New “When an item or file is modified” trigger.

With SharePoint lists and files, earlier you needed to rely on the “When an item is created or modified” trigger to get changes to an item. This meant that you had to add complex logic within your flow in order to get the exact event that took place within the list.

We’re now introducing a new dedicated “When an item or file is modified” trigger that lets you filter to just the list or file modifications, making it much simpler to create a flow that’s tuned to the right events.

New “Get changes to an item or file (properties only)” action.

The new trigger can be paired with the new “Get changes to an item or file (properties only) action” to get the exact set of changes that might have occurred to a list or file.

The action outputs helpful tokens such as “Has Colum Changed:<Column name>” that can be used to filter your flow to just the column(s) you care about

Prerequisites

Note that in order for the action to function you need to enable versioning for your list or library.

Tutorial video

Here’s a video that walks through the new action and trigger in detail along with a sample scenario where you can use modifications to a list to notify you in Teams and create a work item in Azure DevOps

Check out our SharePoint connector documentation or the SharePoint Business apps and process automation documentation for more information on these new triggers and actions and all the other great processes you can enable with SharePoint and Power Automate. We are excited to hear about what you build!

The post Run a flow when a SharePoint column is modified appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’re happy to announce that you can now associate approvals to SharePoint hub join requests! With this change users can:

• Easily setup an approval workflow directly from the SharePoint hub site settings
• Or Create their own hub join process using the new, Approve a hub site join request and Cancel a hub site join request actions for the SharePoint connector

Adding and approval flow to a SharePoint hub

Hub site admins can directly associate an approval flow with a hub from the SharePoint hub site settings page. Choosing the “Require approval for associated sites to join” prompts the user to create a flow for an approval and preselects a default approval workflow, inline with a prompt to specify who your approvers are.

Submitting a new approval request

From then on when a user is adding a site to a hub, they will be prompted that an approval is required along with a message to associate with the approval.

The approvers get notified with an email along with an action to approve the flow, or alternatively they can check for pending approvals directly from the hub site setting page as well.

Below are the details on the actual flow that’s generated and you can always modify the steps in the flow to better suite your organizations needs.

To support and enable hub join approvals work, the SharePoint connector introduces a new trigger and three new actions:

• Trigger
  • When a site has requested to join a hub site
• Actions
  • Approve hub join request
  • Cancel hub join request
  • Join a hub site

Note: While it is possible to build a custom hub join approval flow from a blank flow, it is recommended to create the hub join approval flow from SharePoint. Creating the approval flow from SharePoint will ensure the flow is set up with the right parameters and permissions.

You can find more details on the new action on the Sharepoint connector documentation page and as always do share your feedback on the Power Automate Community Forum.

Happy Automating!

The post Approval workflows for adding a site to a SharePoint hub appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This weeks Flow of the week is written by April Dunnam. April is owner and lead consultant at ThriveFast, a Microsoft Partner focusing on building business solutions with SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow. She is an active blogger and speaker, blogging under the name SharePoint Siren. Check out her YouTube Channel and follow her on Twitter HERE. Also, be sure to leave some questions or comments below and she will be happy to answer them!

The Goal:

It’s Halloween and you still haven’t picked out a Halloween costume.  We want to find a way to make Flow do the work and pick out a Halloween costume for us!

Requirements:

1. A Flow subscription
2. A SharePoint list that contains a variety of possible costume options
3. A PowerApps subscription (optional) – For this article, I decided to create a PowerApp to kick off the Flow and return the costume.  This isn’t a requirement though as you could accomplish the same result with just a Flow button if you wanted to.

Setting up the Costume Database

The first step is to set up and configure the SharePoint list.  You’ll want to create a new SharePoint list called Costumes using the Custom list template.  In addition to the already included Title column add three other columns Single Line of Text Columns:  Gender, Category, Image.  Populate the list with some of your favorite Halloween costumes and tag what Gender and Category it falls under (Superhero, Time Period, Horror, etc).  You can also include an Image of the costume so we can see that in PowerApps.  

Creating the Flow

In Flow, create a Blank Flow and rename it to HalloweenHelper.

For your Trigger, Select PowerApps.  If you don’t want to use PowerApps then use Flow Button as your Trigger.

