SharePoint Power Hour: Translate SPD to Power Automate

my software didn't see it anyway um hi I'm Laura Rogers this is Joelle jobs in here and audio say hello hello everybody welcome to SharePoint power our this is our weekly show we do Wednesdays most Wednesdays 11:00 central and we had fun broadcasting live from Microsoft ignite a couple of weeks ago that was awesome they had such a fancy set up there I had sent out the email beforehand with a link to it but then Mike you know Microsoft had their own get up for broadcasting the show on my channel so when they broadcast it it just ended up broadcasting on to ed to a new URL to it as a new live event instead of the little pre created one that I'd done which is fine but then the link in the email just simply didn't work so you know when you go to our the YouTube wonder Laura channel you you will see it in there it's just not the you know it's not the original link that I had created yeah and in the beginning was me trying to desperately get select to work as well so you may have noticed that and that didn't work either one we were on stage yeah well yeah so but we had so much to talk about I don't know how much time we would have had to oh yeah telling everybody um all right so we had a lot of great announcements at ignite and it was it was it was a whirlwind wasn't it yeah it was actually probably one of my one of the best Microsoft conferences that I've been to for you know actually getting a lot of good information and some deep dive into the different tools so that was really great right yeah so the next few power hours we do are really there's so much to cover I mean Joelle I was looking at like the new search stuff that came out where there's a new sort of search admin center did you get to poke around in there yet yeah oh yeah so some of the stuff you know anyway search web parts lists just everything there's gonna be so much to cover as we go through power hours in the in the next few weeks yeah and as these things begin to roll out to I mean they'll be rolling out like continuously over the next couple months all these updates so as if they're not always rolling up yeah if you thought it was bad before yes this week's topic Joelle had a great idea so Joelle it was this was your idea I'll let you go ahead and sort of give the introduction summary you know just you know I'll just I'll just sit by and let you to kind of explain what it is yeah sure so yeah I think we just and I know that we have a lot of people that are experienced with power apps and probably flow as well that watches regularly but this is really kind of a video to have out there as a helpful thing for folks that are moving from or having to kind of make that transition from SharePoint designer workflows to flow and just really oops of course my phone's gonna start ringing as soon as I start talking but um and just really are trying to understand like how to translate things from SharePoint designer to flow so we wanted to kind of go through some of the common terms we see in SharePoint designer and some of the common concepts and then just look at how those things are done with flow and then also just look at about how flow builds upon them and of course in II just got us things that you had a chip or designer that were regularly used that may not be as clear or even exist in flow yet so that's kind of just a little bit about what we want to do all right yeah so um I will go ahead and share went ahead and share my desktop with you Joelle and Skype so you can see like the live version of it and I'll go ahead and do share my desktop here in all right here we are okay so here is a nice little table that Joelle put together too that will go through all these in this hour and it basically explains how to translate all these concepts in SharePoint designer to flow and also if I did a session just real quick at ignite about the new approvals the new out-of-the-box approvals in SharePoint and if you go there like all those sessions free just on demand to anyone so if you go to the Microsoft ignite website and look for my session I was like BRK I don't know if my head what it was but if you either watch that session it's a whole hour about a lot of you know some of these concepts and a lot of common things do with people do with approvals and kind of the new concepts and other box approvals so go check that out too I I need to write a blog post and post all those - alright so here are some constants that we'll talk through and then and we'll you know I'll demonstrate them just kind of on the fly like I always do and then we'll go through we have some more slides but this is the mate this is a really great one that really explains the actual you know different things that are different versus things are the same in the workflows so for the first the first concept really I'm going to start with triggers and trigger outputs so I'll go ahead and actually flip over to my got my Microsoft flow here so we'll talk about triggers and I'll go ahead and just create a new blank flow and then as we demo things I can go into you know some of these little demo flows that I have but I like to create a new blank one just from scratch and then so the first thing you're gonna do is you have to pick a trigger now back in SharePoint designer you have little check boxes so I actually probably should open up SharePoint designer to you had little check boxes and you had check boxes that basically said whether you want it to run when an item in the SharePoint list is created at the items modified or manually or all three and you can just check as many of those boxes as you wanted to well this trigger here is the same concept except we have a lot more options we have not only you know something happening in SharePoint we have just you know manual triggers we have a bajillion additional things that we didn't have from you know the SharePoint designer ones so like here's SharePoint designer and I can go create a new just pretend like I'm gonna create a new workflow and then test I'll just show you what I'm referring to here it's kind of funny because I don't crack SharePoint designer open hardly any more so these start options right here these little check boxes those are what I'm