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Top 5 Microsoft Flow features from the April 2019 release notes

On Monday, Microsoft published the release notes for – amongst others – Dynamics 365, Power BI, PowerApps & Flow. In this post, I will show you my top 5 Microsoft Flow features!

Support for guest users in flows and approvals

For me, this has been a great ask. I would love to have guest users in Flows and have them respond to approvals. When I invite external users through Azure B2B, I want them to be a full part of my team, not just a little. So having them approve an approval request or edit a Flow would be an awesome new feature.

 

More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/support-guest-users-flows-approvals

General availability of solution parameters

Solutions are a great addition to the Power Platform. There are still some things that I would like to see added. One of them is connectors (please vote!).

 

Another of them is solution parameters. It would be great to change some parameters when you deploy a solution. For instance a tenant name in a SharePoint URL or an account name of a user.

 

More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/general-availability-solution-parameters

Data Loss Prevention enhancements

Data Loss Prevention is available in Microsoft Flow and Microsoft PowerApps for a while now. With these capabilities you can add multiple connectors in a business data only group, to make sure that they will only be used in Flows that connectors that are in the same group.

 

For example: if you put Facebook in the “no business data allowed” group, and you put Office 365 Outlook in the “business data only” group, you won’t be able to use them in the same Flow.

 

In June 2019, you can extend this with a direction. So, in the example above, you will be able to set the Data Loss Prevention in a way that you can get data from Facebook into Office 365 Outlook, but not the other way around.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/data-loss-prevention-enhancements

Improved Flow checker and remediation steps

I like the Flow checker because it helps you a lot with mistakes. Sometimes, you forget to fill in a required field, and you don’t notice it. Then the Flow checked is a real lifesaver.

 

improvedflowchecker-1.png

 

The Flow checker will be expanded, and there will be more help, like checking OData filters and warning when your Flow might end up in an infinite loop.

 

More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/improved-checker-remediation-steps

Extract structured data from emails, HTML, and PDF (Public Preview)

This makes me the most excited since there is way too much important info still in emails. The feature will give you the ability to do more with the body content. With the help of AI, you will be able to extract multiple things from the body of the email:

  • Tables
  • Specific Entities
  • Repeating patterns

This is one of the features that will give Flow more capabilities that some RPA-tooling in the market already has.  Which is a good sign for me.

 

emailextraction-1.png

 

More info: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/microsoft-flow/extract-structured-data-emails-html-pdf  

Wrap-up

There is way more available in the release notes, so make sure to check them out. Click on the following URL to see more: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/business-applications-release-notes/April19/

Comments

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  • Top 5 Microsoft Flow features from the April 2019 release notes

    Data Loss Prevention Enhancements has vanished from April '19 release plan.

    this was the most important feature of April '19 release plan for me.

     

  • Eloy Profile Picture Eloy 64
    Posted at
    Top 5 Microsoft Flow features from the April 2019 release notes

    Too bad I have to wait until June!!

    This is going to make a lot of people happy in our Company!