This week, we’re excited to bring you several new features: support for Visual Studio Team Services (which was one of our top requested features), the addition of complex data types as outputs for SharePoint triggers and actions, the ability to test Office 365 Outlook connections, and finally a Boolean control.

Visual Studio Team Services

Visual Studio Team Services (formerly known as Visual Studio Online) is a popular service for sharing code, tracking work, and shipping software. With Flow, you can now connect VSTS to a wide variety of services such as O365 Email, Slack, Trello, and Wunderlist. For example, you can create a Flow to send you an email and create a task in Wunderlist whenever a new bug is assigned to you.

Enhancements to SharePoint

SharePoint lists support a range of data types from simple objects like Single lines of text and Date and Time to complex objects such as Person or Group, Lookup, and Choice. In our most recent release, we’ve added the ability to use Lookup, Person or Group, and Choice columns as dynamics outputs from any list related triggers and actions. We will be adding the ability to update these data types (as inputs) in a future release.

Test O365 Outlook Connections

Whenever you create a new O365 Outlook connection, we will now test it to make sure you’re ready to use it. For example, let’s suppose that your company is migrating from on-premises Exchange to Office 365, you may be in a situation where your mailbox hasn’t been set up. In this scenario, you’re able to log in but you cannot use the connection since the mailbox cannot be found. Instead of letting you fail after you’ve created a flow, we will test the connection as soon as you provide us your credentials.

In the upcoming months, we will be adding the connection testing feature to many other services and improving our error messages.

Boolean Control

With this week’s release, we’ve also added a boolean control to clarify which values you should enter for boolean input fields, such as Has Attachments in the When a new email arrives trigger.  You can select from a True or False value or reset to default using the Default option.

If you’re copying values from a trigger or other actions, you can select the Enter custom value option and choose an output from a previous step. For example, imagine that you’re writing a flow that copies new items from one SharePoint list to another and you want to copy the value of a field called Vacation Approved from list A to list B. In the action to create an item in list B, simply choose the Enter a custom value option and then select the Vacation approved output from the trigger.

We hope you enjoy these new features and look forward to your feedback either in the comments below or on our Community forums.

Merwan Hade

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