NOT BASEBALL

A few weeks ago a colleague told me that Microsoft was adding a workflow product called [drum roll] Flow to the Office 365 Suite. I think it is mostly intended for teams to pass work automatically from one person to the next.

But you can use it for (the good kind of) stalking. For instance, I set up a Flow to send me an email when someone adds a document to a SharePoint site I moderate for our Quantitative Literacy course. I can also use it to let me know when a stale form gets a response so I don’t have to add a task to regularly check it. The rest of this post walks through that.

Go to flow.microsoft.com and authenticate. Then select My flows at the left and click + New. Select create from template if you find one you like.

I am going to try to build one that sends me an email each day a particular Form is updated. So I went to +Create and selected Build a scheduled flow instead of using a template.

I searched for Forms to get the first step of my flow. I selected Forms and using the trigger tab selected when a response is submitted. It then gave me a list of forms and I picked the one I wanted.

I then clicked mail and in the action tab defined how I wanted the email response to work. I also went up to the top of the page and (I think) made it only send one email even if multiple responses were submitted.

I clicked save and think it will work. I will know tomorrow at 5 AM.

Two simpler flows- triggering immediately when a document is added to a SharePoint site and a Form response is received certainly work as I have tested them.

Microsoft Flow seems to have a lot of power that I am ignoring. But, even what I’m using will make things a little easier on some of the irregular tasks I have to do.