intermediate Archives - Microsoft Power Platform Blog Innovate with Business Apps Wed, 12 Jun 2019 15:00:02 +0000 en-US hourly 1 Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Early Meeting Reminder http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/beginner-flow-of-the-week-early-meeting-reminder/ Wed, 12 Jun 2019 15:00:02 +0000 Have you ever missed an important meeting because it was before your normal work hours? Learn how to get reminder emails for early meetings using Microsoft Flow, and get a crash course in the joy of time zones at the same time.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Early Meeting Reminder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hi Flow Community!

Have you ever missed an important meeting because it was before your normal work hours? This happened to me one too many times, so I decided to do something about it! My flow runs every night around 8 p.m. and sends me and email if I have a meeting before 10 a.m. the next day. This gives me time to change my alarm if needed or make other plans. 10 a.m. may not be “early” to a lot of you, but these values are easy to change.

Before I get into the implementation, if you only care about the solution, I’ve created templates for Office 365 Outlook, Outlook.com, and Google Calendar/Gmail. I’ll be walking through the Office 365 Outlook version, but the others are pretty much the same.

In theory this a straightforward flow, given the handy “Get calendar view of events” action. Get current time, add hours, get events, send an email. But of course time zones have to show up and complicate things. So let’s break it down.

Here’s the math-y part. “Get current time” uses UTC, so we have to convert it to local time to work properly with the startOfDay() function. It turns out that even though we specify the “Round-trip [o]” format, it loses the time zone information here, so we have to convert it back to UTC to be useful to the calendar action. We then add a day to get start of day tomorrow, then another 10 (or however many) hours to get the threshold for “early”. These actions are also all available as functions if you’d like to condense this part, but the actions make for a more readable and fillable template.

NOTE: I didn’t specify the minutes in my Recurrence trigger, meaning it will run sometime between 8:00 and 9:00. If you specify exactly 8:00 you can skip the time zone stuff and do +4h, +10h to get the range. This makes for a brittle template though because changing one value requires changing the others, and we have no real need to run exactly on the hour.

This is the easy part. We pass the calculated times to “Get calendar view of events action”. For Outlook, we pass the “isAllDay eq false” filter because all-day events don’t count as early. Google Calendar doesn’t have an equivalent filter, so instead we use the “Filter array” action and check whether the start time has a “T” separator in it, indicating a specific start time vs. an all-day event.

We then check if there are any events in the array. Normal condition stuff.

From here we could send an email that says “Early meeting! Go check your calendar!” and call it quits. But where’s the fun in that? Instead, let’s convert the events to local time and put them in a more readable format for the email. You can skip the “Apply to each” in favor of a “Select” action here, but that doesn’t let us leave the time zone blank for the template.

Finally, we send the reminder email. Outlook.com and Gmail require you to type in your own email address, but Office 365 has a handy “Get my profile” action that saves you the trouble.

That’s it! Hopefully this flow helps keep your schedule running smoothly. Extra credit if you can get it to filter out an 11:00 a.m. Monday through 5:00 p.m. Friday event (not “all-day” but multi-day), or to remind attendees of the early meeting you scheduled. Let me know in the comments if you have any feedback or if you have any cool timing or scheduling flows of your own.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Early Meeting Reminder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
The Microsoft Flow Online Conference is Tomorrow 12/12 http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/the-microsoft-flow-online-conference-is-tomorrow-12-12/ Tue, 11 Dec 2018 20:57:48 +0000 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!

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

]]>
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.

]]>
Intermediate | Flow of The Week: Automate Mass Company Communications with Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/automate-mass-communications/ Wed, 10 Oct 2018 13:19:19 +0000 The Flow in this article will show how you can use Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online to create an approval process that post news items on your intranet and extend them to all the other communication locations your company uses including Email, Yammer, and Teams!

The post Intermediate | Flow of The Week: Automate Mass Company Communications with Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hey Flow fans!  Are you looking to Work Less and Do More?  You have come to the right place! 
 

The Flow in this article from Michelle Gilbert will show how you can use Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online to create an approval process that post news items on your intranet and extend them to all the other communication locations your company uses including Email, Yammer, and Teams.

