What if we told you that you have the power to connect all your SharePoint lists and libraries to a host of other apps from Dynamics CRM and Yammer to Dropbox, Mail Chimp, and Twitter? Imagine creating an item in SharePoint whenever a new lead is added in Dynamics or automatically copying files from your Dropbox to a SharePoint document library. Now what if we told you that you could do this in a matter of minutes and with zero lines of code? You’d be tempted to ask if we’re crazy or have had one sleepless night too many in Seattle.

With Kerem Yuceturk, Program Manager on the SharePoint team, I'm Merwan Hade, Program Manager on the Microsoft Flow team, and it gives us great pleasure to announce the integration of Microsoft Flow into SharePoint Online lists and libraries. Microsoft Flow is a new workflow tool that enables business users to create automation to receive notifications, synchronize files, and get data between your favorite apps and services, be it on premise or in the cloud. Be sure to check out this and other announcements from the Future of SharePoint conference in San Francisco.

In this post, using a premade flow template, we’re going to walk you through how you can quickly copy new members from a MailChimp member list to a SharePoint Online custom list based on approval via email. We will also be showing you how we are integrating Flow directly into SharePoint lists and libraries and the future of our integration work.

MailChimp to SharePoint Online in a few easy clicks

Let's imagine that you work for an office supply company called Fabrikam. Your marketing team manages email campaigns using MailChimp but you want to track your largest accounts in a list in SharePoint Online so that you can have a column for assigning the accounts to specific members of the team, and store additional metadata to add that personal touch to customer outreach.

Let’s create a flow such that whenever a new member is added to a subscriber list in MailChimp, you receive an approval email asking if you want to add this member to the VIP SharePoint Online list. To make things easier, you can just start from this premade template.  Once you open the page, click “Use this template”.

Enter your credentials and click Continue.

Now select a MailChimp member list and configure the Send Approval email step.

Then select your SharePoint Site Url and the list you want to add these members to. In the example below, we use a list named “VIP Customers”, with columns “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Email Address”, and “Account Lead”.

Configure the Create item step for SharePoint such that for every new member in MailChimp, if the approval condition is met, the First Name from MailChimp maps to the First Name column in SharePoint. Map the other values from MailChimp to the columns in SharePoint as appropriate.

Click Create flow and you’re ready to go! Learn more about how to see your flow in action in this post or documentation. 

Integrating Flow into SharePoint

We firmly believe that all of our SharePoint customers can benefit greatly by connecting their data in SharePoint to other data sources. While Flow templates are a great start, we want to make the flow even easier (pun very much intended). In an upcoming release to SharePoint, we will be integrating Microsoft Flow directly into your SharePoint lists and libraries. With this update, users will be able to simply click Add flow and select a flow template from a panel. We will automatically carry forward the context of the site and list you’re on into the Flow template that was selected.

Future of the integration

We will continue to invest in our integration efforts with more templates for more services and a more complete experience within SharePoint itself. In addition, we also plan to enhance the flow authoring experience for SharePoint by:

• Adding read/write support for Person and Taxonomy column types (currently we have read only support)

• Enabling look up of multi-value properties such as Single-choice, Multiple-choice, and Lookup columns

• Adding ways to leverage your existing SharePoint workflows in Microsoft Flow.

We hope you enjoy the interconnectedness of Flow and SharePoint. Stay tuned for more updates and check out https://flow.microsoft.com/search/?q=SharePoint for all SharePoint focused Flow templates.