Microsoft Flow after General Availability: The Good, The Bad and the Ugly

Hey... it's been a good 4+ months since my last post, shameless.

I'll be sharing more details in a future post on why is that, but for now I'd like to post a few updates on Microsoft Flow after it reached General Availability 3 months ago.

1. Outages

I've been using this since the very first day of the Public Preview and it's been acting strange sometimes, but since it entered General Availability, it started to calm down... a bit. Since this Monday (30/01/2017), when it went bananas...for a full day in production. Nothing like the small glitches that we've seen in Public Preview. Asking about SLA I got confusing answers from Microsoft, something that it's a standalone app etc. So it's not considered part of Office 365 and it's SLA? At least I got it this way.

Although it's just the front-end that was lost, there was no way that a user could know if their flows are running in the background or not. There weren't any messages in the Office 365 Portal or Azure Status portals indicating any issue with the services. After I've asked Microsoft, they've fixed it on the next day, and mentioned that it was a regression after a code update. At least they assured me our flows were running in the background, which is good.

So, as an outcome, take your time before starting to use Flow for production scenarios. It is a very powerful tool, but it's just not mature enough yet and hasn't reached parity with SharePoint Designer workflows (no matter how un-innovative it is). If you ask me, my advice is play with Flow and start learning it - it's obvious it's the future and especially now when it's integrated into modern lists and libraries. Keep your legacy workflows in SharePoint Designer, there's no migration path, but they'll be supported until 2026 (parity with the SharePoint Server 2016 support lifecycle), and there's no end date for support in SharePoint Online.

2. Limited Runs

Another bad news is that Flow now has limited runs (depending on your Plan). You can check all plans here as well as find out which Office 365 plan contains Flow.

In the Preview, we've had thousands of runs for free. It was indicated in the very beginning, however that the pricing will not be available until General Availability. So this is more of a neutral point.

3. Premium features

I've subscribed to Flow (Plan 1) on a trial basis in order to explore some of the paid, premium features like connecting to JIRA, Salesforce, etc.

I've had nothing but a bad experience with those so far - they are so unreliable - your flow runs one day and fails on the next without an obvious reason.

Raising a ticket to Microsoft is useless as the Flow would already work before they answer you. The functionality that I wanted to achieve with JIRA is quite limited in the Flow - it can only capture 2 triggers, which is not sufficient at all if you plan some kind of integration:

Hopefully, Microsoft will invest heavily in Flow as they say and the premium features will bring more value in the coming months. It's good to know that almost any major software is there right now...if your scenario is simplified enough, it might even get the job done for you prior you hire a team of developers to do the integration you need for your organization.

4. Sharing

Finally, and surprisingly you can now invite a new owner to your Flow. 

Once you do this, your Flow will get this green label "Team Flow" under its name. And to edit the owners, just go to the icon with the 2 people on the right hand-side.

What are the benefits?

- All Flows are attached to user accounts. This means the user who created it (and was practical enough to share it with their backups) can now go on vacation...undisturbed :)

- The Flows are storing connections of user accounts and if you'd like your HR to come insert their password in order for them to achieve that nice little automation they've requested from you - they might not feel confident about it. Now you can share the Flow with them and they can insert their username and password from their device and be confident you don't have access to that.


5. Environments

After GA, you'll notice you now have 2 Flow environments when you log in.

One from the preview (which is over) and one listed as default.

A few surprises:

Your Flows are living.... in the Preview environment!

There is no copy or migration of Flows into the live one... confirmed by Microsoft. That means recreation :) hopefully you didn't invest too much efforts in building Flows with the preview (like I did :)

As a dessert, Microsoft is not going to kill the preview environment (again confirmed by them), so there's no hard deadline on when to recreate your flows. There's also no limit on the runs on the preview environment as of this day, but I didn't tell you that :)

InfoPath forms not displaying correctly in Chrome / FireFox

Recently I noticed that every form that I've created with Info Path 2013 (I know it's old-school, but no Nintex in this case) that contains Multiple Lines of Text fields was not displaying correctly in Chrome / FireFox e.g. the text was displayed on a single line and not wrapped.

In Internet Explorer, things look like this:

Another issue is that in FireFox, on editing the form noone could insert a few spaces - only one. The Enter key did not insert a new line in a Multi-line text field either. 

I managed to find the reason quickly - the text area that contains the field has the following property:

white-space: pre. Changing this to pre-line would work fine - you need to use a custom CSS file for that.

Of course you need the SharePoint Server Publishing feature enabled on the sites in order to inherit the CSS from the top-level site. Another one-off solution is to add this in a Content Editor webpart on the page(s) that contain your form...but I guess it's not one form with that kind of field that you'd use...

