SharePoint Workflows:
3 flows to automate SharePoint lists
SharePoint is ideal for bringing your digital workplace to life.
With its features, you can manage your company's documents, communication and services conveniently and flexibly.
But think of the benefits you could still gain by automating these activities.
Find out more in our article!
What will you find in this article
SharePoint and Power Automate:
How and why to integrate them
SharePoint and Power Automate are among the main tools in Microsoft 365.
The former was developed to enable companies to build their digital work environment flexibly and intuitively.
Users can use SharePoint to:
- create dynamic libraries with shared files and documents;
- write and publish targeted news posts and newsletters;
- give users quick access to corporate services and resources;
- build sites and pages dedicated to individual departments, dislocated locations, events and special initiatives.
The second, on the other hand, aims to simplify the automation of business processes.
This means giving all people, more or less skilled in programming, the ability to quickly create automations capable of:
- send notification messages whenever a specific event happens;
- archive certain attachments without the user even having to open the emails;
- manage the approval of new content created in a specific library;
- etc.
If you are wondering what and how many opportunities there are to be had by combining these two tools, don't rely on your imagination.
Read the next chapters.
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The points of contact between SharePoint and Power Automate
The first topic to cover in order to understand how to integrate SharePoint and Power Automate concerns the touch points between the two platforms.
By "touch points," we mean the different types of elements to which a workflow can be tied.
In our case, most of the automations bind to SharePoint lists.
The reason for this is very simple and lies in the fact that SharePoint is the manager for corporate content, which is always created, published, shared and archived through its lists and document collections.
Power Automate then connects to the operations center of your digital workplace.
Its workflows tie into SharePoint lists, and it is the dynamics of those lists that constitute the events called "Triggers," which initiate the series of tasks that automate performs.
For SharePoint, there are +10 different Triggers. Below, we list some of the main ones:
- Inserting a file or item into a list or library.
- Editing files or items in a list or library.
- Deleting a file or item from a list or library.
Each of these Triggers can tie into different automations, such as sending custom notifications via Outlook or Teams, or creating a dynamic report with Power BI.
The possibilities are numerous, and we recommend you explore the "Templates" section of Power Automate.
Here you can in fact view the catalogue of pre-configured flows to tie into Microsoft 365 tools, as well as third-party apps.
If you filter by SharePoint, you can discover the most commonly used, ready-to-use automations for its lists and libraries.
As we get to this point, we want to emphasize that it is possible to build workflows that see SharePoint as a stop or even final destination on their journey.
In this case, the Trigger will be external to the platform.
Let us clarify with an example.
With Power Automate, you could build a flow capable of starting with the arrival of emails from a specific sender.
If this were to happen, your flow could perform the Action of saving the attachments of these emails in the SharePoint library that you share with your team or department.
In this way, your corporate archives could be scheduled to update in real-time and notify users with access to the library of the addition of a new document.
That would be convenient, wouldn't it?
Think of the amount of time you could save if secondary manual tasks were handled by your own digital work environment.
You could decrease the chances of making mistakes in managing business materials and information, and in return gain the focus you need to tackle the more strategic tasks of your job.
But before we paint you a picture free of imperfections, let's move on to the second basic topic of understanding how the integration between SharePoint and Power Automate works.
Let's talk about its limitations - and possible solutions to get around them.
The limits of integration between SharePoint and Power Automate
Power Automate makes it possible to build workflows in low-code mode.
This means that even users with little programming knowledge can automate their own and their company's tasks without having to resort to crude or underperforming solutions.
However, there are limitations in the functionality of tools designed to be precise and, at the same time, affordable. And Power Automate is no exception.
For example, workflows have an expiration of 30 days, beginning their own countdown the moment they start.
This limitation should be considered especially for automating processes such as approvals, which are often carried out by relatively long, multi-level structured flows.
If users were to be delayed in responding to the approval request, the flow would likely fail to conclude in time. The result would be suspension of the stream itself.
Unfortunately, should you find yourself in this situation, be aware that you will be forced to manually repeat the entire procedure.
To avoid this inconvenience, we recommend a simple and intuitive solution: divide your more complex streams into shorter, concatenated units.
This way, you can focus each flow on a specific group of approving users and thus avoid having your automations waste your time instead of helping you save it.
Another limitation is related to the unidirectionality of workflows.
In other words, you can tie one element of a platform to several automation flows, but not the other way around.
In fact, each flow you configure within Power Automate can only be linked to one element of a single platform. For example, you cannot tie an automation to different lists and libraries.
The problem then remains the amount of time you would have to spend building the same flow from scratch so that you can apply the same automation to the multiple repositories you and your team work on.
But even in this case, we have a solution to offer you.
Although it is impossible to eliminate the unidirectionality of automations, you can copy or export your custom flows.
To do this, simply enter the Power Automate interface, select the flow you want with the right mouse button, and click on:
- "Export" to download its contents as a .zip file and import it into other areas.
- "Save as" to create a clone within Power Automate.
At that point, you only need to enter the references to the new list or library to be associated with the cloned stream and... you're done!
However, if you only need to apply the same automation to a couple of collections in SharePoint, we can point you to an alternative solution to the one just seen.
In fact, you can go to each of your lists and click on "Automate" in the upper right-hand corner. In doing so, you can manually apply one or more of your workflows to the files in the entire collection.
Now, we can begin to explore in more detail the main types of automation that combine SharePoint Online and Microsoft 365's Power Automate.
We present the 3 most popular and used by companies.