An introduction to Microsoft Flow

What is Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft Flow is a cloud-scale automation engine that allows you to orchestrate work across one or more different systems. It’s built on top of Azure Logic Apps.

Azure Logic Apps is used by IT pros and developers for building integrations. Microsoft Flow builds on top of that, bringing it not only to personal productivity but allowing it to integrate with Power Platform projects.

Flows always have a trigger and the trigger is what kicks off that flow. There are a number of different triggers, but once that trigger starts the flow, then you have one or more different actions that take place to perform the actual work in the flow.

Instant Flows

Instant flows are a category of flows that start with some type of user interaction or run on-demand when an action takes place, such as when the flow button is pressed in the mobile application.

When you’re in Excel, you can make a flow run for a selected record giving the context of that record, from CDS when you’re in a model-driven app when a record is selected, you can trigger a flow to run passing in the content of the record and other input, or from a PowerApps Canvas app, you can also have it kick off a flow, do some work, and give a response back.

Scheduled Flows

This is something that if you’re familiar with the CDS workflow engine has been asked for a long time. The ability to trigger a flow on a re-occurring schedule, such as run once a day or once a week to perform some operation.

Automated Flows

These are flows that trigger based on events that occur, such as a record being updated, a file being put in Dropbox or even a location trigger when a user moves into a particular location.