Link sharing in SharePoint Online just got tricky!

Update 23/08/2016: Activating the Document ID Service feature on the site collection level will fix that. The links will then work for any file types and not just Excel, Word, PPT.

Just recently (like 10 days ago) Microsoft has deployed some changes to SharePoint Online and specifically to the links to individual documents that you could obtain by just clicking on the context menu. This way of providing a link to someone was very quick and easy, hence heavily used by lots of people. It's just a click, compared to using the Share function or "Get a Link".

The only thing you need to be sure of is that the person that you give the link already has access to this document. Otherwise using the "Get a Link" feature would be more useful. But it also has the disadvantage - you are breaking the permission structure using these links and you don't know where your link will travel after you give it to the person... if it's an anonymous link this can even get out of the boundaries of your organization! Not a good deal of control there...

Few days ago, when I tried to share a document (a project plan in the Microsoft Project .mpp format) in this way - the user got "Page not found" error. Same thing when I tried to open the link :) Both of us have access to that document anyway.

So... I looked up the link and saw that it looks like this:

https://********.sharepoint.com/projects/mytestproject/Shared%20Documents/Project%20Plan.mpp?d=w7c7a7782c60d4480ad0db7a8cd231f60

Now, that's the new thing. In these auto-generated links, there's a new bit - "document ID" as Microsoft called it. This is what's breaking the functionality.

An interesting fact is, that when I tried the same thing with Word / Excel / PowerPoint documents - all workred like a charm (like in the good old days - 10 days ago :). The links contain the same document ID, but they open fine in the browser.

After some research on the topic and a quick call with MS support, they advised me that this behavior is "by design" - great job Product teams. So from now on, every document that can't be open in Office Online (Office Web Apps) e.g. anything but Word, Excel, PowerPoint would fail and the user has to manually modify the link before providing it to another user - how usable is that?

There's also a Yammer hot thread on this... you can check it out in the next 12 days... before the IT Pro Yammer network becomes history, which is another sad topic and a poor decision in my view.

Of course... meanwhile we could still use the "Get a Link" feature and forget about the good permission practices in the organization. At least I recommend not using the anonymous links, unless you absolutely need this shared with someone outside of the organization.

Microsoft Flow first impressios

It's been an interesting week of follow-ups after last week's "The Future of SharePoint" event held at San Francisco. The world is excited about the many new (really new) functionalities and tools that were presented. Today I tested one of them - Microsoft Flow, which is still in Preview and is available to Office 365 FR tenants (or select FR people only).

Flow is similar in concept to IFTTT ('If This Then That'), but aimed at organizations rather than the individual, which means you can't get to it if you don't have a work or school account (Office 365).

Similar to Planner, the tool is not yet integrated into SharePoint, but feels like standing a little bit aside from it with its own domain: https://flow.microsoft.com.
It does, however suggest future tighter integration with Office 365 and SharePoint Online, as today I saw the Flow tile in the App launcher.

Going to the Flow website, very similar to Power BI and Planner, you need to Sign Up.

Once signed in, you can either browse the available Templates ("recipies ready to cook") which will allow you to connect about 35 services or you can start a new flow from scratch. In my example, I'd like to be emailed every time someone creates a new project in Project Online (which is the cloud brother of the newly released Project Server 2016.

Here you'd need to provide the URL for your PWA site collection, then you have just two basic options - "Add a condition" or "Add an Action" - just like the old school workflows for WSS 3.0.

That's understandable as Flow is designed to be simple in its core. So it's definitely not a full-blown Business Process Automation solution (like Nintex, for example) and the flows here are per user, so no centralized store and management of those.

When you choose "Add an action", you see the available hardcoded actions, sorted by the service they're related to. Send Email is under Office 365 Outlook. You'd need to sign in.

You can then configure the recipients, subject and body of the email - the basics. There are some predefined lookups to the current item that you can insert like Project Name, type, etc. That's cool, you just click on them and add them where appropriate.

Then all you need is a name for this new simple flow, you click Create Flow and Done.

On the next Project that gets created in Project Online, I get this:

Looks simple and clean to me. What are your thoughts? Have you signed up for Flow and tested it yet?

Big changes coming to SharePoint Online!

After the new Microsft Mechanics episode with Adam Harmetz was published last night, I am completely stumped at what Microsoft are bringing forward!

Straight to the point:

- A mobile app for SharePoint is finally on the way (iOS, Android & Windows)! 

That's a bit overdue, but great news. Lots of users preferred OneDrive these days due to the great mobile experiences.

