Shipped to First Release: Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries

Microsoft

I am happy to announce that we shipped Flow integration for SharePoint document libraries as well as the ability to launch flows interactively to our First Release users and tenants today. If you are a First Release user, or have your tenant marked as a First Release tenant, you should be seeing a Flow button in the command bar of your modern document libraries. 

 

This integration helps your users automate repetitive tasks such as moving an email attachment into a document library folder, sending a selected item for feedback, posting to Yammer, or integrating files with other Microsoft or third-party services that Flow can access.

 

We will continue to make Flow integration better for document libraries over the coming months. Some of our plans include better support for all SharePoint data types, new actions that allow for sharing items, and new templates that make use of these additional capabilities.

 

This is also a great time to review some of the guidance on the governance for Flow as mentioned in our announcement:

 

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.

 

We will monitor the usage patterns and telemetry, and continue rolling out these features to our production users over the coming weeks. Next step will be to roll it out to 50% of production tenants.

 

Please give these new features a try and let us know what you think. 

35 Replies
Hi Kerem, Good news. Can you confirm if this is a staged rollout to FR.? I'm full org.

Hi @John Wynne, it should be available for all of the First Release tenants and for all users designated as First Release users. Hope you are seeing it.

I'm not currently seeing this in my tenant, which prompted my question. Thanks for your reply.
It should be there at this point. Could you try to open an "in private" browser session, or clear all cookies and try it? Let me know if it is still missing in a private message and we can investigate deeper.
I can confirme Flow is available in my document libraries

In our First Release tenant too this morning



 

I have DM'd Kerem with my issues as requested. Juan you've beat me to it this time :)

Hello @Kerem Yuceturk.

 

I was hoping that this would include access to the library meta-data,  document types etc. but it does not seem to. Am I missing something? If not, any idea when this functionality will be delivered?

 

This sort of functionality is of more use to us than the ability to copy a file from DropBox to SharePoint etc. We are developing a PowerApp where it would be really useful to at least be able to read the meta-data for a document in a library. The library would have multiple document types.

 

Instead, I have a list to which people attach a document. They get this document from our file-system. This document has a large number of fields which the users must fill in before attaching it to the list. And some of the list columns duplicate the fields in the document which means that people must enter the information twice. The PowerApp connects to this list.

 

If using a library, we could define these documents as document types and link the fields to columns in the library. But we cannot use this meta-data in PowerApps or Flow. Even if Flow were the only option, this would allow us to create / update a list item when the document is created / updated. The document meta-data could be used to populate the list columns.

 

Therefore, really interested when this functionality will be available.

 

Thanks.

 

Ian.

We have a similar situation.
We need to set meta data for documents. Read it back out again and send the file meta data and link over to Salesforce. Flow would be good for that.

@Kerem Yuceturk and @Steve Nguyen You guys have got to do something about Yammer treating Flow as a 3rd party application. Anyone who has done their due diligence around risk profile has turned the 3rd party application setting off in Yammer, which then renders it completely unable to interact with Flow at all unless I do a crazy email based workaround.

 

I have actual real life use cases from my business wanting to use Flow into Yammer, I'll give you a couple examples:

 

  • A Deal in CRM is won or lost. Depending on the characteristics of that deal, I want Flow to post in specific Yammer groups with specific people tagged and specific messaging. This is meant to start a conversation around that deal to spread the knowledge of what it was and why it was won or lost.
  • A document is uploaded to a fairly intricate but well managed document library with well defined and understood metadata required. I want Flow to post to specific Yammer groups depending on that metadata "advertising" that document to drive not only consumption of that document out to broader audiences, but also the "rating" of that document to give its owners an idea of next steps for it (does it need edits? is it ready to move up to be shared more broadly? etc)

 

Their patience is running thin on this and I now regularly get the question about when can they use Teams instead of Yammer in these scenarios so they can move forward.

 

Yammer spends a lot of time talking about and demonstrating how it is good for the community aspect of an org, but you're ignoring the business value and how Yammer can integrate with other tools in Microsoft that are intended to solve business needs.

 

I realize there may be some engineering challenges around this that I don't have visibility into, but that is no excuse to not fix this. For a long time you guys said you would never add edit capability to Yammer posts because "it was hard", but now here comes edit capability soon I believe. You guys are famous for making decisions based on data, but this is often leading you down the wrong path because it is impossible to get data on something that is broken or simply does not exist yet.

 

 

I have tried this and it's working :) But is the created flow only working on the selected folder? What if i want a flow to be active on all the folders in the document library? Or all folders below a selected folder?

Hi @Ian Macnaughtan@Philip Worrell, thank you for giving this a try and taking the time to provide feedback. Much appreciated.

 

We do have some access to metadata, although we make you work for it a little bit. We are working on making this a lot better and intuitive in a couple of months, but here's how you can access it today in Flow.

 

If you try out any of the interactive flow templates (i.e. the templates that come up when you select a document library item, and then click on "Create a flow" in the command bar), you will see that it starts with a request, and then does a "Get Item" action for the selected item. This is an action that allows you to access the columns of the library. See this sample image below:

 

FlowWithDocumentLibraries.PNG

 

The actions and triggers we have today deal with either "files" or "items". The file trigger/actions deal with the binary part of the file, as well as things like file name, file size. The "item" triggers/actions deal with the list part of the library: custom columns. The transitions between the two are not great today, but we are working on making that happen over the next month or so. But today, you can still use the item commands to access the metadata columns in your library. Note that today, the "list" dropdown will not show document libraries, but if you type in the ID of the library, or type in the name of the library, it will just work. We will fix this issue in the same time frame.

 

As I mentioned, we are in the early phase of this integration, and we will keep adding more capabilities, and your feedback is instrumental in how we prioritize work and capabilities on our side.

 

Next up in our todo list are the two things I mentioned above (transitions between "item" and "file", and being able to connect to libraries), and being able to write to choice/people/lookup fields (these are read only in Flow today). 

 

Enabling PowerApps to connect to document libraries is also something we are looking at, but this will likely happen in the second half of 2017, a little later than improvements with Flow. I will pass along this scenario to my colleagues working on the PowerApps side as well so that they see this feedback. We can follow up privately if you'd like to see how we could devise a scenario to enable what you are trying to do.

 

Once again, thank you for taking the time to share feedback and your scenarios.

Hi @Rune Myrhaug, you are correct that when you use "File" triggers this is a limitation. They only work on the selected folder. 

 

Though if you use "item" based triggers, they work at the library level and will catch changes/new items that occur in the whole library. 

 

This is not intuitive, and the transitions between the item and file triggers/actions are not easy to do (one way to do it is to match things by their modified/created by dates, with some margin). Think of this as a workaround while we work on making this a lot better over the coming months. Let me know if you are trying to enable a specific scenario and I can try to help.

Hi @David Rosenthal, agreed that this is a scenario we would love to support. I've reached out to my colleagues in Yammer for details, and I'll let them or Steve Nguyen respond about your concerns. 

Thanks for such a detailed response very helpful indeed.

I will look forward to the updates and try some of this out.
Thanks :) Sounds good :)
I would like to get a message into a Slack Channel when a file is created/modified in a SharePoint document library, regardless what folder the file is placed in. I do NOT want to create a new flow for each folder in a document library :)

@Rune Myrhaug, you will run into some limitations today. I can show you some workarounds in private if you'd like :). In two months it will be easier to do.

Thank you Kerem. Kudos and great work to you for a very detailed thread with examples and guidance. Keep up the hard work like this and it won't be long before Flow is completely ubiquitous in Office 365.