Jesse Lawrence
This morning at Directions EMEA, Brian Meier gave an interesting presentation on PowerApps and Flow, which we have touched on before. These are being pushed both as great tools and the way in which Extensions can be fully utilised. Here we will discuss some of the features that he covered.
Microsoft Flow
Microsoft flow is essentially an automated workflow tool. Set up a connection with a data source, as well as what you want the app to “listen out for” (trigger conditions) and when the app sees these conditions it will perform an action as you have configured it to.
For example, it could look at twitter for when @NavConsultants are mentioned with the word “excellent” and send us an email with a details. Of course this would be an awful lot of emails for us…
Flow can link up multiple apps within flow, i.e. Facebook monitor > do something in Excel > Send an email. Each connector has its own set of objects that you can use within it.
PowerApps are online tools that can be used to do things with data taken from one or more external system using connectors. They are ideal for making apps such as service engineer apps as data can be stored offline in the PowerApp then synchronised with the source data. They will also work with multiple data sources using a Common Data Model. For systems that are not currently supported you can use a “Swagger” file using Excel to map the data from your API; this is also used as a way to create the Common Data Model from various sources.
Apps can be created either from the web or desktop, however we are waiting for more details on creating and deploying the apps, especially for third parties.
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