Flow Archives - AlanPs1.io

Flow: Send A Happy Birthday Email Message To Everyone In Your Organisation

20th March 201924th March 2019 AlanPs1 Leave a comment

Quite regularly I hear requests that centre around wishing users a Happy Birthday within an organisation. There is an extremely popular template within the Flow template gallery that does just that, it is called "Send a Happy Birthday email to employees on their birthday" and it uses a SharePoint list. It work's really well, although sometimes date formats can become an issue for the Flow implementer when they are imported from the list. Also, the organisation's users need to be added to the list itself in advance. Whilst that isn't a huge chore for most people, below is a process that requires no list and will send an email to every enabled user in your O365 tenant at 9am on the day of their birthday.

Sound, interesting?

Well, read on and follow the steps and you too will be able to implement this process.

Your email will look like this.

Pre-requisites: You will need a suitable Office 365 group. This may be an "All Users" group or a segmented group that only has users who have agreed to recieve such an email. Maybe it's a group that omits the CEO or those who may not celebrate their birthday. I will leave that to you to decide, but in this example a pre-configured "All Users" group is in use.

Here is the complete Flow.

Flow: Testing Various Date Formats From Any Source

20th February 201920th February 2019 AlanPs1 Leave a comment

As a Flow community contributor, I regularly assist Flow users with the creation of their Flows. The great thing about a community like the one you can find at this link is that when I need assistance with an expression, an Odata filter or the use of a connector, help is never too far way. You just can't beat support like that when working with technology.

One of the common queries that comes up relates to the use of dates in a Flow. Dates and times are an essential part of application building, business processes and day to day life so we may have to say something like the following.

If due date is next 7 days do X, If not do Y.

If current date is 2 days before user 1's birthday (taken from a SharePoint List perhaps) send me a reminder so I can get them a present.

Get all tasks for the next 14 days from a SharePoint List and send a Monday email with these tasks.

The above examples, are merely just a snippet of some of what comes up relating to the format of the date or the expression required to match a date requirement.

But what methods are suitable to test these scenarios if it's just not working is not working for you?

Flow: So Where has "Edit in advanced mode" Gone on Condition Actions

6th February 201920th February 2019 AlanPs1 Leave a comment

Below is an image of the new format for conditions in Flow. Look at the no code control we have here with real conditional logic. What in improvement and one I am sure the community and users will embrace overall. Well done to the Flow Team, one of several great improvements I am seeing on my Twitter time line just now.

Full detail at this link: Build more powerful conditions in flows and more

Image credit: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/build-more-powerful-conditions-in-flows-and-more/

Flow: Filter Array on Multiple Parameters Using and()

10th December 201819th February 2019 AlanPs1 Leave a comment

Back in part 8 – Call O365 Roadmap Web Service Weekly Digest you will see there is a Filter Array that I left alone at that time. This is because the scope of the blog post was to get a weekly digest of posts made by the Microsoft 365 Roadmap.

The expression within the Filter Array get's you the last 7 days of updates and does no more.

This is great, unless of course you have no need to be viewing a specific category such as Windows or O365. Maybe you are an Office 365 Admin and would like to streamline the output by only sending those with category of O365. Or maybe you need to see all Security & Compliance updates along with O365 and the rest, so you would need to omit posts with category Windows Desktop. Here are steps that you can take to modify the above Filter Array and why.

Consider this filter …

Call O365 Roadmap Web Service Weekly Digest – Part 8

8th December 201819th February 2019 AlanPs1 Leave a comment

The Microsoft 365 Roadmap can be an invaluable source of information at times, although staying on top of the hundreds and hundreds of information it has to offer can be overwhelming. I've seen it advised by some to export the data to excel and move it to Power BI. That works great, although the context of this blog series is to have key information alert you so that there is no need for you or your team to check of your own back. With the power of Microsoft Flow, we will capture the new entries on the RSS feed and we will then send a weekly digest email.

Here is a glimpse of what the email output will look like.

For the ID of 43977 featured here, please see this link.

As you can see, each title is a hyperlink and directs you to the Microsoft 365 Roadmap where you can see full information as below:

Tag: Flow