Flow

Power Automate Desktop

Photo by Mateusz Dach from Pexels This time round I’m going to delve into Power Automate Desktop (PAD). PAD is a service that allows you to perform activities on a local machine as part of a flow. It’s a service that used to require an extra subscription cost, but it’s now available to everyone included with whatever tier of Power Automate you currently have. What Can You Do With PAD? So the big question is what can you do with Power Automate Desktop? And the answer is, quite a bit. Among the things you can do:

Sunday, May 23, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using Power Automate to Start, Stop and Restart Azure App Service

Photo by Linda Eller-Shein from Pexels There are any number of reasons why you might want to start or stop your Azure App Service based on other factors. And while there are a number of ways to accomplish this, this time we’re going to cover how to do it in Power Automate with the press of a single button. Whether you want to start, stop or restart you app service, the flow works exactly the same way. As always, we start with a trigger. This time we’re going to use a button trigger so that we can restart our app service at the press of a single button. In Power Automate, create a new instant cloud flow. Give your flow a name and then select “Manually trigger a flow”.

Sunday, May 16, 2021 | 2 minutes Read

More Securely Access an HTTP Request Trigger

Photo by PhotoMIX Company from Pexels In a previous post, we learned how to trigger a Power Automate flow by calling an HTTP endpoint. The best part of this trigger is that it allows you to trigger your flow from anywhere on the internet, be it an application or right in your browser. The trouble is, there isn’t security for that endpoint “out of the box”. Anyone who knows the endpoint’s URI can call it. So how do you secure that endpoint so that only someone who is authorized to call the endpoint can get it to run?

Thursday, May 6, 2021 | 7 minutes Read

Using an HTTP Request Trigger

Request by Nick Youngson CC BY-SA 3.0 Alpha Stock Images This time around we’re going to talk about the HTTP request trigger. This is one of the automated category of triggers that allows you to trigger a flow to run from an HTTP request. This flow is really handy if you have some data you can put into a JSON schema that you want to process in some way. One example from the templates list is passing in data to the flow to use to create a user in Azure Active Directory.

Friday, April 30, 2021 | 3 minutes Read

Tagging Images with Flow and Azure Vision API - Part I

Photo by Brett Jordan on Unsplash This time, in our continuing adventures with Microsoft Flow and the Azure Cognitive Services Computer Vision API, we’re using the Vision API to tag image files. The flow will pass the Vision API image files from OneDrive and update the image files with the list of auto-generated meta tags the service returns to us.

Monday, August 5, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-OCR

Photo by Miguel Á. Padriñán from Pexels Last time we looked at generating thumbnail images via the Vision Service. This time we’re going to look at using the service to get text out of a photograph of a document utilizing the the Vision Service’s Optical Character Recognition (OCR) process. Button, Button We’re going to use a Flow button trigger from the Flow phone app to start this flow. In Microsoft Flow, select New -> Instant - From blank. Give it a name and select “From Microsoft Flow”.

Thursday, August 1, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Flow and Azure Cognitive Services Vision Service-Thumbnails

In the past, I’ve played around with some pieces of Azure Cognitive Services surrounding text recognition. Over the next couple of posts, I’m going to take a look at some things you can do with the Vision Service and ways we can integrate that with Flow. For this first post, we’re going to use the Vision service to create a thumbnail of our image. There are any number of reasons that you might want to generate thumbnail images for a file. One example would be a company that is putting together an online product catalog or online store. For most situations like this, every product will need one or more full size images and a thumbnail to match each one. For example, when you look at a product on Amazon, there will be a series of thumbnail images along the left side of the product page. Hovering over or clicking on an image will display the full size version.

Monday, July 29, 2019 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow: Converting Feed Categories to Hashtags

In a number of previous posts starting with this one, I’ve covered ways to use Microsoft Flow to post to to your Twitter and LinkedIn feeds when you publish a blog post. One thing I haven’t covered in those posts is doing something with your categories. This time, we’ll walk through adding steps to our flow to convert the categories from our blog post into hashtags for our Twitter and LinkedIn posts.

Thursday, July 25, 2019 | 3 minutes Read

UPDATE: Microsoft Flow: Posting to LinkedIn

In a previous post, I showed how to post to LinkedIn about a blog post. The connector available at that time used V1 of the LinkedIn API. That version no longer works. Thankfully, Flow already has added support for the LinkedIn V2 API, and it’s a simple swap of steps to replace V2 for V1. Add a new step just below your “Share an article” step. Search for LinkedIn. Make sure you select LinkedIn V2 and not the other one.

Monday, July 22, 2019 | 1 minute Read

Microsoft Flow: Feeding Forms data to Dynamics 365 CRM

One of the most universal pieces of any company website is the “Contact Us” page. There are countless ways this is handled. At the simplest it can just open a mailto link. Sometimes there’s an inline form of some sort that feeds into some app somewhere. A lot of times it will require someone along the process to take the data from that form and copy/paste it into the whatever Customer Relationship Management system the company uses.

Thursday, July 18, 2019 | 5 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow for Expiration Dates pt. 2

In the previous Flow post, I walked through using Flow to set up reminders for things you need to keep track of, like expiration dates, renewal dates and so forth. In this follow up, I’ll walk through creating a weekly process that emails you a list of upcoming reminders so you know what’s coming in the future. Trigger We’ll start by creating a blank Flow. For our Trigger, we’re going to select a Schedule. Search for “Recurrence” and select that. For this example, I’m going to set the trigger to run on Sunday evenings at 6pm local time. That’s the time I’m starting to think about the coming week, so it’s a good time to remind myself of what’s coming up. For my Flow, I’ve selected the following parameters:

Monday, February 4, 2019 | 4 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow For Expiration Dates

We all have a near endless list of expiration and reminder dates to keep track of: software renewals, contracts, driver’s license, certifications, warranties, and on and on. Or maybe we want a better way of seeing when that pesky doctor or vet appointment is without scrolling endlessly through our calendar. Keeping track of all those dates is a constant hassle. If we’re lucky, we get an email or snail-mail a few weeks ahead of time. But how many of us could tell what’s coming up in next 6 weeks or 6 months? In this post and the next, we’re going to create two new Flows to make it easy for us to keep track of those on-rushing dates of import that we need to keep track of.

Monday, January 21, 2019 | 6 minutes Read