SharePoint Power Hour: Convert to PDF

[Music] hello everyone welcome to SharePoint power our I'm Laura Rogers and I've got Joelle Jobson here on audio probably stay hi hey everybody last week was the big SharePoint conference and so we're sort of recovering from that now it was I almost didn't feel like they hate to say it didn't feel like doing Power Hour because I've just been kind of you know email triage and you know the kids are home now it's summertime so it's just been kind of a crazy around here but um yeah welcome to SharePoint Power Hour this is our weekly show Wednesdays at 11 central I did not send out a newsletter today because it was just so just kind of off the cuff and I wasn't sure what I was going to do it about until about half an hour ago so the fun thing about Power Hour is that it's live you never know what's going to happen and we've got this slack channel that we use for chat during power hour we have and if you're watching this on youtube you have a little in the description below you have a link to IW mentored at slack comm which is where we have our chat and a link if you've never joined before to request to join to be invited and we chat throughout ask questions have discussions and get to know each other and last week at the sharepoint conference in las vegas a lot of us got to meet in person it was a lot of fun we got it's nice to meet meet humans right so I will probably talk a little bit about kind of some fun things that use and citing things that you saw that they announced too but today's topic and Power Hour is going to be converting to PDF now two weeks ago when I was about to do Power Hour sent out a poll little survey that morning of kind of what you thought some topic some good a good topic would be and the first choice that had like double what you know all the other ones was form logic and power apps so that's what I did power apps power our about two weeks ago but the second pretty high votes choice was converting files to PDF so all I'm going to do power our about converting files to PDF and we'll kind of just start with some basics and just do something super simple and then kind of see if we can move on to you know kind of how complex we can get during power hour so we're in our interview in the chat where any of you in my big power apps and flow workshop you got to meet Chris my husband who's a never on power hour but you got to see him in person to it so the two of us are up on stage he was helping answer questions and it's good times we crammed it all in in one day Joelle okay so do what I said I saw the questions coming into you just like just like you did last year when you were on the stand yep and uh Todd Bleeker was in there too it was he was he was back in like 2003 or 2004 when I first went to SharePoint training I went to admin training that was a long time ago he bill English was the admin instructor and Todd Bleeker was on the the dev side he was the developer instructor for SharePoint for developers so he was just on the other side of the hall but so I met him a really long time ago and he came up in gave Chris and I'd lunch those box lunches and brought them to us up on the stage cuz I was like Todd Bleeker what are you doing it's really cool so that's really sweet of him to be in there I hadn't seen for a long time anyway all right so I will share my desktop and I have let's see if I have I have a library in SharePoint here called policies my company policies and this is I do have a blog post that I wrote a while back that is using a button right there in a library in a column to trigger a flow so this is like this is the one this is the library that I used to write that blog post about triggering a flow with a button so that's what that is that is not what we're demoing today we're demoing doing converting a file to a PDF so a good example is just going to be company policies you have company policies that might need to be routed around for an approval process so you once they're approved then you would want them to be converted to a PDF right that's a good simple example to start with so what I'm going to do is my maximize this screen is I'm going to I found that the trigger for just the selected item the one where you select an item and you run a flow is a little bit buggy when you start from within the flow interface it's sometimes it just doesn't end up showing here for some reason so I'm going to I found that when I start from this screen in SharePoint and create a flow that is actually and it they're more consistent and they work when you do it that way just when you're creating the flow for the first time if you want to get triggered the trigger specifically the one trigger called for a selected item so so it says post message to Microsoft teams for elect selected file you really just need to do any anyone that says for a selected file so I picked the request manager approval for a selected file that's actually good one I'll just create the flow and then this is a good one to use as an example for converting it to a PDF after the manager approves it right so we can just take this one and run with it so now I have this flow and it's called request manager approval for selected file let's see what it does so I select a file let me see I'll just cut rename this and PDF just to make sure so whatever file I select it goes and gets the metadata about that file it gets my profile of whoever I am gets my manager and then this little parallel branch it put in here it just means that if it doesn't if I don't have a manager it if it fails if get manager fails it's going to go send me a notification so that's what that and that's just built in and this out-of-the-box flow and then it'll stop all right so what we're going to do is it's going to get my manager and I'm logged in to this fake tent this tenant this pretend world where I'm not the CEO and I have a manager the Wunder Loret in it and then I'm gonna start an approval and it's going to send it to whoever my manager is and then it's gonna start just a regular