Introducing Microsoft Flow: Automating Workflows Between Apps and Services
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About this ebook
The second half of the book continues with managing connections and gateways, where you’ll cover the configuration, creation, and deletion of connectors and how to connect to a data gateway. The final topic is Flow administration and techniques to manage the environment.
After reading this book, you will be able to create and manage Flow from desktop, laptop, or mobile devices and connect with multiple services such as SharePoint, Twitter, Facebook, and other networking sites.
What You Will Learn
- Create flows from built-in and blank templates
- Manage flows, connections, and gateways
- Create approvals, connect with multiple services, and use mobile apps
Administrators and those who are interested in creating automated workflows using templates and connecting with multiple services without writing a single line of code.
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Introducing Microsoft Flow - Vijai Anand Ramalingam
© Vijai Anand Ramalingam 2018
Vijai Anand RamalingamIntroducing Microsoft Flowhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4842-3630-7_1
1. Introduction to Microsoft Flow
Vijai Anand Ramalingam¹
(1)
New Jersey, USA
In this chapter, you will learn the following:
What Microsoft Flow is
What is required to work with Flow
How to create a flow using a template
How to create a flow from scratch
What Is Microsoft Flow?
Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based service that allows users to create automated workflows across multiple applications and services. "Work less, do more." Microsoft Flow provides features that help line-of-business users to improve productivity through automation. Previously, there was no way for these apps to communicate with each other; Flow provides a way to connect with multiple services and automate tasks. Flow allows power users to create flows based on certain triggers and actions on their own, all with zero coding skills. For example, you can save your email attachments to a SharePoint document library. Flow can be accessed via web browsers (it supports Microsoft Edge and the current versions of Chrome and Safari) and mobile apps.
The Flow home page shows the key features that are available such as templates, popular services, an overview of Flow, and more; see Figure 1-1.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig1_HTML.jpgFigure 1-1
Featured templates and popular services
Figure 1-2 shows a sample flow overview.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig2_HTML.jpgFigure 1-2
Overview of a flow
The menus available in the top navigation bar are shown in Figure 1-3.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig3_HTML.jpgFigure 1-3
Top navigation on the Flow home page
My flows: View all of your flows.
Approvals: Create and automate a business approval process. Refer to Figure 1-4 for a sample approval flow.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig4_HTML.jpgFigure 1-4
Sample approval flow
Templates: Find many built-in templates to start your flow.
Connectors: Find all available services
Learn: Find documentation, blogs, and more information for learning purposes.
Flow vs. Logic Apps
Microsoft Flow is built on top of Logic Apps and they both have the same workflow designer. The information in Table 1-1 will help you determine when to choose Flow or Logic Apps.
Table 1-1
Flow vs. Logic Apps
Flow vs. SharePoint Designer Workflows
SharePoint Designer allows you to create automated workflows specific to SharePoint, whereas Flow can be used for SharePoint, OneDrive, Twitter, Office 365 Outlook, and many other services.
SharePoint Designer has only 3 triggers and 7 list actions whereas Flow has 7 triggers and 35 actions for SharePoint.
Note
These counts are accurate at the time of writing. The counts will increase during the course of Microsoft’s updates.
Figure 1-5 shows the available workflow triggers in SharePoint Designer.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig5_HTML.jpgFigure 1-5
SharePoint Designer workflow triggers
Figure 1-6 shows the available workflow actions in SharePoint Designer.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig6_HTML.jpgFigure 1-6
SharePoint Designer workflow actions
Figure 1-7 shows the available Flow triggers and actions for SharePoint.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig7_HTML.jpgFigure 1-7
Flow triggers and actions for SharePoint
Connectors
Connectors provide a way for users to connect to the underlying service using their accounts to create automated workflows. As mentioned, examples of popular services include SharePoint, Office 365 Outlook, OneDrive, Twitter, and more. There are more than 150 connectors; you can see all of the available connectors by navigating to the Flow site, as shown in Figure 1-8.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig8_HTML.jpgFigure 1-8
The Connectors page
Connectors consist of two elements: triggers and actions. Triggers are used to initiate a flow when a specific event occurs. For example, the available triggers for OneDrive are displayed in Figure 1-9.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig9_HTML.jpgFigure 1-9
OneDrive connector triggers
An action is something that should take place once the event is fired. For example, the available actions for OneDrive are displayed in Figure 1-10.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig10_HTML.jpgFigure 1-10
OneDrive connector actions
Templates
Microsoft Flow provides many built-in templates to create commonly used solutions more quickly and efficiently. All of the available templates can be seen by navigating to the Flow site. They are categorized as shown in Figure 1-11.
../images/464567_1_En_1_Chapter/464567_1_En_1_Fig11_HTML.jpgFigure 1-11
The Templates page
Environments
You can group flows and their related resources into separate environments for different scenarios. For example, if you want