Create a Form that takes Specific Actions Based on Responses

One of the more powerful aspects of Flow is that it can take various actions based on conditions. Using Forms inside of Teams, you can very easily set parameters around different actions that will be taken based on the responses people give on your Form. This is a very common requirement of many workflows and can be accomplished  by even the most in experienced users in Flow in just a few minutes. This workflow is a great place to start if you are beginning to learn Flow or have not yet played with "Conditions" in the flow application.

About Conditions

Rather than just adding an action in Flow, a "Condition" allows the user to set up some "If, then" logic within a Flow that has already been triggered. Depending on the action that as being taken, this can allow to create a "Flow within a Flow" if you will, and if used properly can also help larger organizations save their number of allotted Flow runs. If you are building your own bot or using a bot like H3's At Bot, then the possibilities can be… I guess… even more endless?

Well, at this point I think you get the idea- let's get started with building this Flow! Todays Flow is going to be a Form embedded in Teams that sends email notifications of the Form submission to different people in the organization based on the responses given by the person submitting the Form.

OK! Here we go!

 So the first step is to build a personal Form directly in the Forms app, then add the existing form to a Teams Tab, the result of my form seen below in Teams:

Now, heading over to SharePoint, I'm going to set up a list under a SharePoint Site (the site behind the Team/Group of the Form in the Teams Tab would probably be best) where my Columns correspond with the text of the Questions in the Form.

 Once this is done I can head over to the Forms application and get started with the Template to record Forms responses to a SharePoint List:

The next step is to fill out the template and get the response details from the Form, and then enter in the information as needed for the SharePoint List.

Next, I will populate the information for the columns of the list via the dynamic data from the Form, as seen below:

Now, here's where the fun really begins! Instead of just adding another action, I am going to create a "condition" via Flow. For this example I'm having the responses kick of emails to employees in the company based off of the answers submitted in the Form.

My first condition I will set up as follows, with Dynamic data in my email response to the employee in question. If a contract has been noted as being in place by the Form in the Teams Channel, Adele will be notified and sent so she can actually see why she is getting this notification. Note that I've also added a link to the actual item that is recorded in SharePoint so that she can easily get to the record that has been created as well:

In my form response, if a contract is NOT in place, a different person will be notified. I do this by filling out the "If No" section under my condition. 

Now, I'm also going to add a Planner Task to Brian so that the whole team can have some visibility in the process.

To get the Plan ID for the plan in question, I can simply navigate to the plan, and pull the plan ID from the URL as seen below:

Now, just for fun, I've continued this out with yet another set of "Yes/No" conditions and email notifications:

All of this is nested under the original "If no" condition from my first step.

You could add additional conditions under the "If Yes" step back at the beginning of this process.

The last thing to touch on is that all of this is just some fun toys if you do not understand your company's business processes.

If you have not already been given an understanding or requirements by your organization,  get to know some people in your organization and see if you can gather the "If/When" information you need to automate some of their business processes.

If you have some power users in your company, see if you can get them do it on their own- or even train others to do this! I know such ideas seem ridiculous and "pie in the sky" pipe dreams to many people in IT, but I've personally met people in IT that are overburdened that find ways to make such things happen, and their reward is being seen as the hero by their users and their company!

After all, nothing is impossible… well, almost nothing.