Goal

Be efficient and productive with your time by creating one News Post in SharePoint Online and upon Approval – automate the communication to publish to your SharePoint Intranet, send company email, post to All Company group in Yammer and Microsoft Teams Channel.

Connectors

Be sure you have username and passwords for all of these connectors used in the Flow before you get started: Approvals, Notifications, Office 365 Outlook, SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and Yammer.

Let’s get started!

Go to your Company Intranet in SharePoint Online -> Site Contents -> Site Pages.

Note: Assuming you are using a modern page with a News Web Part for your home page. Page approval flows are currently available on SharePoint communication sites and modern team sites only.

 

Click on Create Flow and select Configure page approval flow.

 
The right-hand slide-out panel opens. Click Create flow button.

 

 
Fill in the Flow name and add an Approver(s). Click Create.

 

 
SharePoint will confirm Page approval flow created and adds an Approval Status column.  By default, creating the Flow automatically approves existing pages but all new pages will use the Page Approval Flow.

 

 
You can confirm your Flow was created by visiting http://flow.microsoft.com and signing in.  The Flow will be listed under My Flows. Click on the Flow.

 

 
Review the Flow and fix any connections that show as red or broken connections.

 

 
Review Users and Groups Owners and Connections to confirm you have connected.

 

 
Review SharePoint Owners.  When you create the Flow from SharePoint, the site url and list/library name automatically gets added.

 

 
Now that you have confirmed your Flow and connector permissions, go back to your Company Intranet in SharePoint Online.  Click on the symbol (+) Add to create a News post.

 

 
Create your News post.  Name your post, add an image and a text web part.

 

 
After you have filled in your News post you will see a new button on the right-hand side called “Submit for approval”.  Click on the button.

 

 
The right-hand Flow panel slides out.  Review the connectors and fix (highlighted in red) if needed, click continue. 

 

 
Add a message for the approver and click Submit.

 

 
A new button will appear called “Review approvals” for you to review the approval status.

 

 
The Approval Status of the News post which is the same as a site page shows “Pending” in the SharePoint Site Pages library.

 

 
The Flow should have triggered, let’s go take a look!
 
Note: You should not have to make any changes.  If your connectors are working there is nothing you need to do.

 

 
The Flow did trigger on new News Post so now the approver has a few ways to approve: Approval slide-out panel in SharePoint Online, 

 

 
Flow Approval panel located in Flow,

 

 
And finally, in the Approvers email inbox.

 

 
As you can see the approver can approve or reject a few ways.  When approve or reject is selected a comments box appears which can be written back to SharePoint and sent to the requestor.  Add a comment and select submit.

 

 
After submitting, the Approver will see the updated confirmation of the approval request.  

 

 
The requestor of the site page will receive an email letting them know the page was approved or rejected and, in this case, Approved.

 

 
The Site Pages Approval Status column in SharePoint automatically changes to approved or rejected and again, in this case, Approved.

 

 
The News post automatically publishes to the Company Intranet.  Visit the home page to view the News post added to the Intranet.

 

 

This is the simple Flow to automate Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online. 

 

Well that’s cool, but I also have to communicate to my Team and through Email and post to Yammer too.

Why don’t we automate all our mass communications with Flow!

 
Let’s get in and edit this Flow to add new connections. We will start with adding an action “Post Message” from Yammer to All company group. In the message text, we will add Title and Description from the SharePoint dynamic content.

 

 
Next, we will add Microsoft Teams action “Post Message” and send to the general channel with the Title in the message field and any other comments.  You could also add this action to the Rejected side, informing Team page was rejected and to take action. 

 

 
Another popular communication vehicle for companies is email.  Let’s create the email connector by adding the O365 email action “Send an Email”.  Depending on your permissions, you can send to your entire company and even send on behalf of a mailbox like Marketing.  You could also design the email to have the title in the subject and description in the body of the email.

 

 

Here is the final approval Flow.  Condition Request is equal to Approve, if yes, update the SharePoint column status to Approved, post to Yammer, post a message in Microsoft Teams, send an email to all company and Send an email to the requestor to inform them of the status of the request. Click Save your Flow.

 

 

Let’s test the Flow.  Visit the Company Intranet in SharePoint Online.

Create your News post.  Name your post, add an image and add a text web part. Click Submit for approval button.

 

 
Confirm the connectors and select Continue.

