Forum Discussion
MicrosoftGA: Microsoft PowerApps and Flow
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'm confused by your response. What has MS discontinued in O365 without an upgrade path? SPD still works fine and the WFs it creates will continue to work for many years.
The Dynamics 365 tile is a real problem for some Microsoft customers, and I don't think Microsoft has properly listened and understood. This is making the customers (IT professionals) and Microsoft look bad.
The reason *some* of your customers need the tile is understood, you have explained it well enough already. The reason *some-other* customers need to remove the tile is being ignored.
In our environment, some staff might be assigned a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online Professional license, but none of the students are assigned this license. So when any student clicks on the "Dynamics 365" icon the "The new home for all your business apps" page appears briefly and then an error page appears with the message "You need a Microsoft Dynamics CRM Online license to continue" and a red X icon indicating that this app is broken. From the student point of view, this is just a permanently broken application that the organisation is doing nothing about.
Having the "Dynamics 365" icon should be optional, controlled by the tenant.
- 100% agree with Stephen Crowther here. As a Microsoft MVP working primarily with Dynamics GP, which isn't Dynamics 365, my clients are very hesitant to even consider using PowerApps and Flow because that means they have no choice but to have a D365 tile on their app launcher because the confusion to users is high (they see Dynamics and think it's a different GP shortcut). This should be in the control of the tenant if they need it in their situation, not forced on everyone.
This is great news, congratulations on reaching GA!
On the Pricing details page for PowerApps it mentions "Establish company policies regarding the usage of different connections and apps" as a feature of PowerApps Plan 2. Is there any specifics on how these policies can be implemented? Thanks.
- Chris McNulty
Thanks - further details on environment controls are posted at https://powerapps.microsoft.com/en-us/tutorials/working-with-environments/
What "maximum flow frequency" means in the different plans?
- no matter when the trigger event happens, the flow will be scheduled to check/run in every 15/5/3/1 minutes?
OR
- the flow is executed ~immediately after being triggered but the next possible run will be scheduled in 15/5/3/1 minutes at the earliest?
- Ey Zoltan,
Where did you read the information about flow frequency? Hi Zoltan
Did you managed to find how flow max frequency should be understood?
Is it?
- no matter when the trigger event happens, the flow will be scheduled to check/run in every 15/5/3/1 minutes?
OR
- the flow is executed ~immediately after being triggered but the next possible run will be scheduled in 15/5/3/1 minutes at the earliest?
I'm still not sure as I havent't had a situation where this would have been critical, but my guess is the second version, so no static schedule, but almost immediate triggering, then the waiting period based on the license.
- Chris McNultyIf the flow has a starting condition, the execution only counts against your threshold if the condition is met. For example, in a 30 day month, if you poll Twitter every minute for #GPODAWUND, and that tag is only found once a day, you are only counted for 30 Flows, not 42000.
- Look forward to working with this program. Congrats!
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?
From https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/#plan-feature-table its 2000 per user per month. I've seen these appear in our Tenant today also.
Thanks, I was interpreting it that way, but wasn't certain as if we are going to be limited in the number of 'free flows', and get charged after x amount of Flows it doesn't seem like this is an App Microsoft should turn-on by default for everyone.
AFTER the tiles have popped up I can now see the links to Flow and PowerApps in the Office 365 admin.
Once selected I am told:
"To access the admin center, upgrade your plan."
We are on E1 and we definetly won't upgrade our plan.
Is this by design, do I have to wait a few weeks until this is available, why should I have to upgrade in the first place?
Is the only way for me to manage/disable Flow/Powerapps through Powershell?
- It might be the rollout is not finished for your tenant...E1 plans are eligible to have Flow: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ If the problem continues in some days, open a ticket
This just feeds into the same discussion elsewhere, staff are let loose on features they should'nt have access to. Thanks, but no thanks.
Hello, I see two issues here. 1) Restriction of "business data" services does work by creating DLP policy. However once DLP was created, any new user environment is not being enforced automatically, you'll need to modify again your DLP policy to include those newer user environments. 2) Even if user subscription is disabled, it does not prevent a corporate user from using a "trial license".
Tried executing the following command Set-MsolCompanySettings -AllowAdHocSubscriptions $false, however it only worked for PowerBI that is the users are no longer able to subscribe to PowerBI Trial. However, it had no affect on PowerApps trial, did anyone else encounter this?
