Forum Discussion
Capabilities of Flow (as compared to SP Designer)
Hi folks, Merwan here from the Microsoft Flow team. I think it's fair to say that Flow targets many of the same scenarios that Workflow designer did and we'd like your feedback to make sure that we truly succeed in doing so. However, Flow is not necessarily a "replacement" for SharePoint Designer, it is more of an "evolution." SharePoint Designer will be continued to be supported until 2026.
With Flow, our focus is on empowering business users to create workflows for their everyday business needs through connectivity to many services such as SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, O365 Email, Dropbox, Twittter, Trello, etc. Brent Ellis - for the capabilities you mentioned, today we support HTTP actions and have workflow level logging, but we are working on identifying gaps such as variable types, item level permissions, etc. Brent and others, if you're available next week, I'd like to do a call with you to get a better understanding of the types of workflows you're building today with the Designer and how Flow can help.
Hi Merwan,
I think the flows we have now is based on user level whereas workflows will build by IT admins to build solutions for all users. In future do we see enterprise level solutions using Microsoft flows? I am building lot more workflows using sharePoint Designer in my current and previous projects in various scenarios as specified by Brent Ellis. I have started exploring about Microsoft flows, f possible; I would love to talk to you.
Edit: I hope we will have more control on governance of these apps. Especially if all users started developing apps then IT support team need to have access all those apps to help them if they have any issues. I saw in few posts we will get an option at Tenant admin level to show/hide the flows. I hope we have this option at Tenant, Site collection, site, and List/Library level to provide more control for admins.
Microsoft flow has new features
1. Nested conditional branching
2. Filtering
3. Looping
https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/build-advanced-flows/
Hi folks, we'd love to get your feedback about your SharePoint designer usage and improvements we can make to Flow. Could you please take a few minutes to fill out this survey: http://www.instant.ly/s/dZTNi.
Devendra Velegandla/others - On a side note, we are working on a governance and data loss prevention experience which we will be shipping soon. We'd love to get your feedback around requirements through this survey: http://www.instant.ly/s/W1477
Merwan Hade: are there examples of how to use Flow for the following (listed by Brent Ellis)?
- Call HTTPS Web Service
- App-Level / Impersonation Steps
- Workflow Level Logging
- Not at the moment, what you can find when using Flow is common examples about integration with Office 365 what includes EXO, SPO, etc.
- Mmm...I think the discussion should be also around how Flow will eventually replace SharePoint Online Legacy Workflow and Windows Azure Workflow....any thing you can share? I would like also to know if there are plans to support "State machine" concept in Flow
Juan Carlos, apologies for the delay in response. Do you have some time this week to chat about how you use "state machines" and "SPO Legacy workflows"? Could you please email me directly with your availability? My email is mhade [at] microsoft [dot] com.
Merwan, I'd be curious to know how Flow will support any sort of realistic approval process if it doesn't support state machine workflows. That's the primary way these sorts of workflows have been built, that I've seen. Even in 2010 based workflows that didn't officially support "state machine" workflows, we'd build the workflow to mimic that functionality to support the requirements for a multi-level approval process.