 

 
Add your message and click Submit.

 

 
The approval like before, will be on the slide-out panel in SharePoint Online, in email and in the Flow approval panel for the approver to take action.  In this case we use the Flow approver panel in Flow, click approve and type in the comments. Select the Confirm button to approve the News Post.

 

 
Once approved, the News Post automatically publishes to the SharePoint Online Company Intranet like before.

 

 
The News item also posts to the All Company group in Yammer.

 

 
The News Post is also sent to the Microsoft Teams channel to let the group know the article has been posted.

 

 
And finally, the News post is sent via email to the entire company. 

 

Conclusion

Automating mass company communication using the Page Approval Flow can be invaluable as you try to connect to all the locations where employees prefer to consume and digest company information. This Flow is a real time saver for Communications, Marketing, Human Resources and other departments. No more duplicating efforts and having multiple people write in different spaces. Automate your communications with Microsoft Flow and make your work more efficient and productive. Work Less, Do More!

 

Hope you enjoyed the Flow!

 

Resources

Announcing SharePoint Page Approvals: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint/Announcing-SharePoint-page-approvals/m-p/215466#M19709

 

Documentation

Configure Page approval: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/configure-page-approval-14ce6976-a0a7-427b-b4ab-d28d344a5222

Page Approval Flow: https://support.office.com/en-us/article/page-approval-flow-a8b2e689-d4a1-4639-8028-333c0ece30d9

Flow of the Week: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/category/flow-of-the-week/

The post Intermediate | Flow of The Week: Automate Mass Company Communications with Page Approval Flow in SharePoint Online appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Microsoft Flow: Using Teams + Planner + Bizzy = Efficiency on the go! http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/using-flow-teams-planner-bizzy-for-digital-transformation/ Thu, 15 Feb 2018 14:10:45 +0000 In this video Follow along as I take an outing on a sunny day and am still able to be productive in my work along the journey by using Bizzy to show me what items are overdue in my Planner. This way I can be sure and act on the highest priority items for the day and not miss the important stuff! Come see how it works and how its made and join in the discussion about Flow!

The post Intermediate | Microsoft Flow: Using Teams + Planner + Bizzy = Efficiency on the go! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hey Flow Fans!

Today I am bringing you a new video focused on productivity while on the go! 

​The winter in Seattle is quite rainy and gloomy and when the sun comes out most of us try to get out and feel it on our skin for a little while. I dont know about you… For me though, when I head out of the office, its really important to stay productive while on the move. So in this video I am going to show you a Flow that i use which combines Microsoft Teams, Planner, and a Flow partner tool called Bizzy Bot which allows me to quickly ask questions of Bizzy inside of teams, to return me important information i need so that i can know what items i need to address immediately! sounds complicated, but its not. 

After i show you how it works, I’ll also show you how its made! 

 

 

Please let me know video you would like to see next! Leave a comment below, Talk to me over on Twitter, or chat with me in the Official Flow Community!

Until next time! Later Flow Fans!

– Jon

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

The post Intermediate | Microsoft Flow: Using Teams + Planner + Bizzy = Efficiency on the go! appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Webinar 2/8: Intermediate | The one-stop-shop solution for social networking using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow by Daniel Christian http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/social-networking-using-powerapps-and-microsoft-flow/ Tue, 06 Feb 2018 14:54:53 +0000 Just getting in your groove with Microsoft Flow? Well, this webinar is for you - we're thrilled to feature guest speaker Daniel Christian to talk about how he uses fundamental features from Flow and PowerApps to create a one-top-shop solution for social networking. Join us LIVE this Thurs 2/8 @ 10:00AM PST!

The post Webinar 2/8: Intermediate | The one-stop-shop solution for social networking using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow by Daniel Christian appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Daniel is a new PowerApps MVP and one those rare individuals that is at home in PowerApps as Flow as SharePoint and even Power BI. Definitely looking forward to having him back on this week’s webinar one of our favorite topics…Social networking!

