Microsoft Flow Up And Running Codeless Automated Workflows

You can create flows from scratch, but we're going to begin by using templates. Several reasons for this. First, many of the things you and I might want to build have already been built by Microsoft or by other users, and they're available in the templates library. Second, when we create flows of our own and save them, they are also available in the library. Right now, this is the only method we have of sharing or distributing flows, is to be able to post them as templates, and other people then can use them. In the future, there'll be a solution for organizational sharing, but it's not there as of the time this course is being recorded. So, templates are a useful way for us to learn about how to create flows, and also a useful tool to quickly create them. Let me show you something about the types of templates that are available then.  

Microsoft Flow is an incredibly exciting product, that is going to put unprecedented power into the hands of end users, power that used to be reserved for people who could write code. Microsoft Flow is a way that individuals can create personal automated workflows, using a wide range of services, whether you're connecting Yammer or Dropbox, Twitter, Outlook, Outlook.com, Dynamics CRM, MailChimp, Wunderlist, Instagram. All of these cloud-based services, cloud-based apps, that are available, that we can connect and automate with Flow, using templates. 

his is the Flow homepage. To get here, simply enter flow.microsoft.com as the URL in your browser, and you will end up here. The Flow Preview is free, and that's what we're running right now. There will be a free version of Flow, even after the preview ends, but Microsoft has also announced some pricing, and I have some notes on that at the end of the course. But I'm going to sign up for free, provide my email address. This email address is already registered with Microsoft, I have some other services with Landon Hotel, I have Office 365, I have SharePoint. 

In the next few movies, we're going to create a flow and check it, edit it, make sure we know how to do that and then, we'll quickly create three more flows. So, four by the time we're done. All of them created using Templates. This first flow I'd like to create is one that's very useful for me. Whenever I receive an email that has an attachment, I'd like to have that attachment automatically saved in my OneDrive for Business folder. That way, I don't need to open up the email and save the attachment separately. As soon as I see the email coming in, I'll know that that email's attachments will quickly be available in OneDrive. This is particularly nice in mobile setting where I can then open up my OneDrive app on my iPhone or my iPad and work with that attachment. Let's say I'd like to do something email attachments.

he first thing we have is we have our event, or trigger, what's going to kick off this Flow, how will Flow know when to start. And the answer here is On new email. If I'd like to edit the default values that are being used, I can click the edit button or I can click here, notice I can see a little bit about it, I can see that it's connected to my email account. I could add a comment if I wanted to, but if I really want to get to the meat of this trigger, I need to click this edit button. The first thing it says is that it's looking in my inbox, and that makes sense because in my Outlook account that we just saw, my new incoming mail is delivered to my inbox, so when there's something new in the inbox, that's really what this trigger says. Advanced options. Notice, we won't be changing these this time, but look at the power here. I can say it's not good enough just to check everything in the inbox, I want to know that it was sent specifically to me. 

 This flow tells us how we should test it. At the top of the page, it says to see it work now, send a new e-mail in your inbox. This may take a few moments. Cool, let's give that a go. I'm going to switch to Outlook, and I can send myself an email. Let's do a new e-mail, there I am, and the subject can be any subject that I wish, whatsoever. I want to now attach a file, and I created a file called FLOW TEST, and that's sitting on the desktop, there it is, and I'm going to send this e-mail. Looks like I'm a little non-responsive right now, there we go, there's my send and receive. Cool. It looks like it's not exactly clear who I am, so let's log in and make that happen. There we go. 

I left the page open, and therefore if I want to edit my flow, it's right here. I click Edit, and it takes it back into this flow designer that we were in before, so that you would know that you could make whatever changes you wanted. If you wanted, for example, to say that I was only looking for items that were sent from or to a particular address, or with specific words in the subject, I could do that right here.

We have the first of our flows up and running. we took it for a spin, kicked it's tires. We know how to manage it, where to edit it, how to delete it. Now we're going to quickly create some additional flows using the templates. And exploring a couple of other features that we have here. If I click on templates, I get the list of templates showing all flows. The next flow I'm going to create is a social media flow. So I could click this drop down arrow and I could choose social media flows. And it will show me those and there are a fair number of them and remember that this list continues to grow. If I scroll to the bottom, see more, and more, and more, and more.

Social media emails are used to broadcast information or to repeat information, notification emails are there to let you know that something has occurred. For example, send me a notification when my boss emails me, send me a notification when a new file is added in SharePoint, or when someone drops something into OneDrive for Business, send me an email when there's a new list item in SharePoint, when a new opportunity is created in Yammer. Lots of different choices here, but all of these you can read as keep me in the loop, notify me, keep me up to speed, and therefore, you'll see that the numbers here are higher than they were in social media. 

Events and calendar templates are used for not just calendaring and events, but also for to-do lists. If you think about all of the different ways that we keep track of tasks and our work to be done, we have some of that in Outlook in a calendar, we have some of that in a task list. Increasingly, we have people who are using Wunderlist for that purpose, or Google Tasks. Lots of different choices. So you'll see lots of different templates here. The template that I want to use is a template that automatically is going to manage two different things for me.

Microsoft Flow mobile apps are available for Apple devices, iOS devices in preview and for Android devices in an unreleased state, in other words, a preview state as well. Let's take a look at the iOS app for Microsoft Flow. I'm in the App Store on iTunes. And I'm going to enter Microsoft Flow. If I just enter the word flow, there are lots of apps that have that in their name, but I'm going to get this. You can go to Google Play to download the Android app. It's very similar. And we may be seeing apps for other devices as well, but right now what's available is iOS and 'droid. Here we go, let's open this up. It would like to send me notifications. I'm going to definitely choose Allow, because one of the reasons I want this is to be able to receive push notifications. We have some information, welcome to Flow.

Create a flow that performs one or more tasks (such as sending a report in email):

• once a day, an hour, or a minute
• on a date that you specify
• after a number of days, hours, or minutes that you specify