To retreive a random costume, we need to add a “SharePoint – Get List Items” Action.  We will point this action to the site where we created our Costumes list.  In the Filter Query of the Get List Items Action we will input the following formula so that we only return costumes that fit the selected gender and category:

Now that we have a list of the costumes that meet our requirements we need to get that down to one randomly selected item.  To do that, we will add a “Compose” action.  In the input for the compose action, we will utilize Flow’s rand function which let’s us get a random item.  The formula will look like this:

body(‘GetCostumes’)?[‘value’][rand(0,length(body(‘GetCostumes’)?[‘value’]))]

Now that we have a random item, we need to pass that item back to our PowerApp.  To do that, add a “Respond to PowerApps” action.  If you are using a Flow button instead of a PowerApp then you would insert a “Notify” action.  

In the Repond to PowerApps action, add two inputs:  SelectedCostume and SelectedImage.  

Set the value of the SelectedCostume output to the following expression:  outputs(‘GetRandom’)[‘Title’]

Set the value of the SelectedImage output to this expression: outputs(‘GetRandom’)[‘Column4’]

Rename your Flow and Save.

The PowerApp

For the PowerApp side of things, create a blank phone layout app.  On the landing page, insert two buttons that allow you to select the gender for the costume.  On click of each of those buttons,  use the Set function to set a variable which holds the selected gender. 

The next screen is a gallery of all of the categories to choose from.  Once a categoy is selected, we want that to call and execute the Flow to get a random costume. If you want to call a Flow from PowerApps, click on the OnSelect property of the button that you want to use to execute the Flow.  Select the “Action” bar in the ribbon then select “Flows”.  A list of all the Flow’s with PowerApps as a trigger will show up on the right hand side.  Select the Flow you just created and pass in the gender and category options.  

The last screen is the one that shows you the result.  We will just need to insert an image control and a label.  Set the Image property of the image control to varResult.selectedimage and set the Text property of the label to varResult.SelectedCostume.  

Conclusion

To see how it all comes together in action, check out the video below:

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Halloween Costume Decisions Made Easy With Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today I am excited to announce the FREE and ONLINE Microsoft Flow Conference, December 12, 2018 from 9am to 1:30PM MST

(Mark Your Calendar Now!)

There are Two ways for you to participate,

We would love for you to Attend and watch the sessions, and to do that, please register HERE

Also though, We would love for you to submit a session and join us as a Speaker! To submit your session, please follow the link HERE

If you have any questions, please dont hesitate to ask in the comments!

The post Join the Microsoft Flow Online Conference – Dec 12, 2018 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

I am back with another Flow of the week, and this time, its to show you how we built a Flow that actually helps us manage the Flow of the week blogs… So im writing a blog about blog writer queue moderation, using Microsoft Flow.. on the Flow blog itself.. Its like… Flow-blog-ception!

This Flow will show you how to create a set of automated reminder emails based on previously set dates. Its not too hard, but its highly useful!

So first things first, if you prefer to consume this in video form, Go ahead and check it out below:

And now for the rest of you who would like to follow a step by step, please proceed onward!

First, you need to create a SharePoint list, formatted like the following:

Now, Head on over to https://flow.microsoft.com and get signed in, then click on My Flows and then + Create From Blank

For your Trigger, search for When an item is created and select the SharePoint action and then fill it in with your SharePoint site and selected List like seen below:

And now lets Add an action and search for and add a Compose action and then select the expression builder and insert the following expression 

And then lets add another Compose action and put the following expression in it – 

Ok, are you with me? Great! Now we need to add a set of Parallel actions. To do that, First, click on the + Sign under your second compose and choose Add an action and choose Delay Until and then select the SharePoint Dynamic Content for the Reminder 1 Column Date

Next, click the + and select Add an action and search & choose Send an Email and then customize it to your liking to let the user know that this is their 5 day reminder

As you can see, in the body of my email i am using the two outputs from the compose actions above to help give more info to the user.

Now, click the + above this action and choose Add a parallel branch like so:

From there, choose add an action and again select Delay Until – but this time choose the Reminder 2 dynamic content from the SharePoint data and then add another send an email action, and set them up as the 3 day reminder. Like so – 

And then do the same for a 1 day Reminder and a PUBLISH Day reminder and that should give you a flow that looks something like this!

And if you have set it up like me, with HTML formatting in your emails, you should automatically send out nicely formatted reminder meails that looks something like this:

Here is one, and then another below:

And so as you can see, the tone gets a bit more encouraging with each email, asking the user to be sure and participate in what they signed up for.