The on-stop-shop solution for social networking using PowerApps and Flow

With the increasing number of data connections available, PowerApps with Flow makes the cross-platform functionality easier than it has ever been. It’s because of this reason PowerApps can be used as a central base used to sent out communications to social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook, Yammer, Slack and LinkedIn. This session includes a live demo and walk-through on how a single PowerApps can be used to send announcements. We’ll also see how Flow captures social media content and using Cognitive Services detects sentiment values to help analyze and using Speech translation media content to English. Finally, we’ll see how Flow can post the comments on Microsoft Teams as a central location to discuss the content.

Webinar Details:

When: Thursday 2/8 @ 10:00AM PST

Where: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iVP7HgJuTQc

About Daniel Christian:

Daniel Christian has over 13 years of SharePoint experience starting with SharePoint Portal 2003. His area of expertise includes SharePoint On-Premises architecture, maintenance and administration, and SharePoint Online administration. He is a big fan of building no-code solutions and reporting. Currently, he is focused on PowerApps, Flow and Power BI and its integration using Gateway with SharePoint Server 2013 and 2016.

You can follow more of Daniel’s activities on Twitter @dchristian19.

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

The post Webinar 2/8: Intermediate | The one-stop-shop solution for social networking using PowerApps and Microsoft Flow by Daniel Christian appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Using Flow to create internal Microsoft solutions http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/flow-of-the-week-using-flow-to-create-internal-microsoft-solutions/ Thu, 25 Jan 2018 17:30:11 +0000 In this Microsoft Flow of the Week, Senior PM Jon Levesque walks you through building a Flow that is powering the partnership between Microsoft and UpWork. Come check out the story on how this came together, as well as how to build a similar Flow to solve a similar problem you may be facing!

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Using Flow to create internal Microsoft solutions appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hello Flow Fans!

Today for the Flow of the week I am going to bring you something a little bit different!

Not only is this an instructional Flow, The Flow i am going to share with you today is a Flow that is being used in Microsoft internal, currently. This Flow powers a pilot program partnership between Microsoft and UpWork to bring Freelance designers into the Microsoft ecosystem to help us get projects done more quickly and efficiently. This may not be your use case, BUT this same application of technology can be used in TONS of other situations.

So to start framing the story a bit, I receive an email from my boss asking the team, “Does anyone want to help on this project?” I dive into the email a bit more and learn that Microsoft and UpWork have reached a partnership and they need a workflow to power a good portion of the user experience – the problem being.. We have people who complete a training over here… and we have this request form over here.. with no idea how to connect the two. Oh and one Minor detail.. We need this solution built in 10 days, as we have a major press event to talk about all of this.

Myself and my coworker Kent Weare volunteered to help the internal Microsoft team out! 

We met with the team and learned of a few more problems we were to face… And this is where it really became interesting… 

Problem 1 – The only way to get access to the list of who completed the training was a daily email report… no

Problem 2 – The Daily email report, wasn’t a report of the new people that joined since yesterday… oh no, it was the entire list, every single day, with new participants pasted to the bottom… no​ no

Really?!

Ok, so we get an email report that we can have emailed to us daily but doesn’t give us new responses.. it gives them all to us every time. “How the heck are we supposed to get data out of the attached report and do something meaningful with it?” we asked ourselves.

Suddenly an email we had received from a Microsoft Flow Partner came to mind! PARSERR had joined our platform a few weeks prior and this is exactly what they do!

And – That’s where we jump into this tutorial!

1st – Head on over to www.parserr.com with me and go ahead and start a free trial account and then make note of the email inbox that they assign to you, we will need this soon.

2nd – Forward the email with the report attached to the email inbox you were assigned when you signed up. I am not going to show you any images of mine, i don’t want any rogue emails messing up my process!

3rd – I am going to assume you completed steps 1 and 2 successfully. Now lets open up Parserr and choose +Add a new Rule and then choose Attachments

4th – Add a filter that removes the rows you don’t need until you have the data you want. As you can see below, I remove rows 1,2 and then once that’s filtered I remove the new row 1

5th –​ Now that we have our data being parsed properly, lets go over to Flow.Microsoft.com and click on My Flows and then +Create From Blank

6th – Choose Parserr and then choose When an Email is received ​and then choose the email inbox from step 1 and step 3

7th – Choose +Add an action ​and type in Initialize Variable ​and select it. Im using this variable to get the user UPN so we can do a check to see if the member is already in our approved list or not.

