2021 - break and thrive

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Hello, you.

This is a very personal post.

2020 was tough on everybody, and it looks like 2021 may eventually bring a little bit of reprieve. I only have a modest and simple wish:

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For an immediate, urgent and heavy family matter, I must take a really significant break to try and ensure me and my family survives 2021. For our young family, this is a time of immense personal pain and loss.

  • I must take a break to be with my family — at least until April, but may be many more months. There’s no hurrying this, I want to take a much time as we need.

  • My consulting clients are aware of what’s happening and are so supportive. I have some reduced work with them that I will fulfill.

  • Flow Studio / Power Studio will continue, in the short time there’s a bunch of additional updates in the preview dev build dev.flowstudio.app that needs to be validated and pushed over into production.

  • Power Clarity will continue, but in a much, much slower pace.

  • My writings on the blog or YouTube will be random. There are mornings when I can muster some energy to write, in code or in blogs. If you enjoy them and want to see more, you REALLY have to tell me because I need (and otherwise lack) energy to produce them.

  • I’m unlikely to respond to questions on Twitter or LinkedIn

What can you do for us?

  • If you use Power Automate - I would really appreciate it if you would have a look at powerstudio.app, either for yourself or tell people about it. If it’s helpful to you, consider subscribe to it. If it doesn’t help you - let me know what might push you over the line to be a fan.

  • If you are already one of our 5400+ users or fans of Power Studio and wants to see the future evolved version - check out powerclarity.app

  • If you like Power Apps - you really should check out my GamePad PCF component and tell people about it.

  • I’m keeping my circumstances personal, but a generic statements that has a time component like hope you’ll get through it quickly, or hope you recover soon can miss the mark because I want as much time as we can to still have together. A nicer thing to say is probably please survive as long as you can.

  • Please put it in your calendar to check in on me every month from now, may be beginning of March, or beginning of April. Future me probably need someone to check in on me.

  • Years in the future, when the pandemic is over, invite me to your home for a meal.

How are you feeling?

We are free falling. There’s no parachute. When we hit the ground, at least one of us won’t survive, but we may all fall apart. We are already falling apart.

Power Studio Update April 2020

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I wanted to share our most recent newsletter for Power Studio (previous Flow Studio) and Power Clarity.

It was supposed to be monthly, but everything’s gone crazy, so now it is irregular.

Power Studio Update April 2020

Irregular Newsletters

We hope everyone's staying safe, be kind and taking care of each other, this is an unprecedented time in our generation, and it'll take love and perseverance to get through this.

In Flow Studio Solutions (the company behind Power Studio and Power Clarity) - we've taken on a mix of side consulting in addition to the online products.  While the progress may seem a bit slower, it ensures we have the runway to keep continuing for the future to come.

Since our newsletters has unfortunately become irregular, this is a pretty long email, we have several months' catch up in one big read.

  • Too Many Emails?

  • YouTube channel on extreme Flow techniques

  • Inspirations from Power Platform product updates

  • Flow Studio becomes Power Studio

  • Power Clarity progress

  • We are further apart, but we are also closer than ever before


Too Many Emails?

Many of us are finding unique challenges working from home.  Emails and chat messages are replacing previous physical conversations.  Some of us are finding our inbox overflowing.

If you are feeling overwhelmed with emails, and if our particular email doesn't spark joy.  If you are not getting value from our email newsletters.  If the email is sent to your service account but you'd like to read it on your personal account instead.  If you've changed roles and no longer work with the Power Platform.  If any of these sounds like you...

It is our sincere hope that our newsletters will bring you joy.  And if we aren't doing that, please, feel free to let us know and unsubscribe (link at the bottom).  Take care of yourselves first - you can always find us and re-subscribe later, if you like.

Unsubscribe (this link doesn’t work here on my blog)

YouTube channel on Flow mastery techniques

Over the last few months we've published several advanced flow techniques on our ever growing YouTube channel.

Learn techniques with Select

Many of these techniques combines advanced concepts such as Select, Filter Array and advanced expressions

Inspirations from Power Platform product updates

There are several major updates to the Power Platform in the 2019 Release 2 and the upcoming 2020 Release 1.  Some of these features have already been released in preview or made it to general availability.