referring to as far as this trigger so that's the exact same concept now look at all the triggers we can have a few of these are new they ignite they announce them at ignite so like when a site has requested to join a hub site that's that's brand new that's the this that hub site concept that we talked about in a previous power hour but again you can see deleted is something we never had in SharePoint that people wanted frequently to for something to be triggered when an item got deleted but now that's something we do have in float so this is just the SharePoint triggers I mean you have a plethora of all these hundreds hundreds of other services that you can use as a trigger you can say when something arrives in a mailbox you can do a manual trigger somebody tweet something etc so that's the concept of triggers and let's see I'll go ahead oh thanks for Amanda for posting that the link to my session in the chat window there so that's the concept of triggers so then we have the next option the next item here is actions and actions are pretty much the same thing except again we have hundreds and hundreds more actions that we can do so we'll go I'll go ahead and just show you um I'll pick the manual I'll pick this manual trigger first and we'll talk about these manual inputs and then I'll show you a the SharePoint actions and some of the more common actions real quick I know we've done a lot of power ours about flow but this is a little bit more introductory and geared to people like like Joe all said geared to people that are still stuck in SharePoint designer and and maybe you just kind of wanted to get familiar with flow and learn the concepts so the input this is going to be the same thing as the initiation form that you had in SharePoint designer workflows so that means when someone clicks a button to manually trigger flow do you want to ask them a question or have them fill something in like for example do I want them to have to put in the name of an approver before they start as they start the workflow to maybe say I want the document to go to this approver for approval and they would fill in the approver so that's just an example of a common thing that you would hat you could have as a trigger and so I can just type like just were there and that would tell them to please enter and approver you can customize that and then okay so let's go look at actions and as we're adding actions you can start by just clicking a category and but you can also just do search through them so if you know the name of it you can just quickly type it here but look at all the SharePoint actions we have now this is going to be these are a lot different than the actions that we had in SharePoint designer so in SharePoint designer we had these now of course I don't have the bandwidth in this class to translate every single action to what it is in flow that should probably be separate like a blog post or something like that but a lot of them are completely different so you do have you had variables and we had creating list items editing editing list items and deleting items things like that we also had some more advanced ones with things like substrings and a little bit of calculations and math and adding dates and things like that so the SharePoint designer items that had to do with SharePoint list items and library items those are if it's a list it's going to be called referred to as an item in here and if it's a library it's going to be a file so that's one of the big differences that you do in flow as opposed to a SharePoint designer and then we have things like get get items sale type get here narrow it down get items is awesome and we didn't really have this concept in SharePoint designer except when we got very advanced and did some of that stuff that I did in a Power Hour probably a year or two ago about using Web Services and going in and and like actually getting a whole list of items and like parsing through it in the dictionary and all that stuff which was really complicated so this get items is a lot more simple way to get a list of items filtered by some particular criteria so and you know we can get attachments we can do a lot of things that we couldn't do in SharePoint designer all right so actions again not we not only have SharePoint actions but we have all these other services of things that actions we can do hundreds of actions all right so let's go to the next that those are that's a concept that you know I could spend an hour just kind of talking about actions but the idea here is I'm going to go through this list and try and kind of go through these concepts and make sure we cover all of them and we're actually writing a flow class right now a course right now we have a power apps course and we do a little with some of these connectors in the powerups course but we don't have an actual flow class so we were working on one of those right now so this is some of the content from that all right so stages and steps in SharePoint designer we have a concept of scopes in flow so let's go look at scopes well look at we'll look at stages so in stages you could actually go to an SharePoint designer you could actually set it to jump straight to some other stage in here so I could actually make it have a condition if I want it to and jump to another stage in the workflow in SharePoint designer and here we have scopes so let me close this I'm gonna see new step I'll just do a oh we also have of course variables are called something differently variables we have initialized variable is one of them I'll just give it a name you have to initialize a variable and will flow before you can use it so it actually has to exist and has to have a name which is different than a sharepoint designer where you could as soon as you started using a variable that actually put it in this list of variables but you could add them here so adding a variable and setting what type it is in sharepoint designer is just like initializing a variable and saying what type it is like this and then say i want to do an action I save it I wouldn't give it a name either and then in SharePoint designer just kind of getting around in here you could put your little orange cursor somewhere in between to add things and over