Business Automation with Office365 Flow
Microsoft Flow is a Microsoft Office365 product that allow members of your organisation to create and automate workflows across multiple applications. These automated workflows are called “Flows”.
Flows can be created from scratch through a simplistic drag and drop interface without the need to know how to write code. You can also choose from hundreds of templates to get you started creating your own Flow logic.
Flows are most commonly used to trigger notifications or automate tasks your employees may be carrying out manually. For example, if an email was received in the accounts team shared mailbox with the subject containing “Purchase Order” you might have a flow store the email and attachments directly into a SharePoint folder then email a notification to the sales manager.
Amongst the thousands of possibilities, here is some examples of automation using Flow:
- Request Manager Approval on Document
- Get mobile push notification when receive email from VIP
- Get daily weather reports delivered to email and phone
- Track Facebook wall messages in an Excel Sheet or SharePoint List
- Save Comments on Instagram posts to Excel Sheet or SharePoint List
In this blog article we will demonstrate how to harvest all tweets from Twitter that contain a certain #HashTag.
At Valto we work on many projects with Marketing and Communication departments from a wide range of organisations. A common issue we come across is these departments having a lot of “manual” processes for gathering data about what their customers are saying about them on social media platforms such as Twitter, Facebook and Linkedin.
Knowing what customers are saying about your organisation in a public platform is vital for several reasons. It will let you know what your customers are happy about, but more likely they will make known what they are unhappy about. The most popular platform for sharing feedback about a good/bad experience of a business is Twitter.
This article will show you how you can harvest all tweets that contain keywords or # related to your organisation and then store them inside a SharePoint Online list.
- Create a list inside your SharePoint Online intranet.
- Create the following fields:
- Click on the “Flow” tab on the ribbon and select “Create Flow”
- On the template selection pane on the right-hand side, scroll down to “Save tweets that include a specific hashtag to a SharePoint list”
- You will need to make sure Flow is connected to your SharePoint site and twitter account. Then click continue.
- You will then see the flow editing screen. First enter the search text you want to use to find tweets you wish to Harvest. In this example we have chosen to find any tweets that contain the hashtag “#Valto”. This will work for any word with or without a hashtag.
- Next select the content that will populate each field as shown below:
- Click Save Flow at the bottom of the screen then Done at the top of the screen. This will have now published your Flow.
- Now from any twitter account post a tweet containing you chosen search word for example “#Valto”
- Go back to your SharePoint list and within a few minutes you will see the post appear.
This process could be expanded to include notifications to members of your organisation, so they can react quickly to tweets containing explicit or negative wording for example.
There are many other twitter attributes of the tweets we have harvested we could also include in our SharePoint list for analysis afterwards such as:
- How many tweets that user has favourite previously
- How many people the user followers
- How many friends the user has on twitter
- What native language the user speaks
- How many tweets that user has made in the past
All this information can start building a picture of the demographic of the users that has tweeted. For example, using this in analysis you could determine if this tweet is in fact from a genuine user account or perhaps it is a spoof account from a competitor.
If you have any business processes that you feel could be streamlined or made completely automated, please get in touch.
Author
 | Dougie Wood SharePoint Specialist |
| T: 03335 779 009 E: [email protected] W: https://valto.co.uk | |
| 10 Watergate Row, Chester. CH1 2LD |
POWERAPPS EXCEL V2