8th – ​Choose +Add an action and type in Search for Users ​and select it – Choose the column from your Grab Columns dynamic outputs – For me it happens to be Column 2

9th – Choose More and then Add an Apply to Each​ and then add the body output from the search for users step above to the apply to each selection box.

10th – ​Inside of the Apply to Each add the action Set Variable. ​Set the name as UserUPN and select the User Principle Name (UPN) From the Dynamic content for the value.

​11th – Add an action ​Type Get Items​ and select SharePoint Get Items ​and choose the SharePoint list where all of the user information should be held.

12th – ​Add a condition and use the expression – “@greater(length(body(‘Get_items’)?[‘value’]), 0)​” to check if the user exists on our list already, if they do, we dont want them to get the welcome email twice!

Curse the Blimy email system that cant do a delta!

13th – On the IF NO side of the condition Add an action choose SharePoint then Create Item ​This way, if the user wasn’t on the list yesterday they WILL get the welcome email and be added to our group like you will see below

14th – ​Choose Add an action and then Office 365 Groups and then Add user to Group. ​Select the proper group and then add the User UPN

15th – ​Last but not least, Lets add our final action to Send An Email (hopefully not covered in red smudges like mine) welcoming the user to the group with a bunch of helpful links for them to use!

​And that’s that! A real life Flow powering Process inside of Microsoft, for Microsoft FTE’s to be more productive and to not have to go and code native solutions to accomplish every day tasks.

Here is the email from Liane Scult and Lora White after we completed the project for them:

“Hi, this is Liane Scult from the Office Products Group (OPG)  and Lora White from Microsoft Procurement.  We are business partners co-managing the launch of a new enterprise program that allows Microsoft employees to participate in the Gig Economy by leveraging our first-ever agreement with a freelance platform called Upwork.  It’s a really exciting new opportunity that allows Microsoft employees access to over 12 million freelancers around the world who can be engaged on-demand to complete projects large and small. 

 

We discovered Microsoft Flow when we were struggling to figure to manage process-triggered actions and communications needed to support the program.  In a dynamic process with many requirements that prompt certain actions and messages once completed, we thought we would need to hire a contractor just to facilitate communications.  What contradiction:  We were launching a state-of-the art platform that would digitally transform how we source external talent, yet we couldn’t scale our internal, manual processes to support it.

 

With Flow, and help from Kent Weare and Jon Levesque on the Flow team, we were able to automate all of the steps in our process.  When a new user completes the required training, Flow consumes the data from Learning Central and then triggers a series of events that would have been done manually otherwise.  For example, the flow adds users to our list of approved participants,  joins them to our program MS Teams site, and then sends a personalized congratulatory email.  Next, Flow lets us know when we have a project application to review and sends the applicant a status update in a customized email informed by fields populated by the applicant and the reviewer.  It even sends an email to our supplier advising them when an application has been approved and instructs them to set up the new user account. 
 

Seamlessly and instantaneously, Flow enabled process steps and communications between our program office, our end users, and our supplier.  With very little effort, we have delivered an unparalleled response time – and ultimately, an exceptional customer experience.  What’s more?  It’s efficient and it scales.  Problem solved.  Thank you, Flow!”

​If you get emails like this, i bet your boss would LOVE you! Have you created a Flow that your business absolutely depends on? We WANT to hear about it!  Send me an email at Jolevesq@microsoft.com

And as always, if you have questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below, on our Twitter or the best place to talk – The Flow Community!

P.S – I want to make a special shout out to Courtenay from Parserr.com for providing us access to the Parserr service at no cost. Without the Parserr service, this Flow wouldnt be possible!

 

Until next time!

– Jon Levesque, Senior Program Manager

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Using Flow to create internal Microsoft solutions appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Automate emailing a weekly .xls file from a SharePoint List. http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/automate-sending-weekly-reports/ Thu, 07 Dec 2017 16:46:27 +0000 Community Manager for PowerApps, Mackenzie Lyng teaches us how she created a Flow to automate sending a weekly report to the Social Media and Marketing team to streamline her process and save herself time!

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Automate emailing a weekly .xls file from a SharePoint List. appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Greetings Flow Fans!