here in flow you can put your cursor in between and add things that way so one thing I can do is I'm not going to add a parallel branch right now but I'm gonna add a it's just wanting me this to do an action I want to do a oh look this is new look at this Joelle they moved it they moved condition so now when I go to change or action every single thing that [Music] instead of it having new you know action or condition or whatever all listed together the condition is actually listed there with all the actions see aren't you glad we haven't completely written that class yet because we'd be changing a whole bunch and this was not like this literally last week that's new don't you love it we can discover new things during power hour all right um so this is okay so initialize the variable then I've got a condition and then I can do a scope let me just do it let me do a scope I'll just type it because apparently scopes are listed now along with everything else where they weren't before disco control there we go all right and then I can put an action inside of here and then I can its scope is just like lumping everything together and the whole scope can be it can be named and it can be and have a run after so after you're basically saying what scope should run after so I could have two entire different branches of the of the flow like grouped together in these scopes what you really want to rename these just in general when you're going through flow try and rename things as you go because as soon as I start using something like if I initialize that I have this thing that's called initialized variable notice that I can rename it if I want to but as soon as I start using that variable somewhere below in the flow oh now I can rename it that's that maybe that's new - you couldn't rename it before if you're already using it that's funny okay so scope is just it's a it's a good way of grouping things together so that you can collapse the whole thing in a condition you're gonna be able to group is you're gonna be able to collapse the whole condition - so your scopes are really good when you're having like you have like a huge like complicated flow where you might want to you know document it and have like specific areas to be able to somebody can come and find exactly where to pick something yeah yeah and it yeah it's a good way to just be able to document name things yes scopes are instead of stages now um [Music] let me see right after and so and then this concept of run after I'm we don't even have the concept of run after in SharePoint designer so maybe I'll cover that last but um yeah so scopes are just we're categorizing things I don't see anything obvious that tells me like to jump to the other jump to another scope like you can with state stages yeah yeah I didn't notice that either yeah but if anybody knows let us know if there's a way to do that yeah okay see flow is one of those things I was telling Joe well like I feel like every time I sit down to start teaching flow there are new things are things I haven't quite used as much and things that I still have to learn and figure out and test myself and it's like constant just a little little tidbit there mary says is it better to have one big flow or several well it depends on what you're trying to do if you're doing a bunch of different things on just a certain list item I I'd like to have if you have to do something I would like to just do one flow and have one flow running like if when a list items updated for example and then within that one flow you can say something you can do conditions inside of it and that way that cuz flows actually count they count up so you're gonna get a certain number of flows you can do per month so that's one reason to not do a whole bunch of flows when you really could just do make it you know a little bit more consolidated right so the next concept here is going to be loops and loops are cool because in here in flow it actually knows when it needs to put a loop in something so for example I can say if I'm going to go get the attachments of some list item or if I'm gonna go get attachments of an email or I'm going to look at all the people who approve something if it sees multiple of whatever that is it automatically puts a loop so in SharePoint designer the way you did a loop was you say you know loop a certain number of times or you just tell it how many times you want it to run or you say to loop as long as this equals this you just keep looping through something so it looks a lot different doesn't it it looks a lot different so in here you could actually do a I think it's each loop I never act I never actually insert them myself I usually just they create themselves in here so I'll show you what I'm referring to I'll go back to a workflow that I was doing yesterday I'm like the save and that Joelle and I were talking through and I'll show you what it is and how it remember it was kind of annoying Joelle when it kept putting in a loop and I didn't want it to yeah so this is my okay so um in office 365 groups all come with a group calendar and that is not a SharePoint list that's not it is you know there is a SharePoint site behind the scenes in an office 365 group but that group calendar is not a SharePoint list in that and that office 365 groups SharePoint site so it is actually a different action there are office 365 group actions that you can do in here so what I was doing was I wanted to basically start an approval to fill out a form just say basically like name of event now this could be a SharePoint list item or anything else but this one's pretty simple I'm just going to say the name of an event I want to have in a calendar and then start an approval and then create a group event after that event gets approved someone to lead all this and show you what I'm talking about when it you know puts the loop in there for me so I'm gonna say as soon as someone manually triggers this and types the name of their event that they want to get approved of course you'd have a date and stuff like that too I'm just trying to keep this pretty simple there there isn't even a date control in here yet then I'm gonna say anyone or everyone from the assign list I'll just say anyone and then it's just