Microsoft Flow & Office 365

Are you someone who is always on the move and have made the shift to using cloud-based apps to handle your business? Do you spend a lot of time doing repetitive tasks like, saving important file attachments you receive from your clients on Outlook 365 to your local hard drive? Do you need to track files that are being added to important folders by other team members? Do you want to receive a notification when a very important client emails you, but are busy coordinating tasks with team members on Slack?

You can automate these repetitive, everyday tasks and start paying attention to other important tasks. Microsoft Flow helps you do just that by linking different cloud-based apps, collecting data from them, synchronizing files, sending you notifications, and carrying out many other tasks. MS Flow works on the principle of setting up a trigger to initiate an action. The linked apps talk to each other when a particular trigger goes off and then perform the specified action. For example, your clients might be tweeting feedbacks about your brand using a particular hashtag. It is important to you to track them and keep a copy of the same in your database for sentiment analysis later. You can thus, use Microsoft Flow to create and automate a workflow that will put a copy of each tweet with that hashtag in the database every time a client tweets, without any intervention of a developer. This automated workflow is called a flow.

Apart from using MS Flow to improve your productivity by getting automate routine activities, you can also use advanced integration tools such as LogicApps to create API connectors and gateways for custom solutions. Once you set up a flow, you can use the Microsoft Flow Admin Center to manage the flow from a desktop or a mobile device. As an admin you can manage users, their permissions, roles, etc. The various apps and services that you can link with MS Flow are Office 365, Dynamic 365, PowerApps, Dropbox, Facebook, OneDrive for Business, Salesforce, Twitter, SQL Server, and many more.

Features of Microsoft Flow

MS flow helps you to:

• Create flows to get notifications, manage your flows, and trigger manual flows
• Use different connectors to exchange data between SharePoint and various MS and third-party services.
• Create new items and documents and also update them in SharePoint Online. Also send notifications for it.
• Creating custom APIs
• Use Twilio to support text messages
• Use flow mobile app for iOS or Android
• Use blob storage, resource manager and DocumentDB in Azure services and connect to PowerBI
• Create environments, manage permission and set up Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies using the Microsoft Flow’s Admin Center
• Introduce more workflow features in Office 365 and Dynamics 365
• Save hashtag tweets on a SharePoint list.
• Create CRM entities based on the SharePoint list
• Ease sharing of files in between SharePoint and OneDrive, Dropbox and SharePoint

MS Flow for Businesses

MS offers you some really useful tools to make business operations more efficient and use the available resources in the best way possible. These tools are Office 365’s cloud services, PowerApps and Flow. PowerApps helps you to build web and mobile business applications using templates without requiring you to write complicated codes. You can create apps that are customized according to different departments such as accounting, sales, customer service, administration, and HR. It helps you to develop mobile apps so that your business can improve processes like providing estimates, providing support to customers, etc. 

Industries of different domains such as manufacturing, IT, pharmaceuticals and energy can really benefit from using MS Flow to streamline their business processes and reduce the efforts and time spent on routine tasks. One of the reasons why these organizations find it difficult to find a solution to such common problem is the cost and complexity of deploying software systems. Thus, MS Flow comes across as a good choice to simply sign up and use.

Getting Started with MS Flow

To give you an overview, MS Flow provides you with a number of templates that you can use right away to create a workflow. You can choose from different types of templates for data collection, sending a notification, using social media, improving productivity, using mobile devices, etc. If you can't find a template that is suitable for a task, you can create a customized workflow.

So, to start using MS Flow, you first need to sign up to Microsoft Flow, subscribe to MS Office 365, get a web browser like Chrome or Safari and an email Id. If you don’t have a Microsoft account yet, you will have to create one using your existing email id.

Logging in on MS Flow

If this is the first time you are using an online Microsoft product, you will have to sign up for MS flow at flow.microsoft.com. You can sign up for free here by entering your email address. If you have been using online Microsoft product, simply sign in using the same email address as you use for other products.

Once you sign up, you can start using the free plan for MS Flow. If you want to use additional features that come with the paid versions, you can opt for Microsoft Flow Plan 1 or Plan 2. if your organization has already subscribed for Office 365 or Dynamics 365, then you automatically get access to these additional features on MS Flow.

Creating a Flow Using a Template

Once you log in to MS Flow, the Start page is displayed. It displays a list of templates that are available. You can choose to create a new flow using any of these templates with a ready-made flow. You can also learn more about MS Flow from this page.

Now, you can select the template according to your requirements. Here, we have selected the Get updates from the Flow Blog template. This takes you to the next page where MS Flow will connect the RSS feed of the MS Flow blog to send a push notification to your mobile device every time a new blog is posted. Both the RSS and notifications will be logged in with your Microsoft account. You now simply need to click on the Create Flow button to create this flow.

Creating a Flow from blank

If you can't find a template that suits your needs, you can create a flow from the scratch. Click on the My Flows tab and then select the Create from blank option.

You are then taken to a page from where you can create a flow from blank. You can either chose to learn more about doing so or directly try creating one. It also lists the most popular triggers that you can use to create your flow. You can begin by clicking the Create from blank option on this page.

This opens up a page where you can select connectors and actions to create your flow.  Here, will create a flow to send us an email on Office 365 Outlook every time a modification is made to a file in the Document folder on OneDrive. Thus, we have selected the OneDrive connector and the action as sending an email to Office 365 Outlook.

Once, we select the action as Office 365 Outlook - Send an email we need to login to Office 365 Outlook to connect it to our flow and simply click the Create Flow button to create this flow.