Ever feel like there aren’t enough hours in the day to complete those mundane tasks on top of meetings, projects and high-pressure deadlines? I certainly do. If you’re like me, you know that time is precious in the working world. But what if I showed you how to give yourself back time and never worry about that busy work again? With Microsoft Flow, you can!

I am a social content writer and Community Manager of the PowerApps Community (previously Microsoft Flow Community Manager.) I spend most of my work day writing, designing, editing, and reading when I’m not in meetings or events. Flow came to my rescue  when I was writing content for the Microsoft Flow Twitter Account. Every week, I was responsible for providing the social media team with a list of tweets, graphics, and media for the following week. to be sent out each week.

My Flow automates submitting Twitter content each week. At first, my process consisted of back and forth emails between teams, random technical issues when sending content, and zero formatting. With Flow, I am able to write organized content, send it to the proper stakeholders, and deliver content consistently on time. This Flow can work for various scenarios in a variety of industries. It’s a huge timesaver and easy to create!

To create this Flow, you will need the following:

·         SharePoint Site & List

·         Office 365 Outlook Account

·         OneDrive for Business Account

Now, let’s start building the Flow

1. Sign in to Microsoft Flow if you haven’t already.

2. Click on My Flows at the top of the page.

3. Select Create From Blank +.

4. Type Schedule Recurrence in the search box. Enter the day of the week, time of day, and interval frequency values in the fields below. 

Next, let’s add an action.

Type Compose into the box, and select the expression utcNow(). Selecting this action will return each flow run’s  timestamp as a string, for example: 2017-03-15T13:27:36Z:

5. Type SharePoint into the box, and select the action Get items. This will connect to a SharePoint list with the content scheduled for that week. 

6. Next, type Create HTML Table in the box, and select value extracted from your previous SharePoint action. Select Custom in the Columns box. Select the values that correspond with the column titles from your selected SharePoint list from Get Items. This Data Operations action will pull data from the SharePoint list and convert it into an HTML table. 

Time for another action!

7. Type OneDrive for Business and select the action Create File. Select the folder you wish to map to in Folder Path. Next, select Output for both the File Name and File Content boxes. Be sure to include .xls after the Output value in File Name. This will indicate that the HTML file will be saved as an Excel spreadsheet. 

          And add an action!

8. Type OneDrive for Business and select the trigger When a File is created.  Select the folder path you entered in your previous action. 

9. Type OneDrive for Business and select the action List Files in Folder. Select the folder path you entered in your previous action.

10. Now for the final OneDrive for Business action. Type OneDrive for Business and select the action Create share link by path. Select File Path for the  File Path Box. Choose to send a direct link within your organization. This allows the excel file created from our SharePoint list to be sent as a direct link ONLY to someone within your team or organization.  

11. Type Office 365 Outlook and select the action Send an Email. This will be sent to the social media team with a link that will download a copy of our Excel Sheet file. In Body, you MUST select Add Dynamic Content and add the value WebURL. If you do not include this in the email body, recipients will not have a way to download the Excel file.

 

I hope you enjoyed this walkthrough of my content flow. If you liked what you saw today, let me know! Leave a message below, Message me on the Power Users Community (@mackenzie_lyng), connect with me on Twitter, or email me directly!

 

Until next time! ?

 

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Automate emailing a weekly .xls file from a SharePoint List. appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Webinar 12/7 -Using Microsoft Flow to automate a B2B approval process by Paul Schaeflein http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/dec7-webinar-how-to-automate-business-process/ Mon, 04 Dec 2017 17:57:35 +0000 Out of the box, Microsoft Flow allows you to connect to many cloud-services. But what about your line-of-business systems? With a JSON-capable web service, your employees can use Flow to automate their processes without development skills. Come learn how to connect Flow, APIs, Azure AD and Office 365 in this demo-heavy session.

Attend Live on Dec 7 at 10am PST!

The post Intermediate | Webinar 12/7 -Using Microsoft Flow to automate a B2B approval process by Paul Schaeflein appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hello Flow Community!

Recently, Paul Schaeflein was asked how to automate a process to request and approve external users having access to content inside an Office 365 Group.   In this webinar Paul will go through how to use Microsoft Flow, Azure B2B and Microsoft’s Cloud services to solve this scenario.   Out of the box, Microsoft Flow allows you to connect to many cloud-services. But what about your line-of-business systems? With a JSON-capable web service, your employees can use Flow to automate their processes without development skills. Come learn how to connect Flow, APIs, Azure AD and Office 365 in this demo-heavy session. 