assigned to me just my test account approve this and I'll put the name of the event that they typed in there and then the requester can be the name of the person use it the user email the person that actually fills in the trigger and does the trigger and then the details item link I don't necessarily have an item link because there's no action item for them to approve it's just basically do you approve this name of the event that's all there is to it and then after it gets approved then I wanted to say well I want it to go create a calendar event so that is going to be in the office 365 groups category here so that is create a group event did you all know this that the group events the in the calendar in dollar set group are different than a SharePoint creating a SharePoint list item pretty cool so I need to say which group that I want to create the calendar item in the name of event I can just make it be the name of what they are whatever they typed whenever they type the name of their event and then I'm just gonna make up some a couple of times in here like the request date and then the response date of course you you know you'd have to you could do something more fancy to do something with dates and then I can put a whole bunch more information about that event that I'm creating but notice that it automatically put apply to each that wasn't there right I didn't insert this so why is it saying apply to each so it's automatically gonna give you and apply to each any time it sees that it's got to iterate through multiple things so for each response it's gonna do this so it sees that technically I could have multiple responses I originally had this as everyone from the assign list and I changed it to I didn't want to have a loop and I changed it to anyone from the sign list and it still put the loop on here so basically this case I've only got one approver anyway but it still put this loop on here so I'm not going to go delve into anything Oh maybe gritty but but yeah that's what a loop looks like so anything that you're gonna do and you're that you want it to do for each response you're going to add inside of this loop alright and you know like I said if you have an email that's got attachments and you want to do something with the attachments move them to SharePoint or whatever you do it's gonna know that an email could have multiple attachments and it's going to automatically put a loop or you could just manually insert a loop alright we're already almost halfway done we've got several slides actually parallel branches there's there's actually some there's pear there are parallel branches and then there's a what was the other one that's similar to a parallel branch I'll go look I'll go in there and look at it yeah it's such a different concept okay so in SharePoint designer you could do a parallel block and whatever actions you put in here you know create list item whatever it is set field it'll do those simultaneously so that's what a parallel block looks like in SharePoint designer and then a parallel block in here and flow looks like tight parallel I can't believe they had the nerve to change Upshur flow in the way you add all these right before I'm demoing it the nerve we're demoing Microsoft teams to a customer yesterday and teams was all acting up and walking and oh that and the issues during the demo of course they're like is it always gonna do this yeah no it's not a good luck usually okay so if I go up here see I can add a parallel branch it just doesn't let me add a parallel bridge below that that seems like a bug to me but I guess you actually have to already have something in there so then you can give it a parallel branch for it to do things at the same time now a cool thing about a parallel branch is that you can actually do different things according to whether something is successful so for example if I do something like let's see can I add I can't I'm just gonna try and add one right in there but the little arrow of thinking you went away here cancel there there we go so like if I do like get manager and I'm gonna get manager of the person that's approving it the person that manually triggered it I'm going to go get their manager well sometimes in Active Directory you might not have a manager so you don't want the whole workflow to just bomb out so I can do a parallel branch and I can say I can do this configure run after so this branch I want to run after get manager has succeeded as successful and then this other branch whatever I want to do here like do notification I want to do that configure run after after get manager has failed so that's your white see it even puts a little red icon up there so if get manager is successful it goes on this side of the parallel branch and otherwise it goes here now you don't have to do too you know successful and failed for your parallel branches you can just have it to do two branches the exact same time no matter what but that's a nice little trick of being able to do some trouble you know some sort of trouble some error checking and error handling in your workflow let's see I'm trying to read what Stuart said our communications team often changes the email so it's set up in emails as separate workflows that trigger the main the main flow triggers that way anywhere in the process will get the most recent version of emails interesting um Joelle is just planner have events Nicholas is saying is the same as a planner event I've never seen events and planners and a new thing I mean I know you can date them and that they have like kind of like a calendar view I think in there like yeah yeah but I think it's still just a task yeah it's not an event Nicholas this is not really yeah it's really pretty engine yeah yeah dating putting something on a calendar that's so funny thank you I'm Mary I'm glad you liked that little tip okay so that's parallel branches and then we had me see and then no man I'll just call this manager and what was that action it was like terminate or something Joelle yeah stop in the workflow and that was one of the ones that we're gonna cover I wish the what this wasn't so slow come on oh good lord there we go so I can just yeah terminate you don't have to terminate I mean it'll it'll end after it