Microsoft Flow Introduction in Office 365

Introduction
This article will help you to understand Microsoft Flow and its uses to everyone. Microsoft Flow is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more.

Microsoft Flow is cloud-based software that allows employees to create and automate workflows and tasks across multiple applications and services without help from developers. Automated workflows are called flows.
What is Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft Flow is an online workflow service that automates actions across the most common apps and services. When you sign up, you can connect to more than 220 services, and can manage data either in the cloud or in on-premises sources like SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server. The list of applications you can use with Microsoft Flow grows constantly.

There are three different pricing models for Flow; Free, Plan 1, Plan 2. With the Flow Free plan you can create an unlimited number of workflows, but are limited to 750 runs per month with check-ins happening every 15 minutes. Flow Plan 1 and 2 offer more runs per month and more frequent check-ins for the workflows. 

What does Office 365 flow do in SharePoint?

Microsoft Flow [MS Flow] is a powerful tool which lets you sit back and relax while It does things for you in the background in Office 365/ Dynamics 365. In layman terms, Microsoft Flow is a set of rules that lets various apps communicate with each other automatically.

However, it is not just about the static content. Any business, small or large, depends on business processes.

These business processes could range from simple document or form approvals (think vacation request forms) to complicated processes, spanning multiple systems and applications (think hiring/onboarding business process or purchase orders/financial transactions).Historically, if you wanted to create a workflow in SharePoint, you had to either rely on workarounds (for simple workflows), SharePoint Designer or 3rd party tools. However, there is a new kid on the block you need to pay attention to and that is Microsoft Flow.

SharePoint

SharePoint helps organizations share and collaborate with colleagues, partners, and customers. You can connect to SharePoint Online or to an on-premises SharePoint 2013 or 2016 farm using the On-Premises Data Gateway to manage documents and list items.

Image source: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_sharepointonline/sharepoint/

Image source: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_sharepointonline/sharepoint/

Image source: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/shared_sharepointonline/sharepoint/

This articles I high level about Microsoft flow and we will see the uses of Microsoft flow within SharePoint services and how to use the templates in our next article.