Note: With PowerApps and PowerBI adoption of B2B this scenario will become mainstream.

When: 12/7/2017 10AM PST

Subscribe to watch https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AIImcUZyP7U

 

 

Paul Schaeflein is a solution architect/developer with more than three decades experience in architecting, designing and developing software solutions. This experience covers a vast range of technologies, languages and industries. Paul is an independent consultant, helping organizations of all sizes with their application development, ALM and SharePoint/Office 365 projects. Paul is a top-rated speaker, having presented at SharePoint Evolutions, the Microsoft SharePoint Conference and TechEd conferences, as well as user groups. In recognition of these community efforts, he is recognized as a Most Valuable Professional (MVP). Paul has a blog at http://www.schaeflein.net/blog, and is active on Twitter as @paulschaeflein. You can also reach him at paul@schaeflein.net.

The post Intermediate | Webinar 12/7 -Using Microsoft Flow to automate a B2B approval process by Paul Schaeflein appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified when new Connectors are deployed in your Flow Environment http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/new-flow-connector-notifications/ Wed, 15 Nov 2017 16:03:21 +0000 A recent ask from customers is to be notified when new connectors are provisioned within a Microsoft Flow environment. These requests may be related to updating Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies or provide opportunities to take advantage of new connectors to drive more value for their business. In this blog post we will walk you through how you can take advantage of new capabilities using the Flow Management connector to gain operational insights into your Flow environments.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified when new Connectors are deployed in your Flow Environment appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
A recent ask from customers is to be notified when new connectors are provisioned within a Microsoft Flow environment. These requests may be related to updating Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies or provide opportunities to take advantage of new connectors to drive more value for their business. For example, we recently released the popular ServiceNow and Workday connectors. Customers were very interested to know when these connectors were becoming available. While our team is consistent in blogging about new capabilities, we have had requests for more direct communication about these types of events.

Last week, the Flow team blogged about a new Flow Management connector. This connector provides many useful operations for Flow Administrators and power users. Using this connector we are able to retrieve a list of all connectors within a specific Flow environment and send email notifications to interested stakeholders when a new connector has been deployed. We have created a template to accelerate the amount of time it takes to use this functionality, but will walk through the steps to create this flow below.

We want to check every day to see if a new connector has been deployed to our Flow environment. The best way to do this is to use the Recurrence trigger and then set the Interval to 1 and Frequency to Day.

The next step we want to perform is to retrieve all connectors within our environment. We can accomplish this by using the List Connectors operation from the Flow Management connector. To add this connector to your flow, click on the + button followed by clicking on Add an action label and then search for Flow Management – List Connectors. With the List Connectors action on our flow, we can now configure it to target a specific environment that we are interested in.

Note: within this dropdown, you will only see environments that you have access to.

The List Connectors action is going to return an array that contains all connectors within the environment that we specify. Since we are only interested in new connectors, we want to filter our result set. We can perform this filtering by using the Filter array action. Our From input parameter needs to be set to our value that is being returned from the List Connectors action.

Now we also need to provide filter criteria so that we can exclude connectors that were previously deployed. In order to achieve this filtering, we are going to use an expression that takes advantage of the ticks() function. The ticks function takes in a datetime string and will convert it into the number of ticks since 1 January 1601. As part of the first ticks call, we will pass in the date created value for the connector. As a result, our expression (on left hand side) is: ticks(item()?[‘properties’]?[‘createdTime’]). Next we want to see if this value is greater than the the ticks of a previous day. Therefore, our expression on the right hand side is: ticks(addDays(utcNow(), -1, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)). Within this expression we are using a couple additional function calls. Assuming that this process runs every day, we want to see if anything has changed since we ran this process yesterday. To accomplish this, we use the addDays function and provide the current timestamp in UTC and –1 as a value that represents yesterday.

In order to track the number of new connectors deployed in our environment, which we will also use when sending email digests, we need to create a couple variables. The first variable we are going to create is called NewConnectorCount. This variable is going to be an Integer and will have an initial value of 0.