goes down this branch and there's nothing after it but you can actually you know give it a certain status and a code so that you'll you can log that stuff and be able to report on it or see it later like when you're looking at all of your flows and and the bigger picture of flows and how they're doing all right let's do I wish that other little drop-down box was still there was it it was not due until scope Oh switch switches what okay so switch is an interesting one so I let me go to this other workflow and explain to you why why we would use a switch versus just an if condition and that is gonna be over here because when I was doing my presentations at ignite I just put put each of those presentations as a PDF and put it in SharePoint and then created a flow and I said people could send me an email and it would look at the subject and then if the subject contain like the name of BRK whatever or what my session was it would just respond with the PDF of the slides so I actually created a shared mailbox Laura dot Rogers at ITV Myntra calm so that Joelle and Chris could work on this and manage it with me and manage all the incoming emails but so instead of being it so a switch is gonna be I'll just show you what a switch looks like a switch is kind of like an if statement and we we actually have that concept in power apps to switch switch is if basically like I'll say the subject equals BRK one one one oh I think that's what it was if the subject equals B R K 1 1 1 o do this and you put all the actions that you want to happen if the subject equals B R K 1 1 1 o otherwise you can say add an action if it doesn't equal it you can actually add more switches so if it equals the RK shoot I don't remember off the top of my head what the other one was let me see okay 1 1 1 o and then B RK - 2 8 - so I know this is a little confusing 2 2 a 2 but so I could say if the subject equals this send them this file otherwise if the subject equals this send them this file otherwise just if it doesn't equal either those things do this well I didn't want to do equals so with a switch you have to do equals you can't do contains so I wanted people to be able to type just that name of the session just somewhere in the subject and I didn't want the subject to have to be equal to that so I did not use a switch so I made a little bit more complicated it's probably Nicholas I've never used the switch command in PowerShell but it's probably the same concept and you can you can do this that there is a switch command and power apps too so that's delete that so instead of doing switch we made it a little more convoluted and if so I'll app sees if basically it's taking the subject of the email and it's making it to upper which is making it uppercase so that it just takes whatever you wrote as your subject and turns it into uppercase if it contains BR K 1 1 1 o then I'm gonna go get the SharePoint file this PDF file and then I'm going to send it from a shared mailbox this Laura dot Rogers an item intercom blah blah blah blah thank you for attending my session and it's got the actual file is attached to it in that cool and then if not then I have to say if it contains a dude like another condition so it had to be more complicated because I wanted to say if it contains this do this if not then another condition if it contains this other thing so yeah it was a little more of a pain because I needed to have contains but that's that's the difference between using a switch in an if statement a switch is very simple if just one field equals this it was this equals this and and you have multiple branches for different things that it can equal alright so pretty interesting huh okay um that was parallel blocks and switches start options initiation forms we already talked about and then end of workflow we have the terminate control which we talked about you know sharepoint workflows will just end you don't have to tell it to end it's gonna be over no matter what but you could force it to end by using like the it was a stop command in SharePoint 2010 workflows and I literally just had to do one of these yesterday for a customer in an alternate in workflow yes Lisa there is a switch command in power apps and then there is a terminate control that will terminate whatever whatever you're doing in the workflow alright so here are some things that I'll talk about things that exist in flow that we didn't have in SharePoint designer and a few of those we've kind of gone over already but I'll go ahead and just kind of keep that on this other screen and go back into my this little other flow that I was doing okay you go out of there don't want to save any changes I made all right so of course we have a modern UI and we have hundreds of templates and hundreds like I think it's at least 200 different connectors and just this concept of connectors that didn't exist before in SharePoint designer you only had pretty much SharePoint is your data source and if you wanted to have other types of data sources it was way more complicated yet to do web services and stuff like that in here we have audit logging in SharePoint designer the only way to do logging was to actually you could use the out-of-the-box workflows which the tasks process designer stuff had some logging built in but if you're creating your own workflow you actually had to do this you know whatever you had to do this log to history list action for it to for you to know anything that happened in the workflow well in here in flow we actually have it's just built in it will just automatically tell you you know what's going on like this one that this test that we ran yesterday to create a new calendar item so I manually triggered the flow I have all the details I started an approval it tells me it's kind of raw data but it still it tells me who the approval went to and all the details about it and you can just click and drill down into any of these and then it tells me what you it created and so in you'll you'll just have this list of things that ran successfully and if they didn't run successfully it will actually let you you can go adjust the workflow and hit resubmit which is huge because oh my gosh who didn't spend hours of their life in SharePoint designer workflows