Ebb and Flow™
Maybe you’ve heard about Microsoft Flow recently? It’s a workflow engine powered by Azure Logic Apps to connect your favorite applications and services together. Sounds fun, certainly, but really what’s it for and how can it be used with Dynamics 365? Yes, you can use Flow to connect your smart home to other devices (similar to IFTTT) but to assume that’s where it stops would be short sighted.
The Easy Button
As motivation, I built a ridiculous Flow that I thought Dynamics customers would find interesting enough attempt themselves. Customers often reference the complexity of ERP and CRM implementations by jokingly wish they had an “easy button” ala the famous Staples commercials. So, why not an easy button for D365? Powered by a Flic smart button, I decided to Flow a custom report to my email all with the press of a button. If you’d like to try this yourself, here’s a brief tutorial to follow. FYI – My Flic is connected to the web through the Flic app on my phone, and not through the new Flic Hub. I couldn’t justify the price for the purpose of this experiment, but certainly if you’re thinking of a more robust solution the hub might be the way to go.
Step 1 – Start a new Flow
There are some great templates but to prove how easy it is I’m starting from scratch. For this demo especially I’ll walk through each step since you might want to tailor it to fit your needs. Simply select “Create from blank” and search for Flic as your trigger for this new Flow.
Step 2 – Determine what details from D365 should be in your report
There’s a lot of info in Dynamics that you can pull from, but I want to provide an easy filter for that data. To do that I’m adding this step to help control how much we’ll retrieve for this report. Select the “Get past time” step and decide the time interval for your report.
Step 3 – Prepare the data for sending
Because the view doesn’t send well in email format, I’ve converted the list into an HTML table with this function.
Step 4 – Format a nice email and send it on it’s way