Thanks so much for following our Flow of the week series! IF you have any questions or comments please leave them below, or reach out to us on Twitter or in the Flow Community

Later friends!

– Jon

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: How we use a Flow to manage the Flow of the Week blogs appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this blog post we are going to explore some popular OData filter expressions that you can use with some of our most popular connectors including SQL Server, Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online.

Scenario #1: Get Rows from SQL Server and filter on Customer Name

We have the following Azure SQL database with a table that contains many work orders. From Microsoft Flow, we want to return only rows where the Customer Name is equal to ‘Contoso’

Inside of Microsoft Flow, we can add a SQL Server – Get Rows action. After providing a ​Table name we also have the ability to provide a ​Filter Query​.  Inside this textbox we will provide a statement of CustomerName eq ‘Contoso’. The breakdown of this syntax is we need to provide the name of the field in the source system (i.e. SQL Server), followed by an operator. In this case we want to use = which is represented as eq in OData. Don’t use the = symbol otherwise you will get a runtime error. Lastly, we need to provide a value that we want to filter on. In this case we want to filter on Contoso.​ Since it is a string, we need to wrap it in single quotes ‘ ‘.

For the purposes of this blog post, we will wrap the results in HTML and send them via Office 365 Outlook connector so we can verify our results.

After the flow executes, our we will see our results rendered successfully and only records with a Customer Name of Contoso are displayed.

Scenario #2: Get Rows from SQL Server and filter on date

In this scenario we want to filter out older records and only retrieve records that have a Work Order Create Date that is less than 30 days old. To accomplish this we will also use a flow expression that will calculate the date, 30 days ago. We will then look for any records that have a Work Order Create Date that is greater than this date. The complete expression is: WorkOrderCreatedTime gt addDays(utcnow(‘yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ’),-30). In this scenario, WorkOrderCreatedTime is our source field, gt ​represents our ‘greater than’ operator and addDays(utcnow(‘yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ’),-30) will calculate a date of 30 days prior.

The results only include records that are less than 30 days old.

Scenario #3: List Records from Dynamics 365 using an AND clause

 We will now move onto the Dynamics 365 connector where we can also use OData to filter out records. In this case we want to want to retrieve only records where the Account Name is Contoso Hospital AND the City is Phoenix​.

​To accomplish this we will use an AND​ clause that will let us join two statements. The first being our (Account) name being equal to ‘Contoso Hospital‘ and secondly, our address1_city being equal to ‘Phoenix’. Our complete statement is name eq ‘Contoso Hospital’ and address1_city eq ‘Phoenix’.

When we execute our flow, we will see results only related to the Contoso Hospital in Phoenix.

Scenario #4: List Records from SharePoint Online that Starts With

​In our final scenario, we are going to filter records from a custom SharePoint list. In this particular example, we have 4 records within a SharePoint List and we want to filter on all sites that start with the word ‘Contoso’​​.

From a flow perspective, we will include the following OData query within our SharePoint action: startswith(Title,’Contoso’) where Title ​is the name of the column that we want to filter on and ​Contoso​ is the value we want to the column to start with.

​When our flow runs, we will discover that only the Site Names that begin​ the word Contoso are included in our results.

Conclusion

​In this blog post we covered 4 different OData queries across 3 different connectors including SQL Server, Dynamics 365 and SharePoint Online. While the syntax is a little different than what you are used to when using T-SQL, the power available to you unlocks new ways to filter your data in Microsoft Flow. Using OData to filter at the data source will reduce execution times as it reduces the need to loop through data sets in order to find specific records. So not only is this more efficient by sending smaller messages around, but it will also allow your flows to run faster.

For more examples of OData filter expressions, please check out the following Microsoft page.

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Filtering Data with OData appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Let’s imagine that you’re the Chief Compliance Officer at the Legal department at Contoso Inc. (as most of you know, Contoso is the world’s largest imaginary corporation). You want to send out an approval request whenever a new document is uploaded to the Legal folder in a SharePoint document library. To inform approvers and ensure everyone has visibility into any feedback, you want to notify your teammates on Microsoft Teams. With the Flow integration in Teams, you can quickly create a flow and boost your team’s productivity. Let’s learn how.

