Create a Workflow with Microsoft Flow

In this demo I will show you, how to create a workflow with Microsoft Flow. I will use a business scenario where the employee apply for a leave in SharePoint List named “Team Calendar” and I as a project lead will get an email to approve or reject the request and based on my response list item will be updated with “Approve/Reject” option in ‘Status’ column.

So let’s get started –

• First create a sample list “Team Calendar” with 5 columns (Employee Name (Renamed title), Start Date, End Date, Comment Box and Status).

• Go to the list and click on ‘ Flow’ and then select ‘Create a Flow’.

• Select the template “Send approval email when a new item is added”. Here Outlook will perform the action of sending an e-mail to the ME (as a Project Lead) and SharePoint will perform the action of updating the “Team Calendar” list. Click ‘Continue’ to proceed.

• As this flow was created from SharePoint, the ‘Site url’ and ‘list name’ are filled out automatically.

• Set the information of the user who will get a message when a leave request is submitted to a list. I will set my email address under the field ‘To’.

• Change the ‘Approval request’ text in the ‘Subject’ field to ‘A new leave request has been submitted by’ and append the ‘Title’ (to have the Employee name in the email subject field).

• Insert “Approve, Reject” under ‘User options’, so that any of them can be selected directly in the notification email.

• Delete the condition, as there will be no condition for the email sending.

• Select ‘New step’ and then ‘New action’ to select the action which will update the SharePoint item.

• Since we are going to write back the approval decision to the SharePoint item, select the SharePoint action ‘SharePoint – Update item’.

• Select the site URL in the field ‘Site Url’ and the “Team Calendar” list under the field ‘List name’

• Select the field ‘ID’ from the dynamic content pop-up box as ‘Id’. This will be the ID from the initial trigger.

• Select the field ‘Title’ from the dynamic content pop-up box ‘Title’.

• In the ‘Status’ field, select ‘SelectedOption’ from the dynamic content box. This will be my response (as Project Lead) when I have selected the option.

• Click on ‘Create Flow’.

• Click on ‘Done’ to finalize the flow.

To test the flow, add an item in the ‘Team Calendar’ list and make sure an email is sent. Select an option in the email and make sure that the list item status column is updated.

Happy Learning!!

Overview of Microsoft Graph API

While working with Office 365, you might have come across this term so in this post I will describe what is “Microsoft Graph API “, In the simplest words Microsoft Graph is the easiest way to call the Microsoft APIs be it Users, Groups, Mail, Calendars, Contacts, Files etc. all from a single endpoint.

This was previously known as the Office 365 Unified API. It exposes multiple APIs from Microsoft Cloud Services through a single REST API endpoint (https://graph.microsoft.com ).

Prior to Microsoft Graph API, Microsoft had different APIs for it’s different Office 365 and cloud products which needs below steps while dealing with different Office 365 APIs in an application:

• Find the endpoint of the API
• Get the access token
• Get results from the API
• Repeat for each service
• Manage multiple tokens for each API

So now understand if one had to connect to many different APIs in an application, it gets difficult to deal with it hence as a solution, Microsoft launched the Microsoft Graph API. Using Microsoft Graph, you just have to make a single endpoint call to the cloud services and require a single authentication token.

Microsoft Graph is a really powerful and easy way to call the Microsoft APIs and all from a single endpoint.

Visit  Microsoft Graph Home  &  Graph explorer to get more information about it.

Thanks!!!

Promoted Results in SharePoint 2013/Office 365

In this post I will write about how to create promoted results in SP 2013/Office 365. In SharePoint 2010 we had best bets to promote a result to the top of the search result list by using keywords. this was the great way to highlight a specific item in the result list. Best bets in Share Point 2010 is changed to promoted results in SharePoint 2013/Office 365.

To create Promoted Results, First open SharePoint Admin Center, click on Search from the left navigation and then click on “Manage Query Rules” link

In Manage Query Rules window, select Local SharePoint Result from the drop down of context and click on New Query Rule

On the Add New Query Rule page, Enter the Rule name and on the Context section select “Query Matched Keyword Exactly, enter keywords in the text box separated by semicolon. For e.g. Kavita;Mishra

Click on the “Add Promoted Results” link under Actions section and enter Title,  URL and description and then hit Save button

After completion of above details, click “Save” to save the Query Rule.

Now go to the search center. Type the word “Vision” or  “Policies”. The Company.docx would be displayed on top of the results with a tick mark

:):)

Create an App Catalog in SharePoint 2013 online

In this post, I’ll describe about creating an App catalog in SharePoint 2013 online, before diving into the details, I would like to give you a brief introduction about App Catalog.

The App Catalog is a special site collection on a web application that holds the apps, each web application can have only one App Catalog site collection whereas there can be multiple App Catalogs in a farm.

You can create the App Catalog site collection from SharePoint Central Administration or from Admin site in Office 365. I am using Office 365 for this example but the steps would be almost same.

1. Go to the Admin site in the Office 365 and Click on “SharePoint” link under Admin section

2. Click on “Apps” at left navigation

3. Select Create a new catalog site and then click on Ok.

4. Enter the details of the new app catalog site and then click on “OK”

5. An App Catalog site collection is created successfully.

By default the following document libraries will be available in the App Catalog site

• Apps for SharePoint : A library where Apps that can be use in SharePoint stays
• Apps for Office : This library is use to store the apps for Office
• App Requests : Users who do not have access to add an App, can add a new App Request for Admins to get the permission for the app. 

I hope you find this blog helpful 🙂