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How do you use Microsoft Power Automate in your work?

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Posted on by JonL

Hey Power Automate Community!

We are wondering, Do you use Power Automate at work? In production?

If so, tell us a bit about it! Tell us how you use the flows, what they help achieve, and if they help make life easier!

Thanks!

- Jon

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AllanMartins 106 on at

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We have been using Flow for all the automation needs that we always had, but never figured out a way to manage. From rich approval's process, to simply Sharepoint folder monitoring.

Recently, we managed put in place a simple PowerApp for sendng SMS text message to multiple recipients using Twilio, and it works incredibly fine! 3-4 steps, about 20 mins to set it up and test, and it was good to go.

Have more things to put in place, looking forward what else we could do with it.

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DionGoile 110 on at

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We use flow to manage our 365 tenants allowing ease of tenant onboard, user onboard, user offboard through delegated admin all with approvals.

Also generated alerts around applied licences and management of admin users.

Away from that we use flow to monitor for backup alert failures (failures of the alerts themselves).

Much more to be added!

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JonL on at

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Dion,

Would you be willing to show me these flows in depth? This sounds like a great use of Flow and I would love to learn more about it.

Thanks!

- Jon

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DionGoile 110 on at

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Hey Jon,

Sure thing, I’m limited to my phone only until tomorrow which from then I can provide some more information about these. (I’ve started writing a blog community blog also, which I hope to finish in the immediate future)

But for the moment here is a link to a blog for flow setup to get email alerts about unused 365 emails. This is what we use in house, written and documented by my colleague Elliot.

https://gcits.com.au/knowledge-base/get-email-alerts-unused-office-365-licenses-azure-functions-azure-storage-microsoft-flow/

Thanks,

Dion

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SmartMeter 248 on at

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Hi Jon, This is a little bit of a hack, but I just used a flow to translate Sharepoint cloud list data keys (a people picker into a simple text name field on the same row.) This way PowerApps filter delegation will not be broken. Without a "plain text" of the current user's name, I can't use the filter verbs without breaking delegation, and ending up with the default top 500 rows in my app. It's like a "Flow spatula" for flipping SharePoint list pancakes into a plain text index. Ugly, but funcitonal.

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molotch 15 on at

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Do you have any sort of securely verifiable log of approvals and denials in your approval process? If so, how did you acomplish that?

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paul_culmsee 212 on at

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I am also starting to use it extensively, especially around empowering PowerApps. One powerful example is using Flow (via a custom connector and OpenAPI file) in PowerApps to handle photo uploads into SharePoint with metadata. This is something that the PowerApps community has been waiting a long time for, so being able to use Flow to work around limitations is very empowering... (video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mp-8B1fLrqs).

I also did the same thing for using Microsoft cognitive services. At that time PowerApps couldn't call the OCR functions from the computer vision API and Flow was used as my glue... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O0vstZ1EBaI

I am using Flow also to get around PowerApps limitations with Managed Metadata support. Instead of using the native PowerApps connector, I send data to Flow and then usde the HTTP action to talk to the SharePoint lists webservice to update managed metadata columns. Interestingly, flow cannot do this natively with the SharePoint connector, but the HTTP action is a godsend...

I am also using it for file sync scenarios (although this scenario is actually probably better served via an Azure function and PowerShell PnP.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Hello Jon!
We are just going to use.
Can I use MS Flow between 2 separate Organizations? i have tried to add a connection to a second organization but it wouldn't allow me to pick an entity.
What i am trying to accomplish is: When a field is updated in Organization A, go and create a record in Organization B. Is this even possible?
Thank you, Violab

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paul_culmsee 212 on at

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Hiya

No you cannot do this in the way you might be imagining it, except in limited circumstances. It is possible to use Request/Response triggered flows and the HTTP action for a flow in one tenant to talk to another tenant...

A few people are doing this approach. eg: https://sergeluca.wordpress.com/2017/03/16/invoke-a-flow-from-another-sharepoint-flow-step-12-tutorial/

Paul

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Community Power Pla... on at

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I used to be a SP Designer guy with all the workflows and made some pretty elaborate workflows in the past. It took me a few tries to get used to this but have already sttarted to get a little silly.
I am currently using Flow to send out User alerts to all users in the company of different things, HR Alerts, Communications, IT User alerts... things like that. So the user only has to go to a list and fill in these fields and I have used the HTML function in the flow emails to send out notification alerts to all users.
I also am using Flow to manage an approval process for something internal. So users fill in a form (created using InfoPath still) and when they send it, it goes to a 3 step approval process with HTML emails. Its pretty cool.
Lastly, I am going to start designing flow to do approvals using DocuSign to incorporate our HR forms into a workflow setting. Still in the conceptualization stage in Visio, but looking good.

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