Using Microsoft Flow for process automation – part 2.
Following on from our first blog about Microsoft Power Automation formerly know as Flow, we’re going to move on down the flow program looking at each action as we go…
If there was a buzz phrase for the Post-Covid New Dawn it must be ‘Remote Collaboration’ so we must start with a discussion about this…
As a team, we are a rather disparate group of individuals here at The Excel Experts . We work together on projects sometimes, but essentially we’re all experts at working from home, and using the various forms of Remote Collaboration available such as Skype, Zoom etc.. Within the group, we use mostly emails and, as everyone knows a mailbox can fill up pretty quickly when business is doing well.
So we felt very much that the time was approaching, when we needed a better platform to work from than an outlook address book of consultants and a folder of email projects.
It also became obvious that as an agency that revolves around Microsoft technology, mainly Excel and Outlook… Microsoft Teams was going to be the best platform to reduce our dependence on emails. I was able to add all our consultants as ‘guests’ and this seems to give them the required access that we needed to move to the next stage. Our team now have a really good environment to help collaboration and sharing of ideas, online, remote working from home. Well done Microsoft.
Sharing Data with your Team
We wanted to share the leads with our Team and this is easily done in MS Flow (now known as Power Automate)
Using the ‘Post a message’ action its straightforward to lift the data inserted into the form, and post it into a teams channel using a little bit of html
Same for the ‘Html to text’ action click on the </> symbol to insert the html…
Using Microsoft Planner
The above HTML looks like this
So we now have a message in the team channel about the lead, and we have a new task in the team Planner.
In the next part we will be looking at ways of using planner and flow to help link up other parts of the business. Every time we automate a repetitive process, we save ourselves time, time to hopefully do more enjoyable or certainly more productive things.
