The general availability of Microsoft Flow was announced on October 31 by Stephen Siciliano in this blog. Flow makes it easier to automate the business processes and Microsoft is investing a great amount of time in developing Power Apps and Flow, as they are going to play a huge role in the future, as stated by the official product update. Microsoft Flow is a Cloud-based Service, which makes it simple to automate the common tasks and business processes across your Applications and Services, such as Office 365, Slack, Drop Box, Sales Force.com, Dynamics 365 and many more. You can visit Microsoft Flow site to get first-hand experience of Flow.
If you have not signed up for Microsoft Flow, it can be done pretty easily from Flow site.
In this article, we will see how to automatically save Facebook updates to SharePoint List, using Microsoft Flow.
SharePoint prerequisites
As the first step, let's create a SharePoint List, which will hold Facebook updates.
Once the list is created, select Create a flow option to create the Flow that will save Facebook updates to the SharePoint list.
This will open up the Window, which will let us select the Flow template. Click See more templates to get the extended list of Flows.
From the list select, “Save updates from Facebook to a SharePoint List”.
Click Use this template option to start modifying Flow.
Now, we have to authenticate Facebook and SharePoint, so that Flow can be used to read Facebook data and update the SharePoint List. Click Sign in to authenticate.
Once authenticated, a tick mark will appear against the components. Click Continue.
It will open up Flow designer, which will have a few actions by default. The flow is such that whenever there is a new post on the timeline, a new SharePoint List item will be created.
In the create item action, specify the site URL and the list name of the list, where we will be saving Facebook data.
We can add more actions, if required. Once Flow design is completed, click Done to create Flow.
Flow has been created and we can click Manage to edit the flow, if required.
Test the flow
Now, let’s test the Flow. On creating a new Facebook update, Flow is triggered and a corresponding list item is created in SharePoint List, as shown below.
If we head over to Microsoft Flow site, we can see all the recently created Flows under My Flows section. You can choose to turn the Flow on or off. We can also see the recent runs of the Flow by clicking on the inverted exclamation mark.
If we want to make any updates to the Flow, we can make the changes and click Update Flow.
Summary
Thus, we saw how to save Facebook updates to SharePoint List, using Microsoft Flow.