approval action and I'll say I want the requester to be whoever triggered the flow so that will be for a selected file just the user ID of whoever triggered it so that way the requester is not whoever created the workflow it's whoever triggers the flow and then yes I do want notifications okay so the magic with the PDF so after it get the approval process happens and response is equal to approve then what do you want to happen so it's got these built in emails where it informs a requester of approval I'll just delete that and I'll just leave the inform request requester of rejection that's actually that I don't so that's actually going to me they're currently logged in user which that's fine it's gonna let me know it got rejected okay so then if yes if they approve it then I want to convert it to a PDF so I have the the trick to the PDF thing I just type PDF here it is now there is one that exists this word online action last time I looks which was just a couple of weeks ago the only way you could get this to work was if you had a specific hyperlink to a specific file that you hard-coded into the workflow which is really dumb because why when would you ever not want that to be dynamic and just converting just one specific file that has a specific filing so that one is in preview and so now the thing about power hour is this is just what's in the product right now so if you're watching this power hour this this is May 29th 2019 if you're watching this like 6 months from now a year from now or more this is probably all completely different now so take it with a grain of salt but this is the way it is right now today so word online is not the one we want we want the one that's one Drive so I'll just narrow it down to onedrive for business actions and then I can see I can search for PDF we told him to convert file it's not called convert to PDF it's just called convert file using path so you've got convert file and convert file using path so convert file means that you need to have you need to know the ID of that file that specific file and using path means you need to know the full path like the URL to that file so and when you use the convert the only thing in here is PDF right now so PDFs the only thing that you can do to convert it alright so I need to know the unique identifier of the file that I want to convert so let's see I can just type identifier ID all right for a selected file it doesn't give me the identifier which is why I did this next action called get file properties which gives me all the information metadata about that selected file so then I can do identify fire so this is going to take whatever file I selected and convert it to PDF so then that PDF is just it's going to be in onedrive so it it needs to be in onedrive so this is not going to work the last time I check it's not going to work to just take an identifier of a file that's over in SharePoint and convert it and use the convert to PDF so this will this will most likely error out so let me I'll save that and I'm going to run it once and just show you that's going to error out I need to log in as garth fort here let me this other window open Garth board is the manager so all right so I'll go ahead and I saved it and I'm going to trigger it and then while I'm triggering it I'll go log in as the manager so I have this here's my library make sure and refresh it and I guess just let me know if there are any questions you have all multiple windows open right now okay let me make sure I'm going to make sure and turn off content approval in this library because what we're doing with this approval is unrelated to SharePoint content approval we're just converting it to a PDF so I don't want to get things all anything confused in here so I'm turning off this other content approval setting that I had turned on in this library just to double-check okay and all right so then I will just have to select a file so I'll just say disciplinary actions and then since my resolution is so big the flow is kind of on this little extra little ellipsis but it usually just shows across the top so this one is a request manager approval and PDF that's the one I just created so I'll go ahead and trigger that and I'm logging in as Garth for my quote see we can go look at it running to ants still not going yet sometimes it's instantaneous sometimes it could be within a couple of minutes when we when we trigger this one don't don't now yeah that's fun once I run it once then I'll be able to just click the little test button and just run it again and I won't have to worry about wondering when it's going to get triggered all right so I turned it on right yeah that's fun it's always fun doing demos of these and just kind of waiting it for it for it to run that first time I feel like I should have just done like the manual button because those are guaranteed to run when you click the manual button let's see any questions so far oh you're asking when people will get the slides from all the sessions from SPC I have no idea I know that the conference had us turned them all in and I feel like they're going to send out an email to all the attendees with that information so I one of the questions that I asked in here in slack while we're waiting for this to trigger was what kind of processes do you have where you need something to Oh see I didn't click continue there we go the first time you run if the first time you trigger a flow um it's gonna have that little extra prompt and so I wasn't paying attention it had that little extra prompt that is basically telling the logged in user that it's got it's going to run these services using their credentials but it only does that the first time the person I am just any long-term user triggers a flow so that's what I did I just I clicked to run the flow and then I wasn't paying attention to the little extra dialog box that it popped up alright so this is my the manager is giving me this link it's got a link to the file that I need to approve I'll go ahead and prove it I don't need to type anything