Today, as we announced on the Office Blogs, we are proud to celebrate the general availability of Microsoft PowerApps and Flow. These solutions represent the present and future of our ambition to reinvent business processes, and should be a central element in your toolkit for building collaborative business apps for SharePoint and OneDrive.
Today's announcement builds on our previous post about the tight integration of PowerApps and Flow with SharePoint, and lays out our plan for even deeper integration coming soon. (See below!)
Most commercial Office 365 plans are automatically entitled to start using PowerApps and Flow. Further details on licensing and pricing are available at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ Thanks.
Frequently asked questions
Q. What does Microsoft’s commitment to PowerApps and Microsoft Flow mean for historic business solutions on SharePoint, like InfoPath?
A. As we announced at Ignite, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow are tools for business users to build business applications and automation in SharePoint today and tomorrow. They are the successors to InfoPath and SharePoint Designer for many common business scenarios, especially custom forms used on SharePoint lists.
Q. Will Microsoft still support InfoPath and SharePoint Designer?
A. As we announced earlier in 2016:
- SharePoint Server 2016 will include an ongoing capability to host InfoPath Forms Services. InfoPath Forms Services on SharePoint 2016 will be supported for the duration of SharePoint 2016’s support lifecycle.
- InfoPath Forms Services on Office 365 will continue to be supported.
- InfoPath 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013 will be the last versions of those products. SharePoint Designer is not being re-released with SharePoint Server 2016, although we will continue to support custom workflows built with SharePoint Designer and hosted on SharePoint Server 2016 and Office 365. Support for InfoPath 2013 and SharePoint Designer 2013 will match the support lifecycle for SharePoint Server 2016, running until 2026.
Q. What can customers expect to see inside SharePoint Online?
A. The release is principally a licensing event. If you have previously enabled preview features inside SharePoint Online, PowerApps and Microsoft Flow will continue to appear in the App Launcher and as elements of modern lists. If you had disabled access to preview features, users will see those integrations enabled in the next few weeks.
Q. How can Office 365 customers connect to custom data sources?
A. Every Office 365-licensed user of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow can create a custom API data connection, in addition to the intrinsic ability to connect to sources like SQL, Exchange, Yammer, Box and Twitter.
Q. How is user access managed/licensed?
A. Flow and PowerApps are managed separately. Here is documentation on how users are managed for Microsoft Flow. Here is documentation on how users are managed for Microsoft PowerApps. They are both quite similar in implementation, and provide options to help prevent existing users from joining an Office 365 tenant.
Q. How can restrict my users' ability to move data out of corporate certified environments like SQL and SharePoint to insecure, legacy or consumer technologies?
A. PowerApps and Flow allow you to create data zones for business and non-business data, as shown below. Once these DLP policies are implemented, users are prevented from designing or running PowerApps and Flows that combine business and non-business data. For more details, see https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/introducing-data-loss-prevention .
Q. How can Office 365 customers connect to custom data sources?
A. Every Office 365-licensed user of PowerApps and Microsoft Flow can create a custom API data connection, in addition to the intrinsic ability to connect to sources like SQL, Exchange, Yammer, Box and Twitter.
Q. How can I prevent new users from starting to use PowerApps until the organization is ready?
A. We have extensive documentation on this topic at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/tutorials/signup-question-and-answer The short answer is to use the PowerShell cmdlet:
Set-MsolCompanySettings -AllowAdHocSubscriptions $false
which prevents users from activating "ad-hoc" service like PowerApps, Power BI or Azure RMS.
Q. How can I remove PowerApps and/or Flow from existing users?
A. Again, see https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/tutorials/signup-question-and-answer for a comprehensive overview. The quick answer is to use the Office 365 Admin center and remove the license for PowerApps and Flow. Also, the integrated list button to create PowerApps and Flow require design and edit permissions on the list, respectively. Users, even if licensed, will not see those buttons on any list or library where they don't already have appropriate rights.
Also, inside the Office 365 SharePoint license (e.g. Office 365 E3) disable access to the PowerApps and Flow services as shown:
This will remove the PowerApps, Flow, and Dynamics 365 icons from the AppLauncher “waffle”.
Bulk removal of licenses is also possible through PowerShell. See https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn771774.aspx for a detailed example. Finally, further guidance about bulk removal of services within a license can be found at https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dn771769.aspx
I now see Flow and PowerApps under our E4 licesne and they appear to be turned on for everyone (as Planner was too). Is this expected? If you turn it on by default, how many Flows does each user get under E4?
Accepted Solutions
