2017-07-17

In the latest Collab365 Live Show, Nick and Andy interview the Microsoft Flow Production Team. They overview Flow, and discuss some of the best upcoming features. Meanwhile, Nick and Andy think about how they will make their living in the future, once end-users don’t need help creating their SharePoint workflows!

There is plenty of detail on offer:

  • Where the “Flow” concept came from
  • It’s most common use cases
  • How it fits with other Cloud technologies
  • What happens to SharePoint workflows now
  • And Merwan Hade (Senior Program Manager), and Deon Herbert (Software Design Engineer) also commit to timescales for some of the most hotly requested additional features.
Collab365 -  Latest news on Microsoft Flow
Collab365 – Latest news on Microsoft Flow

Better than SharePoint Workflow?

Many of us have experienced the frustrations of creating SharePoint workflows, and like Nick, have sometimes found it maddening! Flow has been introduced alongside Power Apps and Power BI, and Andy describes them as the “power trio”. But don’t worry just because it’s called Flow (without the “Power”), doesn’t mean it’s a poor cousin.

Here is the overview from Merwan, who is driving Flow development at Microsoft:

Flow empowers users to do automation, without necessarily having to write a lot of code. You can achieve these kinds of things:

  • Sending notifications, when a new file or a list item is added to SharePoint
  • Copying files across different cloud services, e.g. OneDrive to SharePoint (and to/from many non-Microsoft services)
  • Also for collecting data, for example, what are people saying about your business on Twitter, or what feedback you are getting on your latest blog post.
  • Maybe after collecting the data, you transfer it to Power BI to get analytics and metrics, or perhaps the Flow is initiated from a Power App.
  • Also both are also used for approvals: you can create experiences where you choose where to do approvals: from an Approval Centre, from your mobile, or from your inbox.

So what about SharePoint workflows; are they redundant, with the ease of use that Flow brings, and with its broad range of connectivity? Merwan reassures us that SharePoint workflows will be supported until 2026, so there’s no need to panic if your business is getting value from them. But Flow is a successor, and investment in Flow/SharePoint integration will continue, so he suggests that customers should start to move their investment into Flow.

Where did Flow come from?

Is the rumour true, that Flow was first built for Dynamics CRM? Merwan disillusions us on this one, and tells us that there was a Project Wolfkrow, to build a new feature for Power Apps. Did you spot the acronym? It’s “workflow” backwards!

So it started as a feature in Power Apps, called Logic Flows in a preview edition. It proved popular, so investment was upped, more connectors were built (we discuss some of these below). It was then released as an Azure service, and renamed Logic Apps, providing a background workflow facility to complement other Microsoft cloud services.

To create a standalone Flow, one change that Microsoft made was to extend the range of connectors. Connectors were built outside the world of Azure, for:

  • SharePoint, SQL, Dynamics, and other Office 365 services
  • External services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram

There are currently 140 connectors.

Both Logic Apps, and Flow are now available, with Logic Apps being targeted more at professional developers, and Flow at business users. Although they both address similar use cases, Logic Apps has features to allow more detailed development; it can use workflow definition language, you can write functions, and it has native integration with some Azure services such as Azure storage. Flow is built on top of Logic Apps; they share a workflow designer, and much of their infrastructure.

Flow sounds like a marvel! How can I buy it?

You can start developing with Flow at zero incremental cost, as there is a Power Apps Community Plan. This is a free environment where you can experiment; you get to try out the common data service, as well as Flow and Power Apps. This isn’t going to work for production, but it’s a get-go solution at least, and great for learning.

Once you want to consume Flow, there are different pricing models: as well as the free “get you going” plan, which has very limited performance, and which you are not allowed to use for production, there are also P1 and P2 plans. These are distinguished by the number of “runs per month”. Merwan also tells us about the admin facilities, and points out that these could be helpful in trying to decide which plan will be needed. More details can be found here.

What data can I link to?

What about the range of connectors available for Flow? The team is agile, and their release cadence is quite fast, with releases to production happening once a week.

The initial focus for connectors has been on the enterprise, connecting into Office 365 and Dynamics 365, so that Flow users can link into data held in SharePoint, OneDrive, Excel, O365 Outlook, and Power BI. Some of the external links into social media service might seem quite consumer focussed, but there are business use cases as well; you might want to approve outgoing tweets, or get tweets and put them into SQL Server for some kind of analysis.

