Microsoft Flow is a feature on Office 365 Business Platform that comes standard with an Office 365 subscription. The cloud solution allows businesses to leverage workflows to automate repetitive processes. Imagine getting a notification when your boss emails you or automating email subscriptions from MailChimp. All of these are possible—without complex coding—with Microsoft Flow.
Microsoft provides “templates” or ready-to-go software plug-ins that can handle a wide variety of tasks, both from Microsoft themselves and from users around the world. But with so many options, it can be overwhelming to pinpoint exactly which templates you need. Below we’ve listed three possible areas that Microsoft Flow can help improve your business.
1. Automate Your HR Processes
Your human resources department is always a good candidate for process automation. Microsoft offers eleven out of the box features to integrate across your SharePoint, Outlook, and more. In the new hire process, you can use a Microsoft Flow template to be notified when a document is signed or to automatically create a prospective employee profile in SharePoint. For day-to-day operations, there’s flows to both request leave and mark yourself out of office.
2. Boost Your Marketing Presence
One of the great features of Microsoft Flow is the number of non-Microsoft platforms it integrates with. For marketers needing to keep on top of their brand on social media, Flow provides a few options. You can keep a running spreadsheet of all mentions of your brand on Twitter, automate content posting through Buffer and RSS feeds, and even get a daily rundown of your industry’s latest moves. It even integrates with Mailchimp to help grow your newsletter subscribers and can track mentions of a specific hashtag. You can even connect Instagram to Pinterest or Twitter, helping cross-post your content on more channels.
3. Improve Software Development Delivery
Although Microsoft Flow doesn’t require much coding, it can help your coders track their tasks and other software development tasks. Your users and clients can submit bug notifications with the click of a button. You can also use flow to automate task management by syncing your work tasks with Wunderlist, a personal task tracking tool, and even receive a daily summary. Microsoft Flow even integrates with GitHub and Power BI to monitor data trends.
These are just a few ways that Microsoft Flow can help you automate your business processes without the use of any code. However, there are hundreds of other flows created and made available for free by designers all over the world, reviewed and approved by Microsoft engineers, and even more that are possible with the help of a Microsoft consulting firm like eSoftware.
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