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Microsoft Flow

Add Office 365 group members using Microsoft Flow

This may seem trivial, but if you want to create a Flow, that is parameterized, where a name of a group and list of members is passed as the request parameters then it turns out it is not that straightforward. 

In Microsoft Flow there is a set of actions, that allow to work with Office 365 Groups. There is also one dedicated to adding new members (only “Members”. There is no way currently to add “Owners”).

Nintex Document Generation

How To: use Nintex Mobile signature in Document Generation

I recently was asked a question: how can I use the signature from the Nintex Mobile inside a document being generated by the Generate Document action? Unfortunately this is not yet feasible only using Nintex products. This is because Nintex Workflow for Office 365 is not handling correctly the binary data (it loses null bits) so what I proposed was to use Microsoft Flow.

InfoPath loves Microsoft Flow

How to: Move/ copy InfoPath attachments in SharePoint Online

Although it has been repeatedly said that the history of InfoPath is over, for many companies still building workflows’ forms using InfoPath is as obvious as using Excel. However, when doing that in Office 365 and SharePoint Online the product’s boundaries are really visible and are becoming a real pain. 

I’ve been struggling some time ago with an issue related to the workflow’s instance size (here), what was directly related to the size of the InfoPath form together with attached files. The obvious solution I was thinking then was moving those attachments away from the form, into a dedicated SharePoint library, but I wasn’t able to do that easily mainly because of the algorithm that is used in InfoPath to handle file attachments.

Microsoft Flow

Embed images in e-mail’s body using Microsoft Flow

I was working on my newsletter’s solution, aimed to automatically send prepared messages hosted in my SharePoint. Naturally, newsletters often contain images. Lots of them frankly speaking. The most straightforward approach was to insert them as a URL to the physical file stored in SharePoint (described here).  However, in that approach, if a recipient has no access to the site, where the file is hosted or is not yet logged in, the images won’t show up.

How to: Import data from XLSX file into SharePoint Online using Nintex

In Nintex 2010, 2013 and 2016 for SharePoint (Standard version even) on-premise of course, there was a possibility to use Excel Services to query and work with the xlsx and xls files’ data. However, in Sharepoint Online there is no such powerful mechanism (well, there are Excel Services available via REST API, but it doesn’t provide that much functionality). Moreover Nintex products for SharePoint Online (neither Nintex Workflow Cloud nor Nintex for Office 365) don’t have any “OOTB” actions that would fill that gap. So in the end, there is no straightforward way to achieve it. So how can I import (and preferably automate it) data from XLSX file into SharePoint?

The most common workaround is to convert the xlsx file into a plain, csv file and then to work with the data from the file using collections (I will write about it in second post).

Recently I have realized, that there is a set of Excel actions in Microsoft Flow! All of us, who has SharePoint Online, has also a free version of Flow available.