Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps

In this series, I would like to write about Microsoft flow as this product is more and more integrated into Office 365, SharePoint, OneDrive and many other services. In the future, I am expecting that Flow will be a standard part of document libraries in SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business as well. So let’s take a look a little bit under the cover.

If there is a need to create a quick process on your company intranet, or want to use other web services, without spending time with trying to think, how to call right REST or SOAP Query to specific services, right choice should be Microsoft Flow. As a product, it is similar to for example ITFFF, or Automate. Just login / or signup to the company Office 365 tenant and after select Microsoft Flow in the application pool of Office 365.

Using this application everyone is just able to create workflows in a simple way. The basic look is really similar to standard process diagram knows from the old era of programming languages. But let’s back to the beginning. There is a possibility to select from templates on the Flow websites or create new ones from the scratch. Pre-made templates immediately offering basic connection possibilities between separate cloud services (not only Microsoft related) and many actions between them.

Even if there are a lot of actions, I would like to create my own Workflows for specific situations. So in the next posts, I would like to write about these specific cases instead of predefined ones. There is another important thing to say. Microsoft Flow is fully connectable with another new service – PowerApps. Even if you create basic activity with sending some approval tasks to outlook email via Office 365 action, there will be powered by PowerApps.com in the message in the bottom. So the connection is clear. Actions should be also connected to PowerApps as an initiated by PowerApps mostly. PowerApps brings new kind of mobile applications with logic (flow) in the background. As usual, there are also some predefined applications.