At the end of October Microsoft announced that its end user process automation product, Flow, had gone into “general availability.” Microsoft Flow is a cloud-based service that makes it simple to automate common tasks and business processes across your applications and services, such as Office 365, Slack, Dropbox, SalesForce.com, Dynamics 365 and others. Using Flow, you can write a workflow to automate actions between different services, add steps, conditions and so on. Several pre-defined templates can help you get started using Flow.

From a project management tool perspective, Flow offers several actions for automating Project Online.

Some of the triggers included for Project Online can take place during these points:

When a new project, resource or tasks is created; and
When a project is published.

Likewise, some of the actions included for Project Online are:

During project check-in and publishing;
During checkout;
While creating a new project, resource or task; and
While listing projects or tasks.

To learn more about how to work with Microsoft Flow, watch the MPUG webinar, “Automating Project Online with Microsoft Flow and Power Apps,” available on-demand.

Putting Flow into Action

In this article, I share a simple scenario of how you can set up a quick Flow to add a task to be added to Wunderlist (a personal task management app) for scheduling a project kick-off meeting whenever a project is created in Project Online.

To begin, sign-in (or Sign-up), into Flow and click on Create from Blank.

In the search bar, type Project and you will see the list of actions you can do with Project.

Select an option and you’ll be prompted to sign into Project Online. Once you sign in, you’ll be prompted for the URL of the Project Web Access (PWA) site.

Enter the URL and then click on the + icon to add the next action (or condition).

The next step is to add the action, create a task in Wunderlist, from the list, and then sign into Wunderlist.

You’ll be presented with options for configuration of how you want to create the file.

You can use data from the previous step as dynamic variables in the next step. This is powerful because you can add dynamic data between different actions and thereby different apps.

As you can see, I’ve added some text for my task and then the variable project name. You can also add additional options to the task, as below.

Once you configure the options, give a name for your Flow and click Create Flow.

Testing Your Flow

To test, let’s create a project in Project Online (note the project name), as below.

Now when I go check in my Wunderlist account, I see that the task has been created, as designed.

Cool, isn’t it? The possibilities are limitless. Now you can integrate with BOX, Dropbox and many other services.

A version of this article originally appeared on “Think EPM,” here.

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Written by Prasanna Adavi

Prasanna Adavi (Project MVP, PMP, MCTS, MCITP, MCT) is a Senior Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Consultant. specializing in helping organizations meet their business needs in the areas of Project Management and Portfolio Management. He is a regular presenter at various Project Server, EPM and SharePoint events across the country, and regularly blogs. He also runs a podcast dedicated to MS Project and Project Server. He has been awarded the MVP (Most Valuable Professional) award by Microsoft since 2014, for his continued contributions to Microsoft Project Community. Connect with him on Twitter or LinkedIn.

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