I'll just click Submit so that's the manager email that they got and it was instantaneous and then let's go see this it will probably error out I believe yeah so it aired out so that is what's not going to work is that action so you can't just take a file that's in SharePoint and see it says this file is not valid and try to use the convert file action and you have to actually move the file or copy it over to onedrive and then convert it so that's what I was trying to demonstrate there okay so now I'm editing my flow again I'll go back into these to this little interface here oh thanks they said he said June 6 slides let me meet available good you know all right all right if they approve it what do we want to happen we don't just want to convert the file we want to move the file over not move it but just at least make a copy of it over in onedrive so I need to go to my onedrive for business actions and I'm going to do create file so I can decide where I want to put it now one of the negatives about onedrive is if you have a user that's running this flow that is never initiated their onedrive before they've never used onedrive so the you know how the very first time you go to onedrive it says your onedrive is getting ready and you don't have access to it instantaneously as soon as you're a brand new user it waits till you actually start to try to use it so that's one of the negatives about these onedrive actions is that if you have new users that have never used their onedrive before there's at least going to be a delay on here if not an Arab I'm not positive about that so just kind of keep keep that in mind so I'm going to decide where in my onedrive I want to create this file I'm just going you could just say the root of your onedrive or you could pick a specific folder I'll just pick the root keep it simple and the file name I want that to be the same as the file name coming from the original file so let's see I've got a lot of a lot of metadata in this one so that's the name and then let's see we have to make sure that it has the path the the extension too so let's see yeah here folder path identifier is folder name policy de to cause so much metadata I'm just double-checking this okay we're gonna use the file name and then the content of the file I'll just type the content here oh I have to get the file content so there is no file content all I have right now is I got the file properties but I haven't gotten the file content yet there is no file content to put in here so that's another step that I have to add beforehand so notice how I'm working backwards per what it's needing from me so I have to get the file content so this is going to be share points get file contents there it is get file content and that's actually the body of the file and this is going to be the same site that I'm on this is just the route and what file is it my identifier that's my identifier of my file right here when I got the file properties again the forest selected file trigger doesn't give you much you always need to if it's an if it's a file you need to do get file properties after that after that trigger and if it's an item when you do for a selected item you need to do get the item properties after that to get the metadata so now I now I have the file content and now I can create this file over in onedrive so see now I have file content that I can add here all right so now I'll have a new file over in onedrive and then it says convert file then I need to convert the file that I just created over in onedrive so this file that I just created right here this is the one that I need to convert so I I need that ID of that file let's see if this works I have a few in here that I've created that I've already run and that I have as part of demos but this one I'm just you know of course creating on the fly so I'll just say using that since I already triggered it once I'm not going to go to SharePoint Andry trigger it I'm just gonna run my test and then it's going to send an email to my manager again and this one is C I'll go ahead and just go in his email and approve that same-same interface so now you can see it's sort of waiting for him and then it should light yet see there it moved on to the next thing and now it is doing something oh look don't got the file content created the file not converting the file correctly so let's go see bad requests this is why we're working through it okay so it says not acceptable so this is so remember I mention I mentioned this a second ago I mentioned that this might be wrong because it doesn't have an extension see it but the filename is disciplinary actions but it didn't put the you know dot do see dot yeah yeah XLS so I actually need my file name needs to have the extension as part of it so we go back to this part is the one that was wrong so I can't just put the name I need the file name with extension let's see that's going to be in my such timestamp title so I'm looking through these pieces of metadata here and I added soap so this is the one that I use that's not the one that I need because it's just the display name of the file it's not the full file with the with the extension to it folder pet there it is file name with extension so that's the one that I need I did it on purpose you know as a demonstration of troubleshooting it says how did you figure that out well um I have I have got much experience Edie and breaking workflows so just I I've had experiences in the past where the file name is clearly different than the file name with an extension and so just in workflows that will work differently depending on what you're trying to do so if you're trying to actually create a file somewhere it can't just create a file with no extension so I'm running this again and I'll go prove it again really quick why we've we've ate it we've eaten up almost half an hour just doing the convert to PDF with a very simple workflow alright so that one ran successfully what did it do oh my gosh holy cow it actually the whole thing ran successfully it created the file