Usage Of Microsoft Flows And SharePoint Workflows

Microsoft has recently introduced a new Service, which will be helpful to interact with various cloud services and on-premise business apps to automate a few day-to-day activities. We can create general Workflows for common tasks. It also accepts "Common Data Model" and "Connectors & Gateways" as the data source like Power BI and Power apps.


Flow

Apart from it, you can also link Flow to PowerApps to interact with various other business apps and SaaS Services.

There are some pre-defined templates available to use for some common scenarios. A few commonly used scenarios are getting alerts while the new item is created or modified to collect information from the various sources, saving it in one place, and also a simple approval process with alert notifications.

If a user has access to those Services and business applications supported by Microsoft Flow, he can start creating a Flow for his own day to day activities. Microsoft Flow can work with the list of Servers and business apps, given below-



There are a few pre-defined templates available to create Flow. They are-







Flows can be used in a scenario where the personal/team process automation is required. Flows can take actions and events from outside your environment and automate the movement of this data into your system.

 SharePoint Workflows

If you see SharePoint Workflow, it is implemented across the enterprise level or at least a site level to perform complex business logic. To implement Workflow Flows, one should have minimum designer access to SharePoint site or list. These Workflows are created to target a large group of audience at the enterprise level. There are different types of Workflows available starting from Out-Of-Box, Designer, Vision and Visual Studio Workflows. This is only executed on the items within SharePoint and also provides a few options to connect to the external systems.



SharePoint Workflows are good at complex business processes, flow within the enterprise and can be reused for similar kinds of scenarios in other department sites. It is triggered, based on the event created within SharePoint.

SharePoint Workflows can be used within the enterprise sites and can pull the data from a few external systems with restrictions. It's good for designing complex Workflows for large groups of audiences / teams.