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Microsoft SharePoint Blog
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Announcing Microsoft Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries

Chris McNulty's avatar
Chris McNulty
Former Employee
Mar 12, 2017

Last year, as part of our ongoing reinvention of business processes, we rolled out modern lists integrated with Microsoft Flow.  Flow provides zero-code automation of common business processes and connections to dozens of other enterprise and custom data services. We also announced in various venues like Ignite and the Office blog that there was more to come in the integration of SharePoint with Flow and the rest of Microsoft’s Business App platform.   Today, we are happy to announce the next step in that journey, where we bring the power of automation to document libraries.

 

The integration will mean users can easily add Flows to their modern document libraries .  We’re also announcing the ability to launch a Flow interactively, on demand, using a simple button on modern lists and libraries.

 

Let’s suppose you have a new document and you want to get members of your team to read it and update metadata on the document. Our new integration empowers you to build a Flow to inform your team and capture their input directly to document library columns as metadata.

 

We receive a lot of questions about how to govern the usage of Microsoft Flow. We recommend that Office 365 Admins review the data loss prevention (DLP) capabilities for Microsoft Flow. All Office 365 Admins can sign into the Flow administration site without the need for any additional licenses, and set up rules that determine how data can flow between different Office 365 components (such as SharePoint, Outlook, Yammer) and other Microsoft and third party services. If you need more specific guidance on DLP and controlling user access to Flow, please check out our blog post announcing the general availability of Flow in Office 365 from last year, which covers these frequently asked questions.

 

Looking forward, we will roll out Microsoft Flow integration to our customers in the First Release program over the month of March, and based on telemetry and feedback, continue to roll it out to all our customers. We will continue to make additional improvements to Flow soon.  Please watch this space for announcements of these improvements and the progress of the rollout.

Updated Mar 12, 2017
Version 2.0

30 Comments

  • Richard Bourke you can run flow against classic libraries but the classic UI doesnt have the command bar integration.  You could manually trigger the HTTP POST by looking it up in the Flow designer and adding in manually to the Ribbon.

     

    Deleted you can copy files back and forth from Box to SharePoint today, but I;d hesitate to call it backup.  If you have automated processes on one side, and you edit/empty a file there it gets the same result on the copy.  Backup usually implies recovery, which you dont get with just file movement.  The princiaol thing you are guarding against in the unavailablity of Box vs. SharePoint Online - and both, as entrprise cloud services have pretty high availablity.   Today, emhaisze, today, if you have a flow triggered on all new documents in a library the event 'listener' is scoped to a single folder scope, or the root without subfolders.  This is expected to change soon so you can have a Flow autotrigger for any file in a library.  On-demand flows can be triggered anywhere, regardless of folder.

     

    Dean_Gross a Flow can be used against any library - but the UX interation is in modern and the Content Organizer is a classic experinece.

     

    Thanks for all the feedback.

  • William Napoles's avatar
    William Napoles
    Copper Contributor

    I wonder if this feature is at all similar to Runbooks of Orchestrator in System Center 2012, but with a much more user-friendly interface.  A few years ago, I developed a Runbook that monitored a document library in SP 2010 for the arrival of a file.  Once triggered, the file's data spawned e-mails, if the requirements were met, a log was generated, and the file was archived.  At the Runbook's conclusion, maintenance was performed to ensure only a certain period's worth of files were kept.

  • Dennis Gaida's avatar
    Dennis Gaida
    Iron Contributor

    Finally! Great job.

    Next steps:
    - Tighter integration with SharePoint in general: Custom action to be able to start a flow on a particular list item/document (it seems something like this we will get: https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/SharePoint-Blog/Flow-on-demand-for-SharePoint-list-items-and-documents/ba-p/52024)
    - See flow statistics for current item. It is currently very hard to figure out if the flow ran on a particular item or if it ran into an error (*cough* workflow statistics page)
    - Have a direct link to the currently attached flows to the list/library in the Flow menu

    For end users it is hard right now to understand that they need to go to a totally different product to create workflows. If I would see the link library > flow and item > flow I would understand the link better. Flow is a great product!

  • Anonymous's avatar
    Anonymous

    I saw I was able to backup Box to SharePoint, but not SharePoint to Box. Why the limitation on backing up data outside the MS bubble?

  • Wow. This opens a boat load of opportunities and user scenarios. I can imagine you can or eventually move docs to and from blob storage, "cloud" drives, slack, MS teams, twitter images, github, etc..

  • John Wynne's avatar
    John Wynne
    Silver Contributor
    Great to see this integration happening. This rate of progress is truly impressive so far in 2017. Still looking forward to any progress on Forms within SharePoint as I'm a past InfoPath fan ;-)
  • Dean_Gross's avatar
    Dean_Gross
    Silver Contributor

    Will this work in Content Organizer Drop Off libraries also?

  • This is something really cool! Can't wait to try it out! We have so many use cases for this! :-)