over in onedrive and it see disciplinary actions do CX and it converted the file and so let's go see what's over in onedrive let me go here and just go to come on stop it it's onedrive thanks Lisa I'm just now seeing your scroll up to f4 filing with extension yeah that had just so much metadata in that library is a little overwhelming I see this is the error one see the one with no extension that's the one I can delete and then this is the one this is the disciplinary action COC X now so all it did was convert it it didn't put a new file anywhere right couple all I did was convert my file so there's still another step that I have to do in my flow so now that it's converted the file I need to do something with so it just gives me file content so now I have file content here that I need to do something with so then I'll go to my SharePoint actions and I'll do create file so then I can create file I'll go to my same little site here and my path that I want to put it in in my site which is policies is my library and I don't and no there's no folder that I wanted and I just want it in the root of my policies library and we renamed this create file as PDF then the file name will be that same file name now I can just use this file name right here so file name that's the new one from it being converted and then file content that's the new PDF file content see that's that action convert file so I saved it and I'm going to run it yet again lisa says will this ever work on files in sharepoint without having to copy to onedrive hopefully lisa but this is currently today this is how it works this is how you do it so that's why i had that little sort of disclaimer that i did said a few minutes ago of you know this is probably going to be different in the future if you're watching this in the future ok so it uh i proved it it goes through my next condition creates a file converts the file creates the file as PDF now I should be able to go back to SharePoint refresh my library and look at that disciplinary actions dot PDF now I didn't create the PDF file in onedrive I just basically used the onedrive to run the convert action and now I have it's just a test file it doesn't have much in it saying this is a very important staff discipline policy so that's my staff that's my disciplinary actions but that is my converted file yay I have a feeling that this is one of those things that was just easier to do as a onedrive action and maybe gradually they're going to make it be a SharePoint action but this was just sort of like a baby step at least to get there I would think I would want to go delete this file from onedrive after I'm done converting it right so let's see if we can last time I tried to do this it didn't work when I try to just delete that file I had been using so let's see I will add an action because you don't want all these just random extraneous files just floating around in the onedrive right I would think you kind of want to have that cleaned up that's their true Lisa ok so which file do I want to delete I want to delete this create file this this one that it created so I have the ID of that file all right now I'm going to go just start this whole thing from scratch so I saved that make sure I saved it and then I'll just go back to this screen yeah and then I'll go just to a different file so I've got my conflict of interest policy and I'll go run in that policy request manager approval and PDF Bruce says is the flow run with the users permissions it depends I'm going to test this one and run it as try and run it as another user and see if it makes sure it puts it in their onedrive and not mine the flow creator so we'll test that too and you don't have to have that it asks them an extra question when they trigger the flow that was just one of those inputs as part of the manual trigger okay so this one's running so then Garth got an an approval request for the file now I there are some Adobe actions if you own Adobe like a license for the Adobe Isan connector in here or your company has Adobe e-sign the connected OBE sign connectors are really really cool they're really slick and they do they you know they will pass the file around for each signature and then put it back together and just do its got like ten different actions you can do it's really amazing so this is just the free way of doing it you think I should do a Power Hour about the Adobe I don't know if enough people own it to see whether it's whether it's worth dedicating a Power Hour to it because it's more limited audience okay so this one succeeded so that means it did delete the file so that file would have been called conflict of interest so I don't see any conflict of interest file in here so that means it looks so it converted the file moved it copied it to the onedrive converted it created the conflict of interest PDF file here and deleted the one that was in the onedrive so nice and nice and clean right oh yeah you do want me to do to show it Obi okay we'll add that to the list of power hours let me make a note of that okay okay so that was a flow that converts it to PDF and what so would you want maybe to email it to somebody also what else what other kind of things do you do what other kind of business processes do you have where it converts to PDF yes Lisa it does I believe it requires a Creative Cloud subscription I'm not positive though I have a customer that they gave me an account in their creative cloud and so therefore I use those credentials to log in to authenticate to the Adobe service to that connector when I'm creating the flow so I believe it Lisa Joe says can we delete the dot that's in the library too so yes what you would do for that one is you would do a SharePoint delete file and you would delete the one with basically that ID that one that you selected so I'll add that so I'll go to SharePoint and delete file same site and then the identifier of the file I want to delete is that's the one that I actually triggered from at the very beginning let me just type so many pieces of metadata ID