Install the Flow app

To get started, install the Flow app from the Teams’ Store. To access the Store, click on the icon at the bottom of the left-hand navigation bar. Then, choose the Flow app from Top picks or type “Flow” in the search box.

Create a new flow in Teams

Once you’ve installed the app, you’ll notice four tabs – Conversation, Flows, Approvals, and About. The Conversation tab enables you to interact with the FlowBot, the Flows tab allows you to create new flows and manage existing ones, and the Approvals tab lists your received and sent approval requests. Click on the Flow tab and Sign in.

Then, click on the Create from template button.

You can choose from several templates, connecting your Team to services like SharePoint, Microsoft Forms, Dynamics, Twitter, PowerBI, and UserVoice. Select the template titled Start approval for new documents and notify via Teams.

Clicking on the template, will open the Flow designer.

For the trigger, When a file is created, select the SharePoint site and library hosting the data for your team.  For the Post message actions, select the Team and Channel for the Legal department. Finally, enter the names of your teammates for the Start approval action.

Note – All of the SharePoint files triggers and actions are usable for your team’s file library as the underlying data source is SharePoint.

Save the flow by clicking the Create flow button.  

Do your approvals in Teams

Let’s see our flow in action. In the Legal channel, navigate to the Files tab and upload a new file.

Notice that the Flow is immediately triggered and a message is posted in the Legal channel asking the team to approve the newly uploaded file. This message matches the values we entered while creating the flow. The message is posted on behalf of the flow creator.

Click on the ellipsis to see your personal apps and switch to the Flow app. Now navigate to the Approvals tab. You’ll notice a pending approval for the newly uploaded file.

Once you’ve reviewed the file, click on Approve or Reject, enter a comment, and click Confirm.

Bam! A new message is posted to the Legal channel with details about the approver and his/her comments.

Use the bot to launch Flows

The Flow integration in Teams also includes a Bot that enables you to run manual flows. Currently, this is limited to flows that run on a schedule, with support for all manual flows coming soon.

Continuing with our earlier example of the Legal department at Contoso, let’s imagine that we have a flow that runs daily and posts a message to the Team reminding everyone to review certain files for due diligence. You can check out this blog post on how to create such a flow.

Using the Flow bot, we can run this flow immediately. Head over to the Conversation tab. To see the list of flows you can run, enter the command List flows.

Once you get back a list of flows, enter the command run flow followed by the index of the flow you want to run. For example, run flow 1.

You’ll notice the Flow immediately runs and posts a message in the Legal channel.

This is just the beginning

We see our integration in Teams as just the beginning of a long journey in making you and your team more productive. We’d like to seek your help in shaping the roadmap, so please leave us suggestions below and post on our Ideas forum. We hope you enjoy this new update and stay tuned for more!

The post Introducing Flow Integration in Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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… 

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… ​ 

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.

Today, we are going to be looking at one of the common asked questions by our customers, sending multiple attachments on a single email. To illustrate this, we will be creating an item on a SharePoint list and attach a few files to it. Our flow will trigger, on this new item being added. The flow will get all the attachments on the item, construct an array of all the attachments and finally we will use this “array of attachments” and send it out on an email. Let’s dig in to it, shall we?

Let start by adding a trigger – “When an item is created” and selecting the correct SharePoint Site and List.

Please ensure that you already have SP List created that allows storing multiple attachments on the items in it.

After adding the trigger, we need to fetch all the attachments added to the newly created list item. We should, hence, add the “Get attachments” action. The Site name and List name remain the same from the previous step. We want to then pipe the output “ID” from the trigger, to the input ‘ID’ field.

Now, that we have a handle on all the attachments – we must store these in a single array. Let’s start by initializing an array.

Once the array is initialized, the next step is fetch and store the attachment contents in the array. This is a bit tricky to setup, so be careful to follow the instructions to the T.

• Start by adding a “apply to each loop”, then chose the “body” output from the “Get Attachments”

• Next add “Get attachment content” action inside the loop. The SP site name and list name don’t change.

  • For the ID field – select ID output from the “When an item is created” trigger

  • For the file identifier field – Select the Id output from the “Get Attachments” action.

• Next, we want to start adding to the array we just initialized. Set it up as shown below

Let’s revisit what we have setup so far –

• For a new item created – we are first fetching all the attachments that were added to the item.

• The “Get attachments” action returns the file names of the attachment and a corresponding “file identifier”. It does NOT return the contents of the attachment.