There is tooling for self-creation, so developers, and software vendors are able to develop their own connectors, which are then approved by Microsoft, and can be made available for general release. The team is very keen to involve the community, and software vendors, in developing a very wide range of connectors, so the available range should expand rapidly.

Can I get a Flow demo, please?

Of course! Who better to show us Flow than the Microsoft Production Team? The Live Show includes a demo of the current steps for the lifecycle of an approval Flow. Live demos do occasionally have glitches, so if you would like to see the fully working version of this demo, please open the Live show #10 video, and fast forward to 25:30 mins.

There are going to be some exciting changes to approval workflows soon, which I will describe in the following section.

One point that was clarified through a viewer’s question is that you can give other people access to a Flow set up this way. You have to make it a Team Flow, and then you can add individual users to give them access. However, this whole process is going to become very much easier …

What is the team developing next?

With the team’s fast release cadence, there are quite a few developments and additions scheduled. Here is a rundown of some of the most interesting, starting with the one mentioned above:

  • One improvement that will be the released in a few months is of out of the box approvals. You will access the feature from a document or a list item, with a form to define who will approve and a message, and then “Run Flow” to automatically send an approval request. The will be no headaches about giving access to sites, lists, documents or Flows, and no need to create a “Team Flow”, all these things will “just work”.
  • Will we be able to update SharePoint field types like choice, people, lookup. This will be coming in a matter of weeks, and compatibility with taxonomy items will follow a little later.
  • In an approvals Flow, there have been requests for options other than approve and reject (such as “approved with edits”). This is on the team’s backlog, although there isn’t a definite timescale yet.
  • In approval emails, it has been requested that the initiator of this particular approval request (rather than the IT guy who created the Flow) is named. This will be implemented as part of the automated approval scenario later this year.
  • The Flow Mobile App is no poor cousin, and will also be developed rapid with a weekly release cycle across IOS, Android, and Windows phone. All of the popular scenarios will be available across the three platforms, including triggering a “Button Flow”, and carrying out all of your approvals.
  • Can you export workflows back and forth between Logic Apps and Flow? This is not currently possible. However, because Logic Apps is seen as an upgrade path if more complexity is needed than is possible in Flow, this feature is on the team’s roadmap.
  • Andy had noted issues in early versions with Exceptions management. Merwan described a planned new feature making the running of an action dependant. So for example, you could set up a push notification, which you could run after another action … if it’s succeeded, if it’s been skipped, or if it fails. Once we have this, exception management scenarios should improve significantly.

There is more planned, an if you like, you can follow developments using a Flow. What better way? Flow.Microsoft.com has a template available to create a digest of team blogs to be emailed once a week, or you can even get push notifications if you want to be truly up to date!

Sounds like we may need some security and administration facilities

There is a dedicated Flow Admin Centre which provides a variety of information and enables administrative actions:

  • You can see Flows that have been created in your environment, including the connectors that they are using
  • You can suspend or delete Flows
  • You can add yourself as an owner of a Flow, allowing you deal with eventualities, such as the Flow creator having left the company
  • Also historical run statistics are available for a given Flow, so that you can see your overall consumption, and carry out capacity planning
  • Soon to be added is a CSV download feature, from which a breakdown of consumption per Flow is possible.
  • More capabilities are planned, to provide analytics about popular flows, successes and failures, and connectors used
  • The log audits of actions that are taken by specific users, such as deleting or creating Flows, adding someone as owner, movement of documents as a result, are available. (Currently these are not surfaced in the Security and Compliance Center).
  • Data leakage is a significant concern for enterprises, however, there is an effective data loss prevention facility in Flow. An inbuilt facility allows admins to group connectors into “business data allowed” locations and “business data not allowed” locations. It creates a boundary, so for example, you could ensure that users can move from Dropbox to Gmail, but not from Dropbox to SharePoint.

How can I best find out more?

The Microsoft team recommends that you use the flow learning resources to explore the available documentation, learning videos, and example Flow templates. The templates are There is a feedback facility, which you are encouraged to use. Deon describes the community as very active; this includes “Flow ideas”, which are actively used for feature planning. Microsoft engineers also frequently monitor user questions, and respond accordingly.

About the author 

Steve Ledbury

Has specialised in SharePoint since 2006, and more recently in Office 365. Working for clients including Microsoft, BAE Systems and Capgemini, and using his broad base of technical, business and management skills he has provided end-to-end leadership in complex SharePoint projects, including a large-scale award-winning Intranet