for a selected file there's file identifier here and there's also ID here should be the same thing so that's the one that you would use to delete so you're deleting the onedrive document and they're deleting and you're deleting the SharePoint document yes okay so what's that doing oh yeah the email would you want it to email it to somebody oh yeah you might want to store the original with the PDF so I I have customers that like to kind of keep them all together now Microsoft did announce recently they're kind of revamping that whole document the document set concept and they're adding document set actions to flow let's see if they're in there yet set but supposedly we're gonna have document set actions pretty soon anyway so what you could do is right now you could create a folder and put the document in there with the PDF so that's what a lot of people like to do is they like to keep just keep them both together so you can keep them both together they're just alphab alphabetically they're listed next to each other or you know it's totally up to you as to what your business process is sometimes you might want to convert something like think about having a statement of work that you want to convert to PDF and send it to a customer so I have this other statement of work library now I wrote a blog post about let me go pull that out about using quick parts with flow Microsoft flow and quick parts I'll put that link in here I'll put it in the general channel because you can actually use this in conjunction with what you're doing with converting it to a PDF you can create this file that's got quick parts in it that's got actual metadata and also convert that so that one is going to be let's see let's go to that library so I've got my statement of work library and I want to generate a statement of work and generate a statement of work and convert it to a PDF and email it to the customer so here's the I'll show you that one it's that one in here yeah that's in here now this one is so we have 20 minutes left this isn't something that I can demo in 20 minutes but I can show you some parts of it now that you understand the pieces and just the basics of just getting a regular file converted to PDF this is kind of some fun that you could have with it so I've got my customers I've got and this is something we went over in my my big flow class that was two days long I pick a customer I've got the projects that we've been doing and for this project I'll say create a statement of work and that's going to be maybe I have a new project and I want a statement of work to be able to send to the customer so a create statement of work and this is just directly running a flow from the power app and then it is converting it and then giving it back to me so let's see this is it actually put this as metadata this is just like in this blog post I wrote it shows you how to do it so this is metadata about that customer and look it took the hours that I have you saw that you saw on the screen and it's just you know got the customer kind of interspersed here and there but it actually generates this file and then feelings you have the customer email address see the word the flow can automatically you know you have it in some metadata somewhere the flow can automatically email that to the customer as well so let's see that one I might have had that one email it to me let me look really quick just oh yeah here it is so this one is one that I just have it emailing it to me as part of the flow just so you can kind of see the example of it generates the file in SharePoint but it also sends it as an email attachment just as the next step in the flow pretty cool right aha okay so let's see that one will go back to SharePoint here okay so the trick to the quick parts is that it has all this metadata so then when you run the action that you're going to run an action that create the file so you could trigger it like say from a customer so we're going to run the workflow you need to have all the information maybe maybe you want to trigger it from the project itself because different projects have maybe different hours and different metadata so trigger it from the project itself the workflow the flow is going to create a file over in the library over in the statement of work library just say you like pick a project and trigger the flow from there and then in the statement of work library you have all these columns about the hours and the customer and all this information so you create the file but then you also after it's just going to create a blank file you can just make it instead of just creating a blank file if you want to actually use this sort of template you can do a copy file so I've got this statement of work example and this is a template you wouldn't ever want to delete this so I have this file that it's copying and just creating a copy of it with just the name of the customer as part of the filename and then the next step is that it's not automatically going to have the metadata it's just going to be a copy of this exact empty file then the next step in the flow is going to be to update the file properties where it puts all the metadata about that maybe that customer in that project in all these columns and then from there then you actually have a document that has all the metadata filled in like this one so then when I have this document with all the metadata in all the right spots then I then that's the one that I want to create a file over in onedrive after I get the metadata in it right because I need the metadata in it before I can convert it to PDF so then I take that file that I've put the metadata in because because then it fills out the quick parts copy it to onedrive so even though onedrive doesn't have any metadata it doesn't have those same columns it's I was kind of weary as to where that would whether that would work or not because I'm expecting it you know I want it to still have all the data from those columns but it does work so I just copy the file over the onedrive and then then I do the