We wanted to point to a few big items, but also share some inspirations about the type of applications we can now build with these updates - which were difficult to build in 2019

  • Power Apps - instrumentation

  • Power Apps - Microsoft Teams app integration

  • Power Apps - external users

  • Flow - Adaptive Card improvements

  • Flow - Assign approvals to O365 Group (roadmap)

Inspiration 1

Power Apps instrumentation for monitoring and governance.  When we add a simple instrumentation key to application insights - we can now easy track users as they use business critical applications.  This provides a far easier way for makers to build usage dashboards, far more accessible than previous methods of reading Office 365 Audit Logs (which maker may not have access to).  We also have far better detail that we can add to our instrumentation logging messages.

Inspiration 2

Power Apps external users support now allows any external users to use Power Apps.  They would need their own license, or be assigned one through Azure AD.  An external invitation link can be generated via Power Automate, allowing any external users to request and be granted external access with the flow talking directly to MS Graph via Azure AD guest invite, as well as ensuring correct permissions are assigned to the datasource - CDS or SharePoint.  This is one of the most perfect scenarios for allowing users from a different tenant to instantly access existing Power Apps applications without switching logins.  The end user experience is seamless with simply a browser link.

Inspiration 3

Adaptive Card updates to Flow - particularly "Send Adaptive card to channel and wait for response" now allows the Microsoft Teams integrated FlowBot to send media rich adaptive cards - and wait for users to provide custom response - including complex form fields.
This superpower allows flow to contact a user on demand to request for additional details that may be missing in the original data source.  Either as form data completion, or within an advance approval scenario.  It can be run on demand mid-process to quickly request for additional details or decision making.  We predict this to be one of the hottest new flow patterns in 2020.  Best of all - this functionality can run great on the standard Office 365 license.

Flow Studio becomes Power Studio

There are several major updates since our last newsletter for Flow Studio.

  • We added monitoring for Power Apps in the freemium tier, and now we can quickly see all our Power Apps as well as Flows.  The list of apps shows the latest commit message.

  • Since we added Power Apps - we decided to rename Flow Studio to Power Studio.  This turned out to be really fortunate, since Microsoft Flow was renamed in November to Power Automate.
    Both Flow Studio and Power Studio links will work.

  • We added a developer build to test new features, if you are keen to see what's baking, here's a link to the test server for all the wonderous and dangerous new experiments.

  • We added a toolbar to make some of the common actions more visible.  We've realized through testing that many users don't realize we have a contextual menu where a lot of the hidden gems are hiding, so this is a way for us to begin to surface these functions.

  • We've given Export to Excel a major update - this was previously in preview and didn't work well (many of the columns were blank).  So finally we've fixed export to Excel.

  • We've also deployed our latest update for generating a Mermaid markdown for flows.  This is a special markdown for flow chart documentation usable in JIRA and Azure DevOps.  This can be exported to SVG, PNG or Mermaid markdown.  This feature remains in preview - please give us feedback.

  • We had two UX regression bugs with Save button missing in Edit JSON and Migrate plans new button not working, thanks to so many of you reaching out we had this fixed quick.

Try Power Studio

Power Clarity Progress Update

We began our work on Power Clarity in earnest over December 2019, and has hit several development milestones.  Our goal is to have all our Power Studio customers being able to sign up and trial Power Clarity.

Power Clarity is our turnkey, automated monitoring and governance solution for the Power Platform.  We took what we learnt from Power Studio, and ramp it up to do continuous scan of the entire company.  All our Power Platform environments, Power Apps, flows, connections, makers etc, and from that collected metadata, we return reports, tools and automated policies to help you manage and maintain your Power Platform assets mapped to the best practices in the community.

We are really excited to show you Power Clarity soon.

Grain Clarity of your Power Platform

We are further apart, but we are also closer than ever before

We were hoping to meet so many of you in person, but the current crisis has made us all separated from each other.

But in a way, we are probably closer than ever before.  So many of our user groups are now virtual, which means John would love to present at your user group, or if you'd like a call just to chat and catch up.  Let us know.

Catch us presenting at



Power Studio will always be a freemium product. So there will always be a free tier with access to see your existing Apps and Flows.  We hope you will leave us a comment about a feature that you would like to see in Power Studio.



Power Platform Governance with Power Clarity

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Clear the FOG - let there be Clarity

Clear the FOG - let there be Clarity

Some asked me recently how does my SaaS product Power Clarity work with Microsoft’s Center of Excellence kit.

We can look at this from two directions:

  • Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

  • Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity (running with CoE)

  • ALM with Power Clarity

Center of Excellence kit (CoE)

I’m a big fan of CoE built by Microsoft and the community. I love that Microsoft acknowledges there is a need for governance, and the community rises to build tools to help. CoE starter kit is a collection of resources that will be a template to create your own Center of Excellence kit.

