Recently, a new cloud service for automating workflows between different apps and services was released – Microsoft Flow. You can get notifications, synchronize files, collect data and more, and have plenty of services that you can to choose from.
Many times we were asked for an easy-to-use tool to track the company’s Facebook timeline. If Office 365 is already in place, Microsoft Flow is a quick option. The prebuild template Save updates from Facebook to a SharePoint List will do most of the job, but you can create your own template and adapt it to your business needs. e.g. create a new SharePoint item for each new Facebook post mentioning “blackfriday” or “ticket” and then use the SharePoint list for further operations
How it works:
1. To retrieve data from Facebook or any other service, your Flow needs to authenticate. You should create a “Connection” to Facebook:
a. Login on the Office 365 portal.
b. Select the Flow tile from the App Launcher.
c. In the settings menu at the top-right of the screen select Connections.
d. On the My connections page click Create Connection.
e. In the list of Available connections, select the connection that you want to set up, such as Facebook. Then, enter your credentials to set up the connection.
2. Go to a modern SharePoint list and select Create a flow.
3. Select Create a blank flow.
4. Add the needed actions and conditions.
5. Save the flow and it will get automatically enabled.
In the current example, we will get a new item created for each new post containing the word “ticket”.
Other Flow templates for SharePoint which caught my attention:
- Copy files from one SharePoint Online account or folder to another
- Send email, post of Yammer, Twitter and Facebook for new SharePoint Item
- Create a new item in SharePoint, when a new order is added in Salesforce
The full list with SharePoint Flow Templates to be found here: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/services/shared_sharepointonline/sharepoint/
