedure that writes back the on-premise SQL Data Warehouse the results, and the second approver is set to pending.

We will not worry at this point what happens when the Owner rejects in this scenario. However, we will cover what happens when the second owner rejects the sales order. We will cover that now.

Second level of approval – Approver

13. “Setting up for the second approver.”

Insert a step after the SQL stored procedure and search for “Data Operations – Select.”

Once the owner has approved the sales order, it is now the second owners turn to approve it. We are going to follow the steps we performed in setting up the owner:

1. Select the Approvers e-mail address from the body of the ‘Filter array’ action
   1. Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Select.”

concat(item()?['ApproverEmail'],'')

2. Compose a union the Approvers e-mail address from the output of the Select operation
   1. Insert a step and search for “Data Operations – Compose.”

union(body('Selecta2Emails'),body('Selecta2Emails'))

3. Join the Approvers e-mail address from the output of the compose operation and add them to the Assigned to field in the Approvals action
   1. Insert a step and search for “Approval.”

join(outputs('a2EmailUnion'),';')

The important part here is to make sure to use the selected e-mail columns and compose action to create an array for the secondary approvers e-mails. Finally, we will use the join function to combine all potential approvers on the sales order.

The final difference will be in how we handle is the second approver rejects the sales order. We will send the owner an e-mail notifying them that the sales order has been rejected, and then we will set the variable so that the loop will resend the owner the approval.

14. “Handling the Approving and Rejecting of the second approver.”

Finally, just as we did with the owner we will make sure to set our variables depending on the outcome of the secondary approver’s decision.

Sales Order is Approved by Approver:

1. “SQL – Execute Stored Procedure” and enter the RowID as the Output from the ‘Filter_array’ action, and the ApprovalDate as utcNow() function.   
   1. Insert a step and search for “SQL – Execute Stored Procedure.”

2. “Variables – Set Variable,” and set the Name ‘isSecondaryApproved’ to 1 which will end the ‘Do Until’ function we created, and that sales order will exit the loop function.
   1. Insert a step and search for “Variable – Set Variable.”

Sales Order is Rejected by Approver:

The Owner will receive a notification the sales order has been rejected along with comments from the Approver on the modifications that are required for approval. 

1. Set up an Apply to each approver response, information and add the Approver’s comments to be written back to SQL and added to the rejection notification back to the owner.
   1. Insert a step and search for “Apply to each.”
2. “SQL – Execute Stored Procedure” and enter the RowID as the Output from the ‘Filter_array’ action, and the ApprovalDate as Response date.  
   1. Insert a step and search for “SQL – Execute Stored Procedure.”

3. E-mail back to the Owner.   
   1. Insert a step and search for “Email.”

4. “Variables – Set Variable,” and set the Name ‘isSecondaryApproved’ to 0 which will trigger the ‘Do Until’ function to run again and send a notification to the Owner to make changes. This sales order will remain in the loop function for now.
   1. Insert a step and search for “Variable – Set Variable.”

Next Steps

Future developments will look at allowing the manager to delete a rejected record or cancelling the sales order. Maybe even a purge process that has been out there for an extended amount of time. There are many avenues to take the process, and the goal to inspire and encourage curiosity with the Power Platform and Flow.

My next posts will be around Approvals in the Common Data Service and Dynamics 365.

Let us know in the comments if you like this post as I will be developing enhancements to this Flow.  

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/approvals-in-cds-and-seven-updates/

For formatting approvals to, use markdown language at: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/flow/approvals-markdown-support

For an amazing article by Stephen Siciliano on Rich text formatting with Approvals, please see the link below:

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/rich-approvals-text-and-multiselect/

The post Advanced | Flow of The Week: Advanced Approval Write back appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We, on the Microsoft Flow Team want to take a moment and thank YOU, The Community, for all of the ideas and feedback you consistently provide!

All of it is so helpful, and extremely useful to us as we try to continue releasing features and upgrades that make a meaningful impact on your work.

If you haven’t joined the community yet, we would love for you to come be a part! 

Come Join:

• Our user forums, where you can find conversations about Flow and get help from your peers
• The Flow Community Blog, a place for users to write about their experiences, and share tips and how-tos
• The Webinar and Video Gallery, your one stop to find every Flow webinar and some fan videos, all available on-demand
• The Flow Cookbook, a forum where you can share your favorite templates and get inspiration from others
• And much more!

Go register for the community now and join the conversation! We look forward to hearing from you.

– The Microsoft Flow Team

The post Come be a part of the Microsoft Flow Community! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

If you’re attending, make sure to check out all the exciting community events we’ll be hosting in between panels and networking opportunities. We’ve got a QR Code Scavenger Hunt, prize giveaways, and an exciting Virtual Reality immersive experience. Of course our very popular photo booth will return this year with even more hats and props, as well as the famous Swag Prize Wheel! We’ll also be holding a raffle to attend limited book signings with keynote speakers Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner, the authors of Freakonomics, and keynote speaker Alberto Cairo, author of The Truthful Art and The Functional Art.

At the Summit, you’ll get to meet the new Data Insights Super Heroes — a collection of space defenders representing Flow, PowerApps, Excel, and Power BI. Here’s a sneak preview:

Inventive Flox has the gear ready to automate the team ship’s processes. Keep an eye on our community blog this week while we debut the rest of the Datanauts crew!

(And if you’re not able to attend the Data Insights Summit, you can catch panels and keynote presentations on the livestream.)

The post Don’t miss these community events at the Data Insights Summit! 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.