Power Clarity is a turnkey solution - you grant your credentials, it starts scanning. You get dashboards, forms and reports and workflows. I want to stress that Power Clarity is an enhanced version of Flow Studio - something I’ve been building since 2018, so it was developed in parallel to CoE, there are similarities, which leads to how they can be used together.


Here’s a list of roadmap on our first year (2020).

Turnkey Governance with Power Clarity (running without CoE)

If you are a company using the power platform and has not developed or deployed CoE - then Power Clarity can be used as a turnkey starting point.

If you don’t know where to start, or how to build one, we will get you started quickly to help you uncover the platform.

If you don’t have a power governance solution, and need one in 15 minutes, we are your… service.

  • No install - we manage it and keep improving it.
    Power Clarity is a SaaS service so the constant improvements are baked into the subscription. (In my opinion, we aren’t very expensive either).

  • Add one or many concurrent scanning accounts

  • Use accounts that are not administrator accounts - Power Clarity can scan with or without admin permissions, or operating in mix mode between different environments. If you have environment admin - you can see everything. If you only has environment maker - you can still monitor assets that you own.

  • Power Clarity performs hourly scanning, because it’s an incremental scanner and very light on API access. We understand at high API throughput - both source and storage can get upset. Power Clarity incremental scanning of a tenant of 1000 (flows/apps) is typically less than 3 minutes.

  • Power Clarity does not require premium accounts

Enhanced Governance with Power Clarity

If you have CoE deployed and already has CDS entities - then Power Clarity can be used to greatly enhance that data collection exercise.

You no longer need to worry about ‘how the data is collected’, but can keep customizing your reporting and utilization of that data to drive your governance outcomes.
In fact, we give you more events, signals, and policy actions you can perform. We want you to have clarity.

  • Writes to Azure Storage Table and CDS Entities (use Power Clarity to collect data instead of CoE’s admin sync flows)

    (Note: CDS write requires the scanning account to have Premium license for CDS access)

  • Deep API reads into Flows - runs, run actions, run errors and remediation

  • Recall run metadata beyond 30 days

  • When events happen - you can get an email report, or get a webhook call so you can handle it yourself. Power Clarity provides complete tenant flow error reporting without try/catch pattern. Since it’s inception, Power Clarity is a Flow monitoring service as well as a Power Platform governance service.

  • Advanced detection of cross tenant resources

  • Advanced detection of flows utilizing premium licenses

  • Advanced count of flows utilizing API rate limits

  • White and black list filtering of resources (domains, URLs) and connectors

  • Clash detection of flows and DLP policies

  • Clash detection of flows using deprecated actions

Application Lifecycle Management with Power Clarity

Because Power Clarity maintains offline granted access, it can perform advanced active actions to the Power Platform on your behalf, actions that don’t currently have an connector.

  • Flow Studio’s migrate feature (which lets us copy, switch connections and deploy flows), can be invoked from Clarity API call

  • Call Power Platform management cmdlets via Power Clarity API.

  • Continuous backup of flow definitions and Power Apps snapshots

  • Power Clarity provides an advanced GraphQL view of the entire data set available within its stores.

  • Read and reports on managed and unmanaged resources in Solutions

  • History of changes across the entity tracking

See it for yourself

Send me an email john.liu at flowstudio.app to get started.

The Flow Studio journey - first lesson - seed money and salary

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I wanted to write a blog post because I don’t know, I guess you are a technical person that reads my blog, and you might be interested in my journey from a two decade consultant into a sole business owner building a product company.

It’s pretty exciting. Everyone should try this.

This blog post

I was talking to Elaine as she’s visiting Sydney and I was explaining a very critical lesson I’m in the middle of learning, now that my company “Flow Studio Solutions” is 3 months old.

I was also recently talking to Brett and Sandy who gave me a lot of insights into an early day of a founder. Brett asked me several questions and boy he’s a wizard how does he know that’s exactly what I have been doing the whole time.

And there is FIRST LESSON I’m rapidly learning.

When you decided to take part time or taking some time off and start doing your business, you have this tendency to think Oh, the business isn’t taking in enough income, so I’ll just not take a salary for this month. I’ll live off my savings in my personal account.

This is Brent’s wise words to me. Paraphrased

I modified those words into this trick - with the bank details added in.
Please do over. It’s a most simple trick.

