1st Impressions - Even the simplest is complex

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Posted on by AndrewWoody

I was hoping that Flow would bring a level of ease of use, quick and easy configuration, simple actions.

Sadly it feels too much like SharePoint Designer in HTML.

The UX is frustrating, editing a body of an email the cursor won't move, no information about the document creator in File Create events, no ability to link to the Office Online view of a document without trying to do KungFu text manipulation.

Any request to the forums for help on doing something results in a link to Workflow Definition Language https://msdn.microsoft.com/library/azure/mt643789.aspx

I get it's a power user tool, but you have to make the 80% of use cases just work for the average user.

Good effort, a long way to go. Please focus you efforts on get the 1st use to be slick and simple. I'm a serious power user, coder, SharePoint oldie and after a day of hacking basically at the point of saying no thanks, will look else where.

You gotta get the adoption right, the 1st use, the quick win - without this your in the same space SharePoint lives - an overly complex application that I have better things to do than learn... Hey Box thats simple...

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Stephen Siciliano -... Microsoft Employee on at

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Hi Andrew,

Thank you for the feedback, sorry that you've found the experience frustrating. Getting Document metadata (such as file creator, but also custom metadata) and Read/Write links on file triggers is something we're hoping to add soon.

Much like Excel, if you want to do string manipulation or other types of things you'll have to use the functions - our goal is that if you're a Power User who can do it in Excel you should also be able to do it in Flow.

We are working hard to make the first run experience as smooth as possible, and we'll continue to invest in this as long as we need to. Would love to hear any other feeback about other scenarios that didn't work for you and why.

Thanks,
-Stephen

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AndrewWoody 12 on at

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Good you working on it.

Can I ask that rather than get the user to construct URLs think about the use cases very clearly.

If I have a document upload in SP Online, then make the web url a property by default.

In regards to string manipulation like Excel - give some guidance on it or add a [String Format] action with very simple UX that shows the text of a field and allows someone to see the result in the design mode.

This coding, in Visual Studio the added variable watching for a reason, the old fashioned having to run the app and print the variable is just painful. Dont expect users to go back to the 1990 for UX experience.

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