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.

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

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

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

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

Planning phase

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

Link to the planning phase 

Designing phase

This section is split to two sections:

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

Link to the designing phase

Making phase

This section is split to two sections:

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

Link to the making phase

Testing phase

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

Link to the testing phase

Deploying and refining phase

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

Link to the deploying and refining phase

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

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

Now to see how the full solution is built, Click THIS LINK and download the full blog post walkthrough!

The post Advanced | Flow of the Week: Creating an AtBot ChatBot connected to Dynamics 365 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This weeks Flow of the week is written by Flow & PowerApps MVP Daniel Christian. Daniel is a rockstar community member, Lego superstar and all around problem solver 101. Check out his YouTube Channel and follow him on Twitter HERE. Also, be sure to leave some questions or comments below and he will be happy to answer them!

Introduction:

Recording your travel mileage is a crucial and currently a manual process to get travel reimbursement, however, now thanks to Flow and the Bing Maps connector we can automate this process as well. There are two Flows, one is for departures and the second for arrival but both of them update the single row in the Excel spreadsheet. The Flow is smart enough to see which was the last entry submitted by the user that only has the departure information and is pending arrival.

Requirements:

Bing Maps Connector:

Excel spreadsheet:

Flow #1: Depart

Flow #2: Arrive

Conclusion:

The post Advanced | Flow of The Week: Record your travel mileage using Flow and Bing Maps 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.

This isnt technically a Flow of the Week as it wont walk you through building a single Flow, but it will walk you through the Flow Website, the different ways to learn and get started and also points you to a great example of a first Flow to build at the end of the video.

This is a great 100 level introduction to the tool for those of you who are looking to just get started, and its also a great resource to share with coworkers or friends you know, who you might want to introduce to Flow!

Please feel free to leave any questions or comments below!

-Jon

The post Beginner | Flow of The Week: An Introduction to Microsoft Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

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

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

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

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

There are three parts of this flow.

1. Get the news article feed

2. Create an approval step

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

Get the news article feeds

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

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

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

Ok, this is easy, isn’t it?

Ready for step 2.

Create an approval step for each feed item

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

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

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

Sending a tweet from Microsoft Flow

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

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

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

Summary

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

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

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The post Beginner | Flow of the Week: Planner Approval Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.