  1. Make your business bank account. You should have this anyway, otherwise people can’t pay you.

  2. Transfer money from your savings that you intend to live on, into your business

  3. Give yourself a salary and sent that back to your personal savings every month (to pay your bills)

Now suddenly, you can claim expenses, tax deductions and have a clear idea how much money the business needs to continue paying you that salary.

Also, when you want to seek funding or grants - it is very clear to proof how much does the business need to operate, and how much existing seed money had already been injected into this business.

You can’t proof “oh here’s my savings account I need about $5000 a month” that isn’t your business, that’s your lavish/hermit lifestyle, nobody cares about that but you. But if you had your business sending you a $5000 salary, you can easily provide that as clear proof that’s the cost of the business, every month.

So, that is the first lesson.

Move your savings into your business, pay yourself a living salary, and work on your business, not in your business.

I’m grateful for Brent and Elaine for these conversations.

History

For the details which might make sense why there are different dates in the Flow Studio journey. He’s a rough timeline.

2018 April - Flow Studio the product started as a side project
2018 November - Started accepting Stripe subscriptions
2019 June - Until June, Flow Studio operated under a sole trader business registration in Australia
2019 July - incorporated Flow Studio Solutions - a product company that does a side consulting to build the product.
2019 October - first quarter. This update.

Presentations at the Digital Workplace Conference Australia 2019 I’m looking forward to

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It’s really exciting for me to be back at the Digital Workplace Conference again in 2019, this is one of the first major conferences that I was very fortunate to be able to present at, and I have always looked forward to attend, to learn and to give back and present the latest happenings in SharePoint, Office 365, Azure and now also Power Platform.

The Digital Workplace Conference will be on August 6-7 in Sydney.

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This year I’m presenting a topic (and sorry for the slightly concatenated topic name):

A quick introduction to Microsoft Flow, but rapidly takes audience deeper to see the possibilities of the types of solutions possible


There probably should be a line-break in there somewhere. You have to use your imagination for this title for that missing character, sorry!

Lets try that again!

An introduction to Microsoft Flow: Office 365 - Automated

This is an introduction session on Microsoft Flow, but my aim isn’t to show you a simple alert email. My aim is to explain that we have far transcended “Workflows”. It’s not just workflow. We are way beyond that - what we really have is a full Automation Engine. It is Office 365 - Automated.

Be very careful, writing Microsoft Flow is completely addictive.


The Sessions I want to see!

  • Become The Expert of You – Power Skills for Personal Development - Heather Newman

  • Trust-Based Corporate Culture: How to Kick Fear and Toxicity Out of the Workplace - Heather Newman

  • The Fruit Salad Formula for Implementing Ofice 365 - Debbie Ireland

  • Microsoft Teams Deep Dive – 29 Practical Tips and Tricks - Lee Stephens

  • Making Teams work without understanding Information Architecture - Alistair Pugin

  • A Zero-Hype Introduction to Artifical Intelligence and Machine Learning - Kilash Awati

  • Adding voice interaction to your apps - Brian Farnhill

  • Give your PowerApps and Flows some Vision, Language and Feeling - Rich Burdes

  • How to build a Project Hub with Hubsites and Sitedesign and Sitescripts - Knut Relbe-Moe

  • Success Factors in a Thriving Yammer Network - Rebecca Jackson

  • How to Govern PowerApps and Flow - Paul Culmsee

  • Governance & Adoption for Microsoft 365: Making the Marriage work - Megan Strant

But that’s not all

I’m at the conference both days and plan to hang around for the workshop day too. So if you have any questions on

  • Microsoft Flow, PowerApps, Power Platform Governance solutions

  • Azure LogicApps, Azure Functions

  • SharePoint, PnP, Microsoft Graph, SPFx

  • Flow Studio startup journey

  • The latest imaginations in the mind of a mad man

And whatever in between…
I’m available for a chat!

The value of a Physical Conference

I always feel the top value of a physical conference is being able to stash away two or three days to focus and immerse in an environment with like-minded people, we talk tech, have the same challenges, but may have solved some of them with our own personal takes of that experience.

We are very much alike - when we are together in the same conference - we are introduced to new ideas that gives us a much broader perspective than we would usually see when we are so focused on our immediate day to day business problems.

I treat it as a relaxed edu-vacation. Seek out the sessions that broadens my capacities. And grab hold of the presenters and get a deeper discussion to take that back with me.

I would love to see you (see you again) at the Digital Workplace Conference 2019. If you see me you should say Hi John - I want to ask / I want to tell you about <THIS THING>