Updates to flow buttons and new and improved connectors
Flow button improvements
Flow buttons are better than ever! As we announced previously, you can share your buttons with you co-workers and even configure what connections they use. This week we are announcing that if a co-worker receives a button they can easily share it with other people in your organization. Everyone now sees a convenient Share button in the Flow app for iOS, Android, and Windows Phone. When you select that button you can choose who to send the invitation to:
Of course, the owners of the flow still have full control over who can run their buttons. So if someone tries to run it who doesn’t have access, the owners will receive an email asking them to grant access:
At the same time, we are giving authors more control over the data that they collect with the button. Previously, authors could just define free-form text fields, but now they can have people choose from a pre-defined list of options instead. For example, if a button should have an importance chosen for a task, options can be entered for Low, Medium, and High. Now that the button is guaranteed to have one of these three values, the flow can have logic that depends on one these specific values.
Seven new connectors
In the past couple of weeks we have released several new connectors:
- AWeber – AWeber is an email marketing platform that allows small businesses and entrepreneurs to create and send emails.
- Azure Event Grid – Azure Event Grid is an eventing backplane that enables event based programing with pub/sub semantics and reliable distribution & delivery for all services in Azure as well as third parties.
- Azure Event Hubs – Connect to Azure Event Hubs to receive events.
- Azure Log Analytics – Connect to your Azure Log Analytics workspace to run and visualize various Analytics queries.
- Azure Table Storage – Azure Table storage is a service that stores structured NoSQL data in the cloud, providing a key/attribute store with a schemaless design. Sign into your Storage account to create, update, and query tables and more.
- DocFusion365 – DocFusion® 365 is a dynamic, cloud-based document composition and automation engine designed to help you manage all of your document content and processes within the Office 365 environment.
- StaffHub – Microsoft StaffHub is a cloud-based platform that works across all your devices. It enables firstline workers and their managers to manage time, communicate with their teams, and share content.
Improvements to the Slack and MySQL connectors
Although we are releasing new connectors every week, we also are continually making improvements to all our existing connections. This month, a couple of the improvements we made were:
- Slack – You can now create new Slack channels or groups, as well as join new groups. You can even now trigger a flow when a new file is added to a Slack conversation.
- MySQL – The MySQL connector now has full read/write support, meaning you can create new rows in your MySQL tables, or update and delete existing rows.
Flow Collections
Finally, this week we announced Flow collections — a set of templates organized by role or by vertical. To start off, we’ve made four collections available: marketing, human resources, software development, and education. These collections are now featured on the Microsoft Flow home page. Read more about this new feature here.