like creating or editing SharePoint items over and over and over and over again - or manually triggering them over and over again just to rerun a flow a workflow I mean this is I love this resubmit thing that's huge because yeah you just go adjust the workflow change it and then just go back to one that failed and hit resubmit let's see another Street centralized approvals and lazy approvals we have that approval action and again if you want to know all about approvals that that other that session that did ignite has a bunch about that but we had this approval action and in SharePoint designer you had some tasks actions and this sort of little task process designer that where you could send things to people for approval but it was just it would just put it in the task list in that SharePoint site and it was just confined to that one site well these approvals in flow are all the approvals you've received in your entire tenant like ever well they do timeout so the old tasks in SharePoint designer and 20 and 2010 and 2013 they would only live in there for a certain amount of time it's like 90 days or so and you know admins had ways that could go in on the server and and tweak that if they wanted to but basically this is a concept that you didn't have in SharePoint designer because these it's just one big central list of things that you can approve and approvals that you've done that you've these are the ones that I've actually sent to people come on [Music] and these are the ones that I've actually I'm waiting for responses on these and then this is the whole history of things that I've sent and received for all of my approvals amanda says cuz you export the flow logs to a SharePoint list belong so that's a good question let me go look at those I think so you can import an entire flow and you can export an entire flow but let's see what about the logs let's go look at those off the top of my head I think so oh yeah here we go get CSV file so I can get the CSV file of this but you can also there's some new reporting around it and new admin stuff around all these flows and that's some of the stuff that they talked about in at ignite was this ability to do more admin and be able to see more globally about all of your flows and also last power our a couple of weeks ago we talked about all the auditing and audit history and we talked about in office 365 admin where you could go look do an audit log search and flows were actually in there - I didn't see power ups but flows were in there in the main audit in it so this is where I can go in and go to resources it's kind of buried in there but I have all my apps and I have all my flows and this is the flow admin so um Amanda I don't know if this helps you but you could go look at every single flow in your whole organization and be able to see who owns it and go drill in and see what's going on with it so but yeah you can go to the log history list and export it but you could also do more we're reporting off of it Laurie says whereas Microsoft with at end of life worship when designer I don't know yes flow is the official replace yes you should be moving to flow yeah with with power apps they're kind of like well it's not really a fish Alresford InfoPath but info paths going way so kind of power-ups is the new way to do it but and so I mean flow is kind of the same thing there is no way to like migrate your sharepoint designer workflows to flow you're just creating them new but yes from now on I think flows to the point where it is viable and it is something where you can do think all the things that you were familiar with doing in SharePoint designer it's just a lot different you know a year or two ago I wouldn't have said that because there was still a good bit of things missing but they've they filled in a lot of the gaps lately let's see some other new concepts to learn on the connectors we'll go back to our list of connections and you see I pretty much went through here and just created a ton just using a lot of different just to try a bunch of them out created a bunch of these flow management that's one of the connectors so that's where you can manage as an admin manage other flows and so that's an actual connector you have forms again hundreds of different connectors and I can go do a new one and I can see just just tons and tons and tons of them so this concept definitely didn't exist in SharePoint designer all right and then do concepts so we talked about applied to each and that's the looping and switch and as far as dynamic content and expressions with SharePoint designer you can do you can use this little string builder and you can have dynamic content where you can put you know text together with fields from your your item or variables and things like that then you could also do some things like like these string things where you can go extract you know get two characters from the beginning of a string of some field and those were you know not that advanced and then because there were only a few of them I could do I can calculate like item id +1 or something do some math a little bit of math so it was pretty limited so as far as dynamic so as far as expressions and flow I mean there is a ton that you can do it's it's a little overwhelming actually so let's go back into this test flow that I was doing Nicholas says should you have multiple environments or just one well environments Nicolas first of all you have to have a certain license level to even have multiple environments environments are going to be if you want to segregate out like different groups of people that are and managing different groups of people like maybe different like major divisions of your company and things like that that are creating flow and get more granular about how you manage who can create flows and what they what connectors they can use and stuff like that so that's what you can do with different multiple environments maybe we've got only got 13 minutes left I might have time to kind of show you a glimpse of that but I'm not sure ok so this is just this test flow that I was creating so let's go look at some of the actually uncle look at the one the two upper that the one that we had in that other flow here we go okay so this alright to get