Beginner | Flow of the Week: Stay Up To Date With The News

This weeks post comes from Pieter Veenstra, Microsoft Flow MVP
 

To learn more about Pieter, and to see more of his blogs about Microsoft Flow. visit his page at https://veenstra.me.uk/category/office-365/flow/

Without further ado, here is his beginner Flow of the Week!

 

Often Microsoft Flow is used in relation to SharePoint. This week I created a flow which doesn't touch SharePoint at all.

 

Do you want to keep up with the news and post tweet about interesting news articles? In this post I'm going to have a look at creating a flow for this. 

 

There are three parts of this flow.

 

1. Get the news article feed

2. Create an approval step

3. Send out a tweet with details from the news articles

 

Get the news article feeds

 

To get my news articles I'm going to use the bbc news rss feed.

 

http://feeds.bbci.co.uk/news/rss.xml

 

 

In Microsoft Flow the trigger When a feed is published can be used 

 

Ok, this is easy, isn't it?

 

Ready for step 2.

 

Create an approval step for each feed item

 

 

Now, for each news item you will get an approval task in Microsoft Flow. Have you noticed the new reassign option?

 

These approval tasks are of course painful as you will need to login and go to the flow approval screens. There is an easier way to approve these tasks.

 

Straight from your email you can click the approve or reject button and we're ready to send out the tweets. If you want to publish news artciles on your SharePoint site rather than using an RSS feed then you could do that. But remember this is a post without SharePoint.

 

Sending a tweet from Microsoft Flow

 

Now the final step. sending out a tweet, but only after I have approved the tweet.

 

Don't make the mistake of just adding the send tweet after the approval step as shown below.

 

You will find that all approved an rejected news articles are  published on twitter. A condition will be needed to send out only the approved news articles.

 

Summary

In this post I've gone though the combination of RSS feeds, Approval steps and posting tweets. This might not immediately fullfil your business needs. If you take a look at each of these separate steps however you might find some valuable uses for Flow.

 

• How many people look a news during the day?
• How many businesses have processes including many complex approval steps?
• Are you active on social media?

Flow gives a lot of options to automate your processes and the options are almost unlimited.