Announcing a major update today, Microsoft has now launched a fresh new upgrade to its workflow automation solution, Flow. The update can be considered an important stepping stone, as Microsoft looks towards a complete automation of certain workflow approvals in Flow.
With today’s update, the company is introducing a new concept called “Modern Approvals”, aimed at streamlining your approval process.
With these new modern approvals experiences, you can quickly and easily create an approval workflow for your data in SharePoint, Dynamics CRM, Twitter, Visual Studio Team Services, MailChimp and many others. As part of the approval process, approvers will receive email notifications about pending approvals, and can view and respond to all approval requests in a brand-new, unified approvals center.
A san example, lets suppose you want to create a tweet approval process for your brand’s Twitter account.
You can ask your teammates to enter their proposals in a SharePoint list and create a flow such that whenever a new item is added, you start an approval process with item details. If you approve then post the tweet and notify the creator. If you reject, then email your teammate with your feedback.
The Start an approval action allows you to enter a title and specify the approver. You can also optionally enter details, such as the proposed tweet text, and a link to the list. These fields will be surfaced to the approver in the Approvals Center.
You can also capture the approver’s feedback with the Comments output. In our Twitter approval example, you can email your teammate informing him/her of why the tweet is unsuitable.
Approve a request
When an approval request is assigned to you, you will receive an email notification matching the title, details, and item link described in the Flow.
Clicking on the Approve or Reject buttons will lead you to the Approvals Center. Here you can see all your pending approval items.
Similarly, if you have the Flow Mobile app (available on iOS and Android), clicking on Approve or Reject will take you to an approval screen in the app.
PowerApps also receive major upgrade
Apart from Flow, another one of Microsoft’s solutions “Powerapps” — which allows you to design and build desktop apps from zero — is getting a significant upgrade.
The update will now allow users/developers to integrate apps to the PowerBI dashboard, along with a more improved Sharepoint lists feature. Apart from PowerBI, you can now also embed your apps onto websites, with the use of a simple iframe tag.
In addition, the service is adding support for more data sources, bringing the current number to over 100 integrations.