to this little expression builder you can just click your cursor in any box just like just some empty box and then any any of these empty boxes that you click in you're gonna have this expression little tab over here so this is where I can see all these different categories of functions that I can use just tons of them and then don't forget that you can click see more to be able to see like the full list of that category or you can just type start typing something like 2 upper like to lower to upper so a lot of these concepts if you've used Excel in the past if you use Microsoft Access just any other types of logic or languages a lot of these concepts are going to be familiar to you and so if I want to say like is there and you know is there an addition or if there is a subtraction or whatever it is I can just start typing and then that will kind of narrow it down for me because you know there's no way I'm going to know what this full list of expressions is so I can either just go skim through and read every single thing or I can say well if I wanted to do such and such an excel it would have been called this and just go you know go search for it so you go in here and you you can build expressions this way so like the way we did this one was this two upper so I clicked on one he already my husband Chris created this he already created and I'll just I'll show you what it looks like to rebuild it so I'll just get rid of this two upper and so I have to start in a blank box and go to expression into and I know that it's called two upper and then it's just like in Excel and power apps it's going to tell me what it expects in the parentheses and it's going to have you know sometimes it'll require multiple parameters like with commas in between them so I can say what do I want to go to uppercase I need to say what field I need to be translated to uppercase so then to get the content I flip over to this dynamic content tab and that's when I can go get the subject and I just click on the subject and it puts it right here in the expression I click OK so that's what that's how you can build those expressions and they're there a bajillion of them and so that's very different than the way that you did it in SharePoint designer SharePoint designer was a lot more obvious and a lot more limited but in this one there's a lot more freedom as to what you can do but it's you know can be a little bit more complex so that is how you can work with expressions in in flow and let's see is anybody have any other fun examples of things you did with expressions in flow let's see tiny sea says what type of email account is best used to send from I tried using my generic from email address well you okay so I you could do a shared mailbox so you can go into your office 365 admin and create a shared mailbox and then whoever you add whatever members you add to that shared mailbox will have the ability to send as and that way they'll be able to manage the workflow and then if you create like you said you have a generic from email address but you actually have to go to that account in exchange and you know office 365 admin and put yourself in there to be able to have sinned as rights so yeah you have to know to do that let me see if I can go find that no I'm in the wrong environment okay but since a few of you are asking about this I'll just um show you what I'm talking about so if you have I recommend just using a shared shared mailbox and I'm gonna expand this out so I'm go to groups here and go to shared mailboxes so like I have this shared mailbox called IT department and then I have to put members here so Joelle and I are members of the IT department so I can go say I also want to add Billy Bob and Chris so when I add them then they will be able to all these people that I'm putting in as members will be able to do send as in that mailbox it's got a sink and not synchronize this information over to exchange over in exchange I used to be an exchange admin so over an exchange I'll show you that it is actually going to do that for me and put those in exchange for me but if you want to go straight to exchange to do it you can you can go to mailboxes shared and it's in here but you could also go to people's mailboxes like an here and I can do let's see see send on behalf and send as so this screening and mailbox delegation is where you would do that for an individual but for a workflow that you're collaborating on with other people like that one that I was just showing you from ignite that's one that I using a shared mailboxes best and that way everybody can go into the shared mailbox everybody can you know make the flow send as the shared mailbox now one thing that kind of tripped me up was that when I first created it I I went in there and I hid it from the directory I set the setting let's see yeah showing global address list I changed this to no and when I changed it to no then we couldn't it wouldn't work for anyone anymore we couldn't see it in Outlook and we couldn't do the flow that used it or anything so I really did want to hide it from the global address list but turning this to no broke what we were trying to do so Melissa says can you excuse exchange on-prem with flow you would have to be yeah there's there's an SMTP connector so so there are several different types of male connectors that you can use and flow so you just can't use the one called office 365 or Officer five Outlook but like if I go search yeah see there's an SMTP one there's several other type of male connectors or you could yeah I think it just it just depends on your exact setup and whether you're synchronizing your directory to to office 365 or what what your setup is there so let me see if I can get through the rest of what I was doing here dynamic content expressions and then some concepts in SharePoint designer that are very different or that don't exist in flow you had site workflows in SharePoint designer so you don't need the concept of a site workflow in inflow because everything site workflows were just it didn't trigger off of a specific list or library so flows are you can have a flow that has nothing to do with SharePoint in in here so you could be not using SharePoint at all you could have a flow that's triggered