The other variable we want to initialize is called Email Body. We will use this variable to store our content for the email digest we send at the end of the process. 

We now have a filtered list of connectors that have been deployed since our last run, which would have been yesterday. In order to provide a rich experience, we will use HTML to wrap around connector details returned from our Filter array action. To do this we will use an Apply to each loop using the Body returned from the Filter array action as our input. 

Within this loop, add a Compose action where we can add HTML markup around the Connector Display Name and Connection Created Time values. Below our Compose shape, we will increment our NewConnectorCount variable which will allow us to provide a running total of the amount of connectors that have been added.

Next, we want to construct emails based upon whether or not new connectors were found. We will use a condition for this purpose and check to see if our NewConnectorCount variable is greater than 0. If this is true, we will add some HTML markup to our Email Body variable to make our email more presentable. We will include the number of new connectors found by including the NewConnectorCount variable and we will aggregate our list of HTML-enriched connector details using the join(outputs(‘Create_HTML_Row’),”) expression. If there are no connectors found, we will update the same Email Body variable, but with a simpler message that indicates 0 Connectors have been added to our environment.

Our final step is to actually send the email using the Office 365 connector. Because we used variables earlier for our connector count and email body, we can create one connection and Send an email action and use those variables as dynamic content for our email.

We can now save our Flow and it will run for the first time. 

If you end up with no new connectors within your results, you can modify the ticks(addDays(utcNow(), -1, ‘MM/dd/yyyy’)) expression in the Filter array action. to include a wider window (i.e. –7). If there were any new connectors deployed within the past 7 days, they should show up in the email digest.

In this blog post we explored the Flow Management connector and discovered how to use the List Connectors operation in order to provide some operational insights into our Flow environment. We are continuing to invest in our Flow Admin capabilities and this is another tool available to apply governance processes and create opportunities for your business by using the latest connectors. If you have ideas for Admin related templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forum

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified when new Connectors are deployed in your Flow Environment appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified immediately when your flow has errors or failures http://approjects.co.za/?big=en-us/power-platform/blog/power-automate/handle-errors-in-flow/ Tue, 31 Oct 2017 08:52:19 +0000 For this Flow of the week, Program Manager, Sunay Vaishnav will show you how you can stay on top of flows and be notified of failures in real time. Be sure to read and see how you can use flows for business critical processes.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified immediately when your flow has errors or failures appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>
Hey Flow Fans!

If you have been using Microsoft Flow for a while and have automated your business processes, chances are that your flow has failed or errored out due to some unforeseen circumstances or bugs in the logic of your flow.

One of the key principles of software engineering is to consider and handle as many failure cases as you can, but to also be able to detect, respond and recover from failures as soon as you can, when they happen. These principles can be transferred to business processes that are automated using Microsoft Flow. Today, for Flow of the week – I am going to show you how to stay on top of mission critical business processes that you have automated using Flow, and how to get notified or perform recovery steps in case a flow fails or errors out. Let’s jump into the details, and look at the how, since we have already established the what.

I have a flow that copies over the images I upload to a folder in my OneDrive account to my Azure Storage account and emails me back a link to that image, so I can use the link in my blogs. Pretty cool right?

Imagine if I upload an image to my OneDrive folder and for some reason the automated email doesn’t show up. I don’t want to waste time waiting, instead I go over to the Flow portal and discover that something went wrong with my flow. Now if only, I had been notified after the first image I uploaded that my flow was failing due to expired Outlook credentials – I wouldn’t have uploaded the other 10 images. Now with the recently released “Configure run-after” feature you can catch such errors and react to them programmatically.

For my flow, I am going to “configure run-after” on the last action, and if the last action doesn’t execute successfully – then I will send a push notification, notifying me of the flow not able to run successfully.

In the image below, you can see that I have configured my flow to send a push notification with a link to the run details page – this helps me quickly figure out what went wrong.

Now, in this case the “send email” action failed, but if any of the previous steps had failed, it will cause the penultimate action to be skipped and which in turn results in the last action (send notification) being executed.

           

 

 

That’s it for this time. If you have any questions, suggestions or feedback about flow, please feel free to post below in the comments, in our community, or reach out on Twitter.

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Get notified immediately when your flow has errors or failures appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

]]>