Connect external services to SharePoint using Microsoft Flow

Connecting external services to SharePoint specially the ones that are not part of Microsoft ecosystem was incredibly hard but this is about to change with Microsoft Flow.

Microsoft Flow is an event-automation service developed to create automated workflows between your favourite apps and services to get notifications, synchronize files, collect data, and more.

SharePoint 2016 was officially announced last week and it will include a full integration of Microsoft Flow but you don’t need to wait to put your hands in the new version, if you have SharePoint online you can start using it today.

At the moment I'm writing this article Microsoft Flow it’s still in Preview, and you will need to register with your Office 365 account.

Even though it supports a variety of services in this article I’ll just use Twitter and SharePoint.

1. To register open the Microsoft Flow site and click in the Sign up free
2. While your account is being created open one of your SharePoint site collections and create a custom list to save the tweets.
   Let’s use the column Title to save the tweet and create a new column to save the Author. 
   
3. Open Microsoft Flow, the option will appear in the waffle icon in the Office 365 suite bar
4. In Microsoft Flow click My Flows and then click Create new flow
5. Let’s start with Twitter, this will execute an action every time that a tweeter appears and matches a certain condition. Once you select it you will need to Sign in into your Twitter account 
   
6. Write your query, in this case all the tweets with the hash tag #handsonsharepoint will be processed
7. Click in the plus icon to

   add an action

   
8. Select SharePoint Online – Create Item and Sign in into SharePoint online
9. In the Site url field write the url of the site where you've created the list
10. All the lists from the site will populate the List name field, select the one you've created to save the tweets
11. In the Title field select the the Tweet text
12. In the Author field select the Tweeted by
13. Provide a name to the Flow and press

    Create Flow

    
14. The Flow will start running immediately and you have the option to share it in the Microsoft Flow gallery
15. To test your Flow make a tweet that match your query
    
16. After a few minutes it will appear in the list
    

Let me know in the comments section what are your thoughts about Microsoft Flow, will this be useful to automate events in your SharePoint?