What is Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft has invested in a number of cloud-only upgrades to the venerable Office programmes as part of its drive toward mobile and cloud products. One of them is Flow, a trigger-based process automation system.

What Does Flow Do?

The desire for personal productivity has been burning for pretty much the whole century if you're the kind of person who frequently reads Study Tonight articles. Microsoft's effort to provide you with the type of notification, alert, data collection, and communication automation that will allow you to spend less time on tedious but essential admin tasks and more time on fascinating (and productive) activities is called Flow.

Consider Flow to be IFTTT with a focus on the workplace rather than the Internet of Things or hardware.

You may build "flows" (short for "workflows") based on trigger events using flow. For instance, you might design a flow to send a message to a Slack channel if a Visual Studio build fails or download replies to a Microsoft Forms survey to Dropbox on a regular basis.

Is It Usable by Anyone?

If people register for a free Microsoft account, anybody may use Flow. Although they have about the same capabilities as those with a free Microsoft account, users of Flow with an Office 365 subscription are also able to utilise it.

Business editions of Office 365 and Dynamics 365 are also included with Flow; however, various subscription levels get different versions of flow that correspond with premium and free accounts. Although it's a little unclear, you may look at the specifics on Microsoft's price website.

If you intend to utilise more than what the free account permits, you may also pay for a Flow account. Three price schemes are available:

• Flow Free: You may construct an infinite number of flows with the free plan, but you are only allowed 750 runs per month and checks take place every 15 minutes.
• Flow Plan 1: The cost of Flow Plan 1 is $5 per month. Every month, you get 4500 runs, and checks occur every three minutes. Additionally, you get a few premium connections for applications like MailChimp and Salesforce.
• Flow Plan 2: The cost of Flow Plan 2 is $15 per month. Every minute, checks are performed, and you get 15,000 runs each month. The same premium connections that were included in Flow Plan 1 are also included, along with access to organisational policy settings and a number of business process flows.

You may join up for a free trial of one of the premium plans for 90 days, which should be sufficient time to decide if it's worthwhile to pay the money.

What Are Some Uses for Flow?

The whole point of flow is to eliminate the tedium of performing things that a machine could handle for you. It may be as simple as receiving an email alert whenever someone updates a file in Dropbox, or it might be as sophisticated as a multi-step procedure with approvals, alerts, and notifications that is based on a Power BI analysis of real-time data.

Three different sorts of flows may be produced:

• Automated: A process that is started by an event, such as the arrival of an email or the modification of a file.
• Button: A flow that is manually started by pressing a button.
• Scheduled: A flow that executes once or again at a predetermined time.

On a premium plan, enterprise customers additionally have access to business process flows, which direct employees through data input processes and may initiate additional flows depending on the data.

Since it can be challenging to come up with uses for this kind of tool, Microsoft has offered a wide variety of templates from which you can choose. Some of these templates are tailored for particular contexts (such as productivity, sales, software development, etc.), while others make use of particular connectors. An application's relationship to Flow is known as a connector.

Every SAAS-enabled Microsoft programme (including GitHub) as well as connections for Slack, Dropbox, Gmail, MailChimp, Jira, Twitter, BaseCamp, and dozens of more apps are available. Most of them are corporate services like BitBucket and Salesforce that you wouldn't require as a personal user, but some of them are only accessible to premium (i.e., paying) users. Additionally, there are connections for protocols like RSS and FTP. At the time of writing, there are connections available for 323 different apps and protocols, and if you want a different connector, you may create your own.

IFTTT vs. Flow: Which Is Better?

What you require from them will determine the response to it. IFTTT is more user- and IoT-focused, whereas Flow is more enterprise- and software-focused. IFTTT is your best option if you want your lights to switch on in response to a Slack message. Flow is a better choice if you want a SharePoint list to be updated each time someone answers a survey you produced. Both of them are excellent at what they do, so you may use either one gladly for various jobs.