same exact thing that I demoed earlier and convert it to PDF and then put it back in SharePoint or send it as an attachment okay so let's go see who this runs as I will log in as another user and run this other one that we did you were asking about who it runs s okay so this one is I'm logged in as another user Billy Bob and Billy Bob's manager is me okay so that's to the approval we'll go to so Billy Bob is going to go this is the company policies one the first one that we did we're testing to see who's onedrive it uses with him being the one that triggers it so this is a see jury duty company policy and he is going to trigger that let's see oh look at that he can't trigger it do you know why because I didn't make him a run only user so you have to go out of your way to make sure that you make people to run only user if you want them to be able to see that flow and trigger it so I will go over it so this is their flow that I just created and you can only trigger it if you're a run only user so maybe I just want Billy Bob to be able to trigger it that's not very practical I probably want everybody in the company contoso all I want everybody just add anybody at all to be able to trigger it and I'll just let it so this means that when that person triggers it whoever the person is that triggers that each action will run as them or do I want it to run as me the admin so potentially for the onedrive for business I can just make it put everybody's onedrive files in there as me in my onedrive I'm just going to leave all the defaults though okay so now Billy Bob let's see how long this takes to kick in now Billy Bob should be able to see that Flo oh thanks Lisa roadmap roadmap number two zero seven nine five is that the the document sets thing I was talking about services I'm working on a similar but the agreement is the library content type well does it work that way cuz Stewart I found that the only way I can get it to work is instead of using a content type just by having a a file in the library and let it use that when I the first time I tried doing you know that example of like the one I showed you with the statement of work and the quick parts it didn't work with had just having it as the content type which is the way we've always done it so I had to just have a file that it copies but that would be nice if that's fixed now you never know okay now here this is I'm logged in as Billy Bob dress code oh yeah flow there we go now he can access it so that little run as where it shows a list of people that is only for manually triggered flows okay so now he started that flow and let's see if it lets go look at what it's doing it's going to send the approval email to me and sorry about so many tabs now it's just insane see leave Leave whoo it failed so the request manager approval in PDF failed running it as Billy Bob aha delete file the file does not exist so oh that last one that I just added that I didn't test yet that's the one that it aired out on that's that last one that I added so I'll probably just put like the wrong file identifier or something I put IB let's put an identifier I'll try the one from the actual trigger that it I wouldn't think that all these identifiers z' would be different but whatever file ID there okay that's deleting that that's the one that deletes the original document from SharePoint and I'll test that so least the the email the approval email the approval emails we'll just say who the requester is but they're those approval emails are always going to come from just this Microsoft flow if you do any of the email actions like send email send email from shared mailbox send email with options those are going to be those are going to be more specific to being able to control who they say they're from but these approval actions are always just going to say they're from Microsoft flow okay I proved that one so what we're really looking to see right now is where it's creating that file so who's whose onedrive is it creating the file in so you know what I'm going to do I'm going to delete those actions that delete the file because I'm not worried about them right now I want to just see where it's creating the onedrive file save I love how fast it is to test these things compared to SharePoint designer okay it's doing the approval probably I'll take a second it's not the new one no that's the one I already did yeah here's the new one okay so then the flow is going to keep going I approved it bla bla bla bla now we need to go look at onedrive so this is let's see this is Billy Bob's onedrive let's see if it created it in his onedrive oh it did so Billy Bob was the one that triggered it so that's where it created that file with the onedrive action so now let's change this flow so let's go to the run only users screen and change the flow so when it does the onedrive for business I want it to use my ofte I'm logged in as this account called admin and wonder whether that is my current login and so I want it to use me my onedrive whenever it creates these temporary onedrive files so that's going to be a way that you can use to get around the fact that the user might be new they might not have a onedrive they might not have used their onedrive yet and/or just not having it create files and random other people's one drives okay so now I did that I changed it so when it runs it's going to run as not at for that one action it's not going to run as that user so I'll go ahead and do a different one now as as Billy Bob so I'll do the staff discipline policy and I'll run that okay that's so again that's running as him and let's see so it's running I've got to approve it and then is it going to create the staff discipline in here this is a big mess this is all just demo stuff yeah so there you go look it created staff discipline in my onedrive the admin so that's your way of getting around so it doesn't when only four manually triggered workflows though can you do that so now so instead of putting it and it adds that person in their onedrive it's putting it in mind just