1. Blog
  2. August 2018

Test your flows with real example data, and four new management connectors

, Vice President, Power Automate, Friday, 31 August 2018

Creating a flow may require some trial and error during the development process. Starting this week, you can use real, example, data from connectors to test your flow as you build it, right inside of the Flow portal. Now you can know that the flow will run as expected. Additionally, we are introducing four new management connectors: PowerApps for App Makers, Power platform for Admins, PowerApps for Admins, Microsoft Flow for Admins, and, one other new connector: Microsoft School Data Sync.

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Power platform Security & Governance: Deploying a Defense in Depth Strategy

, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Thursday, 30 August 2018

A common cyber security approach used by organizations to protect their digital assets is to leverage a defense-in-depth strategy. When customers ask how to best secure and govern their Microsoft Flow and PowerApps environments, we provide similar guidance. The following list represents different layers that you can use to protect your digital assets and apply governance to ensure your organization’s interests are met.

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Improved Calendar, SharePoint, Approval, Button and Connector capabilities

, Vice President, Power Automate, Friday, 24 August 2018

This August, we released new calendar templates that copy events between Google Calendar and Office 365 or Outlook.com. Second, we now support read and write for multiple-value fields in SharePoint that are Choice, Person or Lookup types. Third, you can now send approvals on behalf of other users in your organization – for example, the person who uploaded the file in the SharePoint list, instead of the person who created the flow. Fourth, buttons have two new input types: Number and Yes/No. Finally, there are improvements to several connectors.

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Advanced | Flow of the Week: Automating Microsoft Flow Governance – Using Microsoft Flow

, Principal Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Thursday, 23 August 2018

Enterprise Security and Governance is an important topic for many organizations. Microsoft continues to make investments that allow customers to implement PowerApps and Flow and be confident that they have their bases covered from a governance perspective. Much like Microsoft Flow empowers users to build powerful workflow and automation solutions, we want to empower administrators with the same capabilities to support their needs. In this blog post we are going to explore a scenario that describes how you can automate governance activities by taking advantage of the Office 365 Management API.

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Advanced | Flow of The Week: Advanced Approval Write back

, Senior Platform Evangelist, Wednesday, 15 August 2018

A robust, Client-specific approval workflow and write-back engine is not a standard feature of many ERP systems, which requires BI architects and data engineers to think outside the box to deliver scalable solutions. Microsoft Flow can meet these enterprise level requirements, and can do it at a fraction of the time and cost of any other solution on the market. This article will tackle the current business requirements pertaining to enterprise level solutions around on-premise SQL data warehouse write-backss, robust tiered approval cycles, and sales order approval requests. Come and Learn how to build a system like this using Flow from Community Member Phillip Guglielmi

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Introducing Microsoft Flow integration in Excel

, Senior Program Manager, Microsoft Flow, Tuesday, 14 August 2018

Flow is now integrated into Microsoft Excel! With this integration that uses the For a selected row trigger and the Flow launch panel, you can create and trigger on-demand flows for selected rows in any Excel table on spreadsheets hosted in SharePoint or OneDrive for Business. The Microsoft Flow for Excel add-in enables you to connect your data to a wide range of services such as SharePoint, Outlook 365, Dynamics 365, Teams, Visual Studio Online, Twitter, Approvals, etc. In this post, we’ll walk you through this new capability with a hands-on example.

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Announcing the Flow Preview Program

, Vice President, Power Automate, Thursday, 2 August 2018

The Flow Preview program is the way to get early access to the upcoming functionality and updates for Microsoft Flow. All you need to do is to create an environment in Preview region, and you will get early access to the newest features. With the Preview Program, not only you can try out and learn about the upcoming capabilities, but also validate that your flows work as expected with the upcoming updates.

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