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Overview Of Microsoft Flow

Introduction

 
Microsoft Flow is another amazing no-code approach by Microsoft which can help an individual to automate things, saving time and effort. Microsoft Flow offers a medium/solution which can be utilized by simple drag and drop connectors and trigger points to automate the process in an organization.
 

Components of Microsoft Flow

  • Trigger – The point which will act as an initiating point for the flow
  • Connector – It acts as a component to integrate multiple other applications, like email to one drive
  • Action – It can be defined as a transformation point in the flow

    Microsoft Flows

The process to Sign Up

  • The license of Microsoft Flow is offered to every individual who has Office 365 login credentials.

    Microsoft Flows

    So, one needs to sign up to Office 365.
  • Click on the Flow tile in Office 365.

    Microsoft Flows

Sample use case of Microsoft Flow

  • An organization needs to send email notification on every 3rd working day to employees with information of Pest Control
    or
  • The organization needs to communicate with multiple vendors every month seeking information for invoices raised and the processing of the payments and updating multiple systems
    or
  • Or, the organization needs to automate the visa application process, that is, an employee submits information through Microsoft Forms and then this information will be submitted to the manager for approval followed by other multiple steps
    or
  • An employee needs to automate the process of saving the attachments to a specific folder in File System from Outlook

Sample Flow Creation

 
We have created a flow to share the email notification on specific dates by the organization with its employees for the pest control.
  • Create an Excel file in OneDrive – storing information about the dates on which the email needs to be triggered and shared with employees.

    Microsoft Flows

  • Here is the screenshot of the Flow designed to undertake the same.

    Microsoft Flows
  • Recurrence – Flow has been scheduled to run every day through the “Schedule”, trigger point
  • Initialize a Variable – Variable Name is initialized to get the value from Excel online- stored in OneDrive
  • Another Variable – which will be used to store the incremented value
  • Get a row – from Excel based upon the variable initialized in Flow
  • Condition check – If the data fetched from the Excel file is equal to TODAY
  • Send an email – send an email notification to employees about pest control
  • Update a row -- Update the value in an Excel file, with an incremental value so as to ensure next time the flow will take the updated value to fetch updated dates


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