Since it's launch in 2016, Microsoft Flow has been helping businesses automate menial tasks, in a simple way. In our first Lancom TV episode, I chat with Imran Sadiq, our Technical Director, to discuss, what is Microsoft Flow?
Video Transcription
Hello, everyone, and welcome to our very first video series, which we are now calling "From Imran's Desk."
I'm sitting here today with Imran, our Technical Director from Lancom Technology. And we're going to explore a little bit of what's going on in his world and at Lancom. Before pass it on to Imran, it's probably worth that I introduce myself.
My name is Priscila Bernardes. I'm a Customer Experience Manager for Lancom Technology.
Now enough about me. Let's talk to Imran. And before we get started, Imran, first, thank you so much for coming here today.
Thanks for having me.
How about you talk to us a little bit about yourself, how long you have been with the company, what your role is at Lancom Technology?
So my name is Imran Sadiq and the current title is Technical Director at Lancom, been with the company for almost 13 years, so a very long time.
Wow, long time.
Yeah. I started off as a graduate engineer at Lancom when we were quite small, only four or five of us. So I've seen the company grow over the years and proud to be where it is and really, really, really happy to have such a great team around us.
For today, what we thought we would do is to pick a topic and sort of grab Imran's ideas and perceptions behind that topic. Now the topic of the day is Microsoft Flow and I know that probably some of you are just like me and wondering, "What is it?" Right, so how about we start with the key question, Imran.
So Microsoft Flow is actually a part of a bigger suite of technologies from Microsoft. It's part of the Office 365 technologies that Microsoft has been bringing out. It is based in the cloud as you would imagine with all the new technologies that are coming out. It essentially is a workflow engine running out of the cloud. So it's very similar to Zapier, if you have used it or heard about it. But what it is is actually focused a lot more around the Microsoft technologies, so the Microsoft products like Email, Calendar, OneDrive, SharePoint. All those combined together work really seamlessly with Microsoft Flow itself. So Microsoft has designed that to work with those technologies and make it really easy for end users to create workflows which can sync data between different products. It can pick up information from one, send it to another product itself. It can get notifications for you. It can do filtering. All those kind of things that you can imagine between those technologies it allows you to do that in a very easy and simple way. So you don't need very highly technical knowledge.
Definitely. I think yeah, you should try it because next time when you come to me that you wanted to get something done...
Definitely. I think yeah, you should try it because next time when you come to me that you wanted to get something done...
You'd just tell me to do it myself.
I'll be handing you out like, "Here you go,"
Right. So we have established that Microsoft Flow, essentially long story short and for non-technical people like me, is a workflow machine that has been designed by Microsoft, integrates really well with their own products which is your traditional Word, Excel, PowerPoint, your emails, but also can integrate with other third-party products out there, if I am hearing correctly?
Definitely. I mean things like Twitter, Facebook, Slack, Twilio, all those things, it can actually integrate with all those third-party products.
Fantastic.
So all of your data and applications that you have in your business which are not very smart at the moment you could just apply Microsoft Flow into it and it pretty much opens up a whole wide world for all those products.
Now that we hopefully understand what Microsoft Flow is I am feeling a lot more informed already. I feel like I can go back to my desk and try and do some flows of my own.
Well, some of the very basic examples that are available is, for example, if you want to be notified on your mobile, for example, if you want to get a text message sent or if you want an alert pop-up on your screen, if your boss sends an email or if you have a some very important people that you are expecting some emails to come from and you don't want that to go to just your normal plunder of emails, you want that to be notified, a pop-up on your screen, so you can do that very easily with that.
Wow. So I could set up a flow that tells me, "Send me an email whenever my boss... Send me a text message whenever my boss emails me?"
Yeah, definitely,
Interesting
And you can actually pop-up on there. You can customize it to say different things.
Sure
And other examples are if you have SharePoint you're using and if someone adds a new document into SharePoint library, your list, you can have a customized template email sent to different people saying, "Hey, we have uploaded this document. Please action these things." Or you can get notified yourself. You can do things like have your attachment for your Outlook.com email address to be copied over to OneDrive, so you know you have a list of all attachments you would ever had in a cloud drive.
Wow, that would be fantastic.
That would be very cool.
So if I get photos, if I get documents, I could just write a flow that says anything that gets attached to your Outlook.com, which is a Microsoft product in case you haven't guessed, please send it to my OneDrive.
Yeah, Exactly.
But I'm sure you would have played around with Microsoft Flows at Lancom, I'm assuming.
Yeah, definitely,
So talk to us a little bit about it. How did you use Microsoft Flow for Lancom Technology? What were we able to achieve by applying Microsoft Flow to our own company?
With Microsoft Flow we were able to install a data gateway product on our SQL Server. That pretty much allows us to expose those data into Microsoft Flow where you can quickly go and drag and drop all the tables and data that you would want and create a very nicely looking template, HTML template, email, which then goes on to different people based on what rules that we set up for that data. And that's been really, really cool and has solved one of the main business problems that we had where we wanted to notify the engineers when they haven't corrected their time at risk, for example.
Right.
And I can see a big future in that. I'm sure we'll be trading a lot more rules and a lot more email templates which will go out to our engineers as well as other people around the company.
So what I'm hearing here is that, what we have been able to do in again trying to bring it to the non-technical world is that, we got data that we had seen on our line of business applications which we explained what that means before and that was mainly around we work with time sheets.
Yeah.
And we were able to write a flow that looks for when information hasn't been correctly put into our time sheets and notifies that person that initially into their time to say "Hey, you may have missed adding something in here. Could you please correct yourself?"
Yeah, exactly right. I mean...
And all automatically?
Yeah, all automatically. Rather than someone going through all those time sheets and correcting them we pretty much highlight that to the engineer as soon as they made the change and it lets them actually correct it on the fly rather than a manager going through all of them at the end of the month and spending hours and hours doing.
Yeah. That would be fantastic for so many people out there, I'm sure. How long did it take us to set it up?
It is hours rather than weeks and days I mean obviously you still need to come up with the business logic and what you would like to do with it. But in terms of setting it up in Microsoft Flow, if you're just talking about Microsoft Flow itself, that is hours pretty much where you just drag and drop things that you would like to do, add conditions, add filtering and, yeah, it does it straight away for you.
Right. So we talk about the benefits. We talk about time, how long it takes us to be able to get the solution we wanted. Now how about we talk about money?
Pay as you go. At the moment and it's very, very economical compared to where you have to actually buy a product and pay a set amount every month. It's just pretty much pay what you consume.
I have got one last question and I promise we are about done. There's always upsides, downsides, pros and cons. So what would be the downside? Is there anything that we should be aware of when we're trying to go on and implement Microsoft Flows or when we're trying to come to an IT company and ask them to help us with Microsoft Flows? What should we know?
Well, like any of the technology, with Microsoft is it just throwing everything at the wall and see what sticks. So Microsoft Flow is one of those things which is actually a mature technology now and they are actually improving on it. So there are still some things which are missing. For example, if you are actually trying to utilize your on-premise data you still need to make some changes in terms of how you get that and might have to add some views or introduce some more things within your database to actually be exposed to flow and make full use of it. There isn't any large downsides but it is the evolving technology as we all know, the cloud, and I'm sure it will improve over time.
For today, that's us. Thank you so much, Imran, once again.
Thanks for having me.
And I look forward to chatting to you soon.
Awesome. Sounds good.
Thank you.