when a certain thing gets tweeted and it sends an email to somebody so you so kind of that concept that existed for a site site workflows doesn't exist it's not needed when within flow and then we can do things like you can't do anything with document set at least not ya cumin sets have been kind of haven't been updated or anything done with them recently but you can create folders in flow and you can move things around between folders so you just can't do the exact document set items that you had in SharePoint designer and those those didn't even exist in SharePoint designer 2013 workflows those were only in 2010 ones anyway so like document sets yeah yeah document sets were not in 2013 they they haven't been around since the 20s since 2010 workflows had some document set actions so let's see now with approvals you actually had this whole approval like let's see I'll go to the tasks start a task process you had this task process designer and sharepoint designer and you could customize what the outcomes were well the kind of again watch my my night session about all this stuff but kind of the equivalent in flow is going to be that approval action and the approval action as of now doesn't give you the ability to change what the outcomes can be like like something other than approved or rejected but you can use an action called outlook it's send email with options so yeah send email with options lets you actually type what you want some options to be and then they actually have buttons in the email where they can pick from things it's just not gonna be an approval and it's not going to show in that list of approvals up here but you can make the workflow do something according to what their their response was when they pick one of those options in the email so you can have like maybe even use the switch and say if if user option was this go down this path if this good on this path etc so you can have not only can you have something other than approve or reject you can have a bunch of them you don't even have to just have to I'm gonna wrap it up let's see we don't have impersonation steps and flow I tweeted something Joelle do you remember me tweeting something the other day about doing permissions with flow I didn't write it I just like retweeted it from somebody and let's see if I can find it okay there there was a post somewhere of someone saying how to do something with SharePoint permissions and flow I just have not personally done it but we don't have back in SharePoint 2010 workflows we had impersonation steps where you could have do actually do things with permissions in those we don't have that exact concept in flow and then Visio integration that we that got introduced in SharePoint designer is actually coming in flow it's something that they announced that's gonna be exists in here where you can create the flows from within Visio whoo all right let me go back to my screen wow that was a whirlwind okay so um you see Oh Jerry said plumb sail has an add-on that lets you do permissions there's also a great add-on that I like call it the mohebi add-on for PDFs is really great and you can get a mohebi account it's a third-party product but you can actually get a free account like for test and out that just allows you a certain limited number of runs and you can also get a free account that just limits you down to certain things so there are a couple of different ways you can get free or demo accounts in with me move MB but it lets you convert things to PDF so like this is a flow that I did where you have a new customer so a new email arrives it's going to be a new customer it creates a statement of work update some metadata it actually gets a word document that it created and converts the word document to PDF and it actually since I use quick parts in the word document it converts it to PDF and actually puts the verbage like the metadata and it's in the document and has the customer's name and everything in it it's pretty cool so that's one of the things you can do with that one what was the other one plumb sale let's go look at plumb sale does anybody use that oh there's Jerry posted a link to it I'll just type plumb sale plumb sale sp plumb sell forms plumb sale documents so you put plumb sale actions let's see what that is oh yeah yeah so that's what he put that's the link that he put in the chat window anyway cool and was that cost I'm not sure Oh free trial cool so it's not gonna be just a you know free out of the box but that is something that you have as an option and again hundreds of connectors Oh Nicholas says he uses plumb sail with SharePoint designer but not with flow so far all right any other that's a good idea anybody else have any suggestions for third-party products that in here that they use adobe has some good stuff in here for collecting signatures you do need to have an Adobe account for that that's so that's not necessarily gonna be just a free add-in but it does let you do you know collect signatures it's pretty neat all right well I guess I better wrap up let me see next week I am going to be out of town Joelle I guess what you'll you know just let me know if you Joe L may do a Power Hour but um yeah Oh Nikolas she put a link and I think maybe it's in the general tab in there to the ignite sessions but I'll have to write a blog post that has those in it too and I wrote a blog post saying that I was going to speak at ignite and I put the link to the sessions in that one - all right well uh thanks Joelle Frank you Joell like did all the work for this eventually oh well did all the work and hopefully you guys saw our newsletter you saw that cute picture of us at ignite in that on the fancy desk doing power hours so and if you didn't sign up for our newsletters you can go to wonder Laura calm and it's got like a little button that says keep in touch and that's how you can sign up so the but the third party thing Nikolas was called knew him be alright thanks everybody over and out have a good one

Channel: Laura Rogers

Views: 1,761

Rating: 4.8333335 out of 5

Keywords: SharePoint, Office 365, workflows, SharePoint Designer, Microsoft Flow

Id: qKeJJTbQrE4

Length: 63min 53sec (3833 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 10 2018