Intermediate | Flow of the Week: How we use a Flow to manage the Flow of the Week blogs

Jonathon Levesque, Senior Platform Evangelist, Wednesday 16 May 2018

What's up Flow Fans!

I am back with another Flow of the week, and this time, its to show you how we built a Flow that actually helps us manage the Flow of the week blogs… So im writing a blog about blog writer queue moderation, using Microsoft Flow.. on the Flow blog itself.. Its like… Flow-blog-ception!

This Flow will show you how to create a set of automated reminder emails based on previously set dates. Its not too hard, but its highly useful!

So first things first, if you prefer to consume this in video form, Go ahead and check it out below:

And now for the rest of you who would like to follow a step by step, please proceed onward!

First, you need to create a SharePoint list, formatted like the following:

Now, Head on over to https://flow.microsoft.com and get signed in, then click on My Flows and then + Create From Blank

For your Trigger, search for When an item is created and select the SharePoint action and then fill it in with your SharePoint site and selected List like seen below:

And now lets Add an action and search for and add a Compose action and then select the expression builder and insert the following expression

formatdatetime(triggerBody()?['Publish_x0020_Date'],'dddd MM/dd/yyyy') – So that it looks like the following:
 

And then lets add another Compose action and put the following expression in it –

formatdatetime(triggerBody()?['Title_x002f_Description_x0020_De'],'dddd MM/dd/yyyy')
 
So it should look like this so far:

Ok, are you with me? Great! Now we need to add a set of Parallel actions. To do that, First, click on the + Sign under your second compose and choose Add an action and choose Delay Until and then select the SharePoint Dynamic Content for the Reminder 1 Column Date

Next, click the + and select Add an action and search & choose Send an Email and then customize it to your liking to let the user know that this is their 5 day reminder

As you can see, in the body of my email i am using the two outputs from the compose actions above to help give more info to the user.

Now, click the + above this action and choose Add a parallel branch like so:

From there, choose add an action and again select Delay Until – but this time choose the Reminder 2 dynamic content from the SharePoint data and then add another send an email action, and set them up as the 3 day reminder. Like so –

And then do the same for a 1 day Reminder and a PUBLISH Day reminder and that should give you a flow that looks something like this!

And if you have set it up like me, with HTML formatting in your emails, you should automatically send out nicely formatted reminder meails that looks something like this:

Here is one, and then another below:

And so as you can see, the tone gets a bit more encouraging with each email, asking the user to be sure and participate in what they signed up for.

Thanks so much for following our Flow of the week series! IF you have any questions or comments please leave them below, or reach out to us on Twitter or in the Flow Community

Later friends!

– Jon