The company also announced a public preview of PowerApps, a new system for publishing custom business applications. IFTTT, short for “If This Then That”, is a popular Web service that uses configurable templates, or “recipes”, to trigger a series of interactions between other Web and software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications for users, typically with a single action, or in an automated fashion. These apps can run on the web and on mobile (through the PowerApps apps for iOS and Android).
Advertisement
The concept for flows was first revealed last November as a feature for PowerApps users called Logic flows, but the only third-party integration was with Twitter and primarily for commands related to Microsoft products. Another would be automatically copying certain files from OneDrive over to a team’s SharePoint site. It’s a preview service that also connects services together. At the very least, PowerApps should be of interest to Access-reliant organizations because it could do what that application does better, even if Microsoft doesn’t choose to replace it wholesale.
Microsoft on Friday launched Flow, an IFTTT (If This Then That) competitor primarily marketed to enterprises as a way to improve business workflows through automation.
IFTTT is getting some competition from Microsoft.
Microsoft made Flow to do just that, allowing you to connect apps and services and automate portions of your workflow, easing the need to check each thing every minute to make sure you didn’t miss anything new.
PowerApps Microsoft first unveiled PowerApps late past year, but they were at the private preview stage back then.
There are so many different apps, programs and services we use on a daily basis, or even a minute-by-minute basis. Data being pulled will come from sources such as Dropbox, Dynamics CRM, Google Drive, OneDrive, Salesforce, SharePoint Online, Twitter, and more.
Applications built using PowerApps will run in a browser. Microsoft’s announcement explained that “Apps respect data source permissions at all times, so be assured that only authorized users can access data from any app you share”.
Advertisement
For those looking for PowerApps documentation, Microsoft seems to be building it out gradually at this page.
