Now that we have transitioned into a brave new world of Power Platform from the old world XRM , it obviously becomes imperative to understand the complete toolset at our disposal in great detail.
One of the most important and underestimated ( IMHO) tool in the Power Platform toolbox is Microsoft Flow. Flow is touted as one of the three pillars of the Power Platform – and it is hard to ignore the amount of power the tool brings to the table.
However when talking to enterprise customers that have a sophisticated IT landscape that underpins their business , there are quite a few apprehensions (rightly so) about a technology that is supposed to be at the disposal of “citizen developers”, and the mayhem it can potentially cause without the presence of appropriate governance rules.
So as part of this blog (or a blog series , if I get around to creating a series out of it) , I will try and answer some of the common questions / challenges (in a Q&A format) we can come across when trying to land this piece of technology in an enterprise environment.
Can I group / isolate / segregate and separate various flows being created in my organisation ?
The subscription for Microsoft Flow comes with a separate administrator interface i.e. https://admin.flow.microsoft.com/ , which is the admin center for Flow.
This admin center allows administrators to create and manage what is called environments for Flow. These environments provide an isolation boundary for all resources. Hence providing the capability to create isolation between apps and flows . Additionally DLP (data loss prevention) policies can be applied to individual environments – which prevents connectors talking to each other , that is if you do not want them to talk to each other. As an example if you do not want D365 online and Twitter in the same flow – you could create a DLP policy that would prevent that.
Can I mimic a typical ALM scenario with dev , test and prod instances to gain more control over the release cycle of Flows being created ?
Using the concept of environments as explained above – we can mimic such a scenario.
As we can see above – the default environment has been renamed to Dev and additional non-default environments have been created to mimic test and prod. The Dev environment can be used by the users to experiment and create new flows. Whereas the Test and Prod environments can be used in more controlled manner with additional policy controls being applied , and limited publishing right given to the users. This will prevent users pushing changes to test or prod environments without going through the rigor of a change control process , but having flexibility of being able to experiment in the Dev environment at the same time.
This set-up can now be used to separate connections to SOX and non-SOX systems . Any SOX systems can be connected to within the test or Prod environments whereas any non-SOX systems can be connected to in the default / dev environments.
Are there any tools available that can be used to aid the maintenance of the flows being created in a various environments ?
Other than the standard powershell cmdlets , Microsoft has introduced a number of native flow management connectors that can be used to carry our various maintenance activities. A quick search for the templates results in the list as below :
If we look at one specific template as an example :
It provides a list of new PowerApps, flows and connectors that have been introduced into the tenant within a configurable window, the list of components is then collated and emailed to a configured recipient .
This could potentially be further extended to add flow approvals , which enable Admin to approve or reject flows , and the ones rejected can be deleted after a specific time period , post notifying the original creator.
Can we get more visibility and insight into how Flow is being used by the users within the Organisation ?
In order to satisfy this requirement Microsoft has released Microsoft Flow Admin Analytics based on customer feedback . This admin interface provides a detailed brekadown of the usage of Flow , with the help of various prebuilt Power BI reports, as explained in the link :
https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/admin-analytics/
Power Platform Adventures 