Microsoft Flow Spring 2018 Update

, Principal Group PM Manager, Microsoft Flow, Wednesday, March 21, 2018

Today we are announcing a new type of flow: a Business process flow. These flows, based on the Common Data Service for Apps, define a set of steps for people to follow to take them to a desired outcome. We also have a number of new integrations coming, including a Flow add-in for Excel. With this new add-in, you can create or trigger automation on an Excel table with the Flow button the Data tab in the ribbon. Finally, we have several new features coming to help you repair flows and build flow solutions that support full application lifecycle management.

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Advanced | Flow of The Week: Retrieving Office 365 Message Center and Service Health Notices using Microsoft Flow

, Senior Program Manager, Wednesday, September 5, 2018

To automate critical business processes in Office 365 using Microsoft Flow, we typically need to call cloud-based services in order to retrieve data. Calling these services often requires us to use the HTTP connector and action, and as a result, provide our TenantID, along with an App’s ClientID and SecretID in the Flow. This blog post will provide a detailed walkthrough of configuring these required parameters when calling cloud services using the HTTP connector. We’ll use a recently released Flow template as an example, which retrieves data from the Office 365 Message Center and Service Health dashboards.

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Test your flows with real example data, and four new management connectors

, Principal Group PM Manager, Microsoft Flow, Friday, August 31, 2018

Creating a flow may require some trial and error during the development process. Starting this week, you can use real, example, data from connectors to test your flow as you build it, right inside of the Flow portal. Now you can know that the flow will run as expected. Additionally, we are introducing four new management connectors: PowerApps for App Makers, Power platform for Admins, PowerApps for Admins, Microsoft Flow for Admins, and, one other new connector: Microsoft School Data Sync.

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Power platform Security & Governance: Deploying a Defense in Depth Strategy

, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Thursday, August 30, 2018

A common cyber security approach used by organizations to protect their digital assets is to leverage a defense-in-depth strategy. When customers ask how to best secure and govern their Microsoft Flow and PowerApps environments, we provide similar guidance. The following list represents different layers that you can use to protect your digital assets and apply governance to ensure your organization’s interests are met.

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Improved Calendar, SharePoint, Approval, Button and Connector capabilities

, Principal Group PM Manager, Microsoft Flow, Friday, August 24, 2018

This August, we released new calendar templates that copy events between Google Calendar and Office 365 or Outlook.com. Second, we now support read and write for multiple-value fields in SharePoint that are Choice, Person or Lookup types. Third, you can now send approvals on behalf of other users in your organization - for example, the person who uploaded the file in the SharePoint list, instead of the person who created the flow. Fourth, buttons have two new input types: Number and Yes/No. Finally, there are improvements to several connectors.

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Advanced | Flow of the Week: Automating Microsoft Flow Governance - Using Microsoft Flow

, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Thursday, August 23, 2018

Enterprise Security and Governance is an important topic for many organizations. Microsoft continues to make investments that allow customers to implement PowerApps and Flow and be confident that they have their bases covered from a governance perspective. Much like Microsoft Flow empowers users to build powerful workflow and automation solutions, we want to empower administrators with the same capabilities to support their needs. In this blog post we are going to explore a scenario that describes how you can automate governance activities by taking advantage of the Office 365 Management API.

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Advanced | Flow of The Week: Advanced Approval Write back

, Senior Program Manager, Wednesday, August 15, 2018

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-backss, robust tiered approval cycles, and sales order approval requests. Come and Learn how to build a system like this using Flow from Community Member Phillip Guglielmi

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Introducing Microsoft Flow integration in Excel

, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Tuesday, August 14, 2018

Flow is now integrated into Microsoft Excel! With this integration that uses the For a selected row trigger and the Flow launch panel, you can create and trigger on-demand flows for selected rows in any Excel table on spreadsheets hosted in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The Microsoft Flow for Excel add-in enables you to connect your data to a wide range of services such as SharePoint, Outlook 365, Dynamics 365, Teams, Visual Studio Online, Twitter, Approvals, etc. In this post, we’ll walk you through this new capability with a hands-on example.

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