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.
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.
- Already sent an e-mail to you :-)...by the way: To me, scenarios that involve the use of a state machine workflow vs. a sequential ones are those where depending on a condition, the user could be redirected to a previous stage a not the next one that is what typically happens in sequential workflows.