- Microsoft Flow - a brand new product, that allows users to build logic around documents and items in a super friendly way. 

That brings a couple of question - what would happen to the existing SharePoint Designer workflows? With the decision taken earlier to not introduce a new version of SharePoint Designer and considering the almost no changes that happened to it and the workflows since 2010 - I think those will be killed. The question is more likely until when they'll be supported?

How would Flow compete to veteran 3rd parties like Nintex and K2? Would it be the free quick go-to solution if you're after something simple or would it try to compete with them?

- Power Apps - a tool that will allow users to create simple, yet powerful mobile apps that can be run on mobile devices and work with SharePoint items.

That's really nice. Something similar to what Nintex were already offering as part of their Nintex Forms product.

- Easier, user-friendly site creation process - click and have a new site in a few seconds.

Only 2 templates availabe - team site / publishing site. We were advised that site templates are not good a while ago... here's the reason why. I've always avoided them as a best practice, but a lot of people use them, especially in large organizations.

- Easier page creation and editing - each new page will automatically be responsive to look great on any device.

Cool, but again - what would happen to the current pages? 

- Each newly created SharePoint site will also create an Office 365 Group with an e-mail address so that conversations can be started around files easily.

Does that mean that the existing sites will also have groups created? I doubt it considering the number of sites organizations may already have. So this will bring some inconsistencies between "old" and "new" team sites. We're about to find out.

- Users will be able to add links to anything in Document Libraries, not just files that are stored in the library.

Simple, yet useful. Doclibs were kind of limiting as of today.

- Users will be able to pin files that must be highlighted and they'll appear on top of the library.

Kind of like what Facebook brought as Featured Photos.

- The Sites tile in the App Launcher will be renamed to SharePoint, so no confusion on what's SharePoint anymore.

I love that :) No more questions like "How do I get to SharePoint in Office 365"?

And last, but not least.... what would happen to all the branding that's already in place? Looking at the new beautiful and responsive UI I don't think there's any way to automatically adapt the custom branding. More likely there will be "old" and "new" experiences going on simultaneously until the IT Pros and developers can adapt their Intranets and users to the new one. What are your thoughts?

Yammer External Groups live today

Update 10/05: After deep dive-in with Microsoft, it turned out some domains like GMail, Hotmail etc. are blocked. I was however able to sign up in the free Yammer network of abv.bg (which is a free email service provider in Bulgaria) and surprise, surprise - there were already 335 members!

So... it's a hit or miss whenever you invite external partners if they're not using their corporate domains. So... working with freelancers anyone? Use external  networks instead - no restrictions there. Or we should wait for the Office 365 Groups to allow external users...

Update: It seems you can't invite external users to the external groups, unless they are existing Yammer users (e.g. they have a home Yammer network), which makes the service 50 % useless.
Going back to External networks if you need to collaborate with just anybody out there without knowing or asking them if they already belong to a Yammer network...


Starting today, we got a hold of the Yammer External Groups feature.

Previously, when people had to collaborate with external parties, they had to go through creating an external network and then create groups in there and invite people. That worked, however it was hard to keep track of which networks are you in and it was tough when you just had to post a quick message, you had to switch networks...

I've already tested the feature and it works surprisingly well - the external groups are clearly listed as such below all the internal groups. When you invite someone, they get the email invite, join and only see the external group they're invited to. Nothing else.

This is the experience for the external user when they join. They see your group along with the network name under their All Company group.

With external networks, a Network Admin could configure whether those external groups could be created by all users or by the admins only. So far I don't see the option to control the external groups creation, but the regular users can't create them in our network. I can also see that the option to create an external network is now gone.

So... enjoy the external groups and say goodbye to external networks.

Overdue date not marked in red in SharePoint Online Task Lists

Hi folks,

Been a while since I've posted anything SharePointy.
One reason is the migration to Exchange that I was recently involved with and it's in fact still not completed, so expect Part 2 of the post anytime soon(ish) - it will include GMail to Office365 stuff.

Now, I've found out that whenever your dates in an out of the box task list become overdue, they are NOT marked in red if you've changed the Due Date column to include the time (and not just date).

Strange, isn't it? Yes, so you can't really use this as a very precise task/time tracking solution (yet).

Default (Due Date = Date Only) and today's date = 07/04, so any task before that should be RED.

Including the time, and the task is no more overdue :) I've talked to MS about it, and hopefully it will be changed in the future by the product team (which happens to be Project for that one).

So... alternatives are for you to use some list conditional formatting...which is another big topic I might write about in the future as I've had to do it as part of a project management solution.