Flow, the workflow engine in the Office 365 cloud that makes it easy for any end user to create and automate their workloads, which translates to, if you repeat it, automate it. Thanks to Flow’s many hundreds of prebuilt templates that ready to go and FREE to use, there isn’t much you won’t be able to accomplish. There is also a huge community that Microsoft supports that are constantly developing new ways to use Flow!
“If you repeat it, automate it!”
If you find yourself doing the same tasks each day, week, or month consider using a workflow to aggregate data collection from 3rd party web sites and services like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn and other social media platforms into a single easy to see dashboard in SharePoint. The idea would be to send invoices, product updates, or reminders to update documents automatically on a schedule you define, create, and make work for you and your team on YOUR TERMS!
Getting started is really easy just go to https://flow.microsoft.com and sign in with your email address. Once you are in just click the Home button in the left hand navigation and now you can search for a Flow template to get started! With a few modifications specific to your environment you should be able to test and publish your workflow in a matter of hours vs weeks or months! WoW, that’s pretty awesome!
A couple of things to keep in mind about using Flow, by default it will only loop through 100 items, 5000 items is the maximum amount per Flow, additional planning is needed for larger runs or using a Logic App. Flows can run on a schedule, so each night at 10pm or every Saturday at 2am. Flows are for end users to automate their tasks, Logic Apps would be needed to run as a service account and be available company wide. You can share Flows or export them and share with other users inside or outside your organization!
If you need help with a workflow that has complex actions let us know and we would be happy to give you 45 minutes to talk with our Flow expert and see if we can help you with planning, troubleshooting, or creating your next workflow click here.