for that one action it's running as me pretty cool Craig says anyone using this in their companies how friendly is this from the crews perspective the crew like the end user just my how how long will the flow wait for approval thirty days Microsoft okay so first of all Craig I usually find that I don't it just in the real world I don't usually do manually triggered workflows because then you have to depend on the user knowing to do that so usually just in the real world when you're having workflows that do things on files it's going to be based on the file getting created or getting modified or you know something specific about the file once it gets created or modified and not have to rely on them manually triggering it so to me just in my personal experience of doing workflows for about ten years not many of them are usually usually have a requirement of needing to be manually triggered so usually it's just very automated so and then to answer your question about the flow it waits approval for 30 days it has it gives you the ability to change the timeout in here in the settings it's got a specific syntax that it uses for that of the ISO the ISO 8601 format to be able to change if you want the timeout to be shorter but Micra somebody Microsoft on the flow blog recently wrote a post about if you're concerned about flows being live for 30 days you want them to be longer you could do instead of this instead of the action called instead of the action called start and wait for approval you would just do create an approval and that way it's creating it and kicking it off but not waiting for it and then you can have so what they did was they did a separate flow that had a trigger of the common data service like where the data is actually stored is like it's a table in there called approvals buried just in the common data service and then the trigger could be when the person approves it and that would kick off a different workflow so that is a way that you can get around if you know how to if you have the common data service I'm not sure if that's an extra license cost though that's why I've been kind of iffy about that one that's another sort of way potentially that you could do that is have a separate flow that is only triggered when someone actually does their part of the approval but I've never tried that I just read it in a Microsoft blog post just on the regular Microsoft flow blog last month or so so yeah yeah all right cool well we have five minutes left what do you okay so Joelle you I know you watched the keynote and you're kind of probably paying attention to Twitter some during the week what are you excited about that they announced this last week I think the home site thing because I know just and some of the work I'm doing I know whole thing of making a communication site you know the route kind of quote unquote of your intranet has been a pretty big deal so I think that'll be at home some homes that concept will be really helpful oh yeah because we we have a lot of customers that are small and medium sized businesses and you have all these just sort of sharepoint home pages that have nothing on them because it's sort of a daunting undertaking right to people when they see this blank home page and they feel like they need to work really hard to figure out what content needs to go on it have meetings get you know like do it right yeah I mean also just right now if you try to make your route site have a modern home page it just looks like a team modern home page whereas if you're creating communication sites for like other departments and it looks like those are theirs those look fancier than your route which is kind of a little bit backwards so I think that the home site concept kind of helps with that because it kind of has that that more structured modern like designed look to it first it's just like a regular team modern team page home yeah so yeah I'm super excited about that and then the page that's currently just the SharePoint home that will become like kind of like your remember my site kind of personalized stuff and that'll be like really awesome just all personalized news for you documents for you you're saved bookmarks and everything about you that's personalized for the logged in user Oh Jeremy says importing an excel file to a list and being able to edit the field yes that was cool myself yeah and it's SharePoint used to be able to do that so they're adding renaming sites I know that's so funny that's such a small thing and that's a huge to people we sat there at the lunch table and just kind of asked people around the table what was their favorite thing and they were all just so excited about being able to rename the URLs for SharePoint site all right well let's see Lisa Joe is asking about that common data service thing I'm going to look that up and I'll put it and I'll have to see if I can find that so I'll put that just in the chat window for you when you know whenever I whenever I find that link again I saw it but I didn't actually try it out I just kind of got the gist of what they were talking about but yeah next week hopefully Joelle will have something that one of those major things they talked about that's actually the weekend demo we'll just see we'll just kind of wing it between now and then and see what you know what's out there Bruce says did Microsoft talk about allowing guests users to access power apps I don't know if they did I'm not sure all right and it was so fun getting to meet some of you in person add the sharepoint conference that was awesome putting the names to the faces and all that cool all right good to see you all thanks for coming to power our I will go find that link for you and until next time and go to the hashtag ideas channel to type any ideas and I'll kind of ponder those two all right I'll see you all next time bye bye

Channel: Laura Rogers, Microsoft MVP

Views: 9,928

Keywords: SharePoint, Office 365, Flow, Workflow, PDF, Convert PDF

Id: Izhqe7SrXR0

Length: 59min 44sec (3584 seconds)

Published: Wed May 29 2019