• The attachment content is fetched separately using the “Get attachment content” action.

• Our array, contains the attachment item with two properties – Name and ContentBytes. We are assigning the DisplayName, retrieved from “Get Attachments” action to the Name property and the Attachment Content, retrieved from “Get Attachment Contents” action to the ContentBytes property.

Now for the final step, we need to send the email with the attachments array we just constructed.

This step is straightforward, add an action to send an email – using your favorite email connector and pipe in the attachmentArray output to the attachments input field.

That’s it! Once you have successfully created and saved your flow, be sure to test it by exercising the trigger. You should see an email like as shown in your inbox with multiple attachments sent on a single email.

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 Advanced | Flow of the Week: Send multiple attachments on a single email appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this post, we’ll walk you through an example of how to create and customize a flow that uses the launch panel’s capabilities using the For a selected item trigger. We’ll also demonstrate how you can enable other members of your organization to run this flow using run-only permissions.

Create a flow

Let’s imagine that you work at a travel agency called Contoso Adventures and you store images used in your brochures in a SharePoint document library. Using the Flow launch panel, you can quickly collect feedback from your colleagues by runing a flow on-demand that posts a message to Microsoft Teams with a link to the selected item. To get started, simply select the Flow menu followed by the Create a flow button. 

This will open a pane on the right-hand side of the window listing several templates you can choose from, enabling you to connect your SharePoint data to OneDrive, Teams, Yammer, Planner, and more. Select the template titled Post a message to Teams for a selected item.

Selecting the template will open a new tab in the Microsoft Flow site with additional details about the template. Click Continue.

In the flow, you’ll notice a new trigger for SharePoint called “For a selected item.” The trigger is modeled after Flow’s button trigger, allowing you to run flows on demand and capture additional inputs that will be populated by the invoker of the Flow. These inputs can be of type Text (either a single choice or a list of options), File, or Email. We’ll learn more about customizing inputs later in this post.

For now, create the flow by specifying a Team and Channel to post your message to.  If you click on Edit, you can customize the content of the message to be posted. By default, we include the text description entered by the invoker (Message) followed by a link to the selected item.

Save the flow by clicking the Create flow button.

Run a flow using the Flow Launch Panel

Back in your SharePoint document library, select a document and click on the Flow menu. Then, choose the newly created flow – “Post a message to Teams for a selected item.”

Clicking on the flow, opens the Flow Launch Panel. The first time you run this flow, you’ll be asked to confirm your credentials. You can also learn more about what this flow does. Click Continue.

Now, enter a message to send to your team, requesting feedback. Click Run flow.

Voila! A new message is posted to Teams on your behalf including the note you added in SharePoint and a link to the selected item.

Share a flow with run-only permissions

Now that you’ve created the flow, you can share it with colleagues either by adding them as an owner of the flow or as a run-only user. The latter allows you to maintain ownership of the flow, while enabling your colleagues to run it. In Flow, head over to My Flows and choose the Post a message to Teams for a selected item.

Under Manage Run-Only Users, click on the Add another person button.

Here, you can enter individuals or AD security groups. We will be adding support for Office 365 groups in the future.  For each connector used in the flow, you can decide whether the invoker should bring their own credentials (“Provided by run-only user”) or use your credentials (“Use this connection”). Click Save to add the user as a run-only user.

Customize the flow

Let’s customize the flow you created earlier and ask the invoker whether they want to send the selected file for review to their manager or post it to Teams. In the For a selected item trigger, let’s add a text  input called Destination. Let’s replace the hint text for this input with a custom message “Select Email to manager or Post to Teams”.

Then, click on the ellipsis followed by the Add a list of options button.

For the first option, enter “Post to Teams” and for the second option, enter “Email to manager.”

Now, let’s add a condition after the Get item step that checks whether the Destination is equal to Post to Teams. And, let’s drag and drop the Post a message action into the Yes branch.

Let’s finish off our flow by adding a Get manager and a Send an email action in the No branch. You can get the Invoker’s email, OID, or display name by referencing dynamic content such as User email, User id, and User name respectively.

Now when you invoke the flow in SharePoint, you’ll be asked to select a Destination and the flow will act (post a message to Teams or send your manager an email) depending on your selection.

We hope you enjoy this new update. If you have ideas for templates or other feedback, please leave us comments below or post on our Community forums.

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