Flow

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

Microsoft Flow - Manually Triggering a Flow

My previous articles on Flow have all had external Triggers of some kind: a blog post, a tweet, a timer and so forth. There are times when you want to have a Flow that you can trigger on demand. One solution to that is to use a Flow button. The Flow mobile app for iOS and Android has a menu tab (currently the middle of the menu options) called “Buttons”. When you create a Flow that is started by a button Trigger, a button will appear in your app allowing you to trigger the Flow.

Thursday, January 3, 2019 | 7 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Adding Some Delay

In a previous post, I walked through saving tweets to an Azure table so they could be retweeted later with an #ICYMI tag. As with most processes of learning, we do the hard way first to learn the concepts. And then we learn the easier ways to do it. As it so happens, Flow provides a much easier way to do this. We’re going to add some delay. One of the Actions available in Flow is the Delay Action. This pauses the execution of a Flow for whatever amount of time you specify. So instead of saving our tweet to a storage table, we’re going to replace that part of the Flow with a delay and a tweet post after the delay.

Friday, December 21, 2018 | 3 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow Conference

If you didn’t catch it, the Microsoft Flow team ran an 8 hour online conference with a bunch of different Flow presenters talking about a bunch of different ways to use Flow. It’s a lot of amazing content. You can catch it all on YouTube, broken up into 4 2-hour blocks. There are a couple of presenters where the audio had some issues, but overall it was a lot of fantastic content.

Tuesday, December 18, 2018 | 1 minute Read

Flow & Function Together - CS Advent

For this year’s #csadvent post, I am going to continue my posts about using Microsoft Flow to make our lives easier. This time, we’re adding in some Azure Functions as well. In a previous post, I covered creating a Flow that an attendee to a conference might create to watch for tweets that they might want to re-tweet. This time, we want to take on the role of conference organizers who want to watch the flow of tweets for how positive or negative people feel about our conference.

Monday, December 17, 2018 | 11 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Integrating Instagram

A growing number of people seem to be using Instagram as their primary social media platform. It works well and is quite simple, without a lot of the extra baggage that Facebook and other platforms add. So long as your primary content is image based, it’s great at what it does. In this post, I’m going to be covering a couple of excellent ways to get started with integrating Microsoft Flow with Instagram.

Monday, December 10, 2018 | 5 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Retweet Posts on Approval

Photo by Ian Turnell from Pexels There’s a lot you can do with Microsoft Flow and implementing the approval action. This will allow you to put in a process to control any Flow you want to. Most of the sample approval templates in Flow are focused around business processes. In this post, however, we’re going to cover the following scenario: I am at a developer conference and I want to watch Twitter for tweets about the conference that I might want to retweet.

Monday, December 10, 2018 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - ICYMI, the Easier Way

Last time I walked through a more complex way to implement a roll your own ‘In Case You Missed It’ Flow for retweeting Twitter posts linking to new blog articles. It wasn’t the way I would do it, but the point was more to show you a few things you can do in Microsoft Flow. This time I’m going to show you an easier way to retweet posts to Twitter about your blog. And this time we’re going to use Azure Table Storage to make our lives easier.

Monday, November 26, 2018 | 6 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - ICYMI, the Hard Way

One of the promotion methods that many bloggers employ with Twitter is to re-tweet their previous blog post tweets with an “In Case You Missed It” (#ICYMI) tag a few hours or days later. In this blog post, and the next one, I’m going to show you a couple of ways you can implement this in Microsoft Flow. Setup We’ll start by creating a new Flow from the blank template. You can see my previous posts on how to do this. I won’t repeat it here.

Thursday, November 22, 2018 | 8 minutes Read

Microsoft Flow - Convert Links to Short URLs with Bit.ly

In my last post, I showed you how to create a Flow that would promote a new blog post on Twitter and LinkedIn. Given the character limits on Twitter, you may run into issues where your tweet has too many characters and your Flow will fail. The quickest way to address that is to convert the link to the blog post into a short URL using the Bit.ly connector. Adding Bit.ly Open up the Flow that you created last time. Do this by selecting the ‘My Flows’ menu option on the left, then click on the name of the Flow. Once it opens the dashboard for that Flow, near the top right of the page you will see the ‘Edit Flow’ button. Click this to get back into design mode.

Monday, November 19, 2018 | 2 minutes Read

Using Microsoft Flow to Promote A New Ghost Blogging Platform Post

UPDATE: I’ve since abandoned Ghost and gone back to WordPress, but the concepts here apply equally and the Flow will actually work without any modifications for WordPress blogs. Flow is Microsoft’s answer to IFTTT and Zapier and similar services. These services automate certain online tasks based on various triggers. In the case we’re examining today, we’re going to automate the following requirement: When a new blog post goes live on my site, which is powered by the Ghost blogging platform, I want to create posts about it on Twitter and LinkedIn.

Saturday, November 17, 2018 | 6 minutes Read