Flow Studio subscription discount finishes very soon

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Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

Photo by Fabian Blank on Unsplash

This will very brief.

At the end of this weekend - Most of the Flow Studio customer’s accounts will flip from Trial to Free status. There is a current discount that will expire in less than two days.

Going forward, I intend to build out more and more features but they will all be behind the subscription. Aside from general UX changes the free tier is unlikely to receive additional features.

Subscriptions

As part of this initial roll over, I wanted to do a special discount to thank my current customers and encourage everyone to move to subscription. This discount is set at $70 / first year.

Future Discounts?

Since I believe Flow Studio to be excellent value at $10/month (or $100/year), I’m unlikely to offer any future discounts. I’m more interested in building compelling features that Makers, partners and businesses needs to be extra-successful.

I didn’t make this a big marketing fanfare, as I’m a learning startup founder and selling things is something I’m learning.

Currently status: I’m still better at making things than actually selling them.

Partnerships

Many of the current subscriptions are sold and tied to the Service User account that enterprise Flows are running under. Essentially this is a “prod” license.

We see a lot of conversations in the months ahead with Makers directly for their business, or with the consultancies that are implementing Microsoft Flow across tenants, to make sure the Flow Studio subscription is a great product both for creating better Flows as well as monitoring your running Flows.

Talk to us about these partnerships. Whether it is bulk licensing, or multiple tenant scenarios. We are very early in this stage so you get to get in the door first.

Some upcoming plans over the next two months:

  • Two major features still under development - if you are interested let me know we can talk privately about feature priorities.

  • A series of short YouTube videos that explains the hundreds of use cases that you need Flow Studio.

  • Probably a FlowStudio main site make over for users visiting and not logged in.

  • May be look for a co-founder?


Thank you

Thank you so much for your time, energy, support over the last 6 months since I pushed Flow Studio out the door. It’s a journey I’m very much enjoying, and I loved talking to you all about how to use it and why you would need it.

P.S sorry I said brief and then posted a wall of text again!

Flow Studio trial ends soon, what's next?

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flow-studio-logo-90.png

This is a Flow Studio startup post. A few weeks back I locked myself in a room and added subscriptions to Flow Studio. In less than two weeks, the initial wave of free monthly trial will end. I’m writing this to be clear what we would be expecting.

Plan

  • Inspirations

  • Explain what will happen

  • Different Tiers of membership

  • v0.1.53

  • Where are we going next

  • Feedback


Inspirations

I have been listening to MS Cloud Show episode 276 where JD Trask from Raygun talks about startup with CJ and AC.

I have listened to it 5 times now.

  • (yes!) Add Subscription

  • (yes!) Do it via Strip

  • What do you mean paying is optional for your customers

  • It is a fear of rejection, it isn’t good enough and people won’t use it if it’s not free

OK. Wow. Startups are hard. Business is hard. Selling is hard. Development is actually easy, comparatively.

What will happen next?

Flow Studio subscription tiers were added on October 18 - so on November 18 - Trial status currently granted to all existing customers will flip over to Free status. Customers that joined after October 18 will have a full month of trial, so may flip after November 18.

This means these features will require a subscription

  • Edit JSON

  • Rename Actions

  • Admin

  • Get All Runs (slow) //better name pending**

  • (Bulk) trigger re-run


Different Tiers of Membership

These features will remain in a Free tier

  • Sort

  • Filter

  • Tag

  • Get Latest Runs // this pulls the latest page of 50 runs

The subscription tier is US$10 / month. There is a yearly discount at $100 / year.


New release Version 0.1.53

A lot of work has gone in to move Flow Runs into its own tab page, this gives us a lot of performance improvements to read lots of Flow Runs.

The expanding master-child grid is nice to look at but very difficult to keep the UI performance when there are a lot of Flows and Runs. There was also not a lot of space to do more work with the Flow Runs screen.


Where are we going next?

I’m hoping that customers will add weight to help me prioritize future features. Flow makers comes from all kinds of backgrounds and have very different use cases and needs.

I am adding more analytics - both for error trapping as well as feature detection, to work out what customers are using Flow Studio for. For example I know customers use sort a lot, but I don’t actually know which column they are all sorting by…

I also know customers click on /admin but I don’t know if customers actually have access to their tenant admin environment. So whether that is just exploration, or is that something that’s critical to their workload - and this affect what features I can add to admin.

Feedback

I’m always here - comment here, on Flow Studio issues or support @ flowstudio.app

These next two weeks will be a lot of thinking and planning for the next feature. Customers have the power to influence what that is.

Summary

  • Flow Studio trial wraps up on Sunday November 18 - customers will revert to Free status

  • Get All Runs and Bulk re-trigger becomes subscription feature

  • Email if you want to talk about bulk discounts for your company


/Back to work

Sending email with inline images via MicrosoftGraph and MicrosoftFlow

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I had previously written how we can use Send Email as Anyone in Microsoft Graph, and as a bonus wrote a section on how we can use it to send inline images.

There was a small problem - sending email is very hard for app-only permissions - app accounts don’t have email boxes. So for that scenario to work, app accounts need a super crazy “send email as anyone” permission.

Sending email is a lot easier with delegate permission - if we have delegate permission Mail.Send - we can send inline attachments very easily. This is not an admin-tenant approval required permission, so any user can grant this.

Plan

Combine two techniques:

To aad.portal.azure.com

Add Mail.Send (delegate permission)

If you can “grant permissions” to your tenant, doing it here will immediately grant this to your current connection.

Otherwise we have to go back to our Flow connectors and make a new connection for batch.

Create our Flow

Here we are creating a MSGraph mail object JSON getting it ready for send

Using a $batch connector - call /me/sendMail

Results

Inline images are super useful for newsletter or emails where you want to include a nice header, signature or whatever in-between. This is a way to send these with Microsoft Graph and Microsoft Flow.

Resolving Google DNS problems with hosting *.app from Hover on Azure

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This is a quick blog post - special thanks to Simon Waight who looked into this with me and gave me some nudges towards the right direction. The solution was his suggestion too. That guy, he knows his Azure.

Problem

Okay, checklist of my problems:

  • Bought flowstudio.app domain name with Hover

  • Mapped custom domain on Azure

  • Set CNAME/A record from Hover nameserver to Azure

  • .app needs secure cert - which was bought through Azure (Go-Daddy)

  • DNS lookup is good for almost everyone

  • DNS lookup from Google DNS 8.8.8.8 fails

  • So anyone that uses Google DNS can’t see flowstudio :-(

Notes

Please understand John is a developer and not an infrastructure guru. But this was pretty interesting.

  1. .app is a secured domain

  2. Google DNS fails, because Google owns .app

  3. While most DNS servers are happy to talk to ns.hover.com to resolve my domain name to Azure, Google wants to verify the DNSSEC

  4. This fails, so Google DNS treats the DNS record as invalid, refusing to resolve FlowStudio.app

  5. This was really confusing, until I finally come across a note on Hover’s FAQ:
    https://help.hover.com/hc/en-us/articles/217281647-Understanding-and-managing-DNSSEC

“Please note: Hover does not offer hosted DNSSEC DNS services using ns1/2/3.hover.com. If you require DNSSEC, you’ll need to use a third-party DNS provider that offers DNS that supports DNSSEC fully.”

Solution

The fix is to create a new Azure DNS Zone, and then change the nameserver records on Hover to point to Azure DNS Servers. A/CNAME records are created on Azure DNS. This seems to have resolved the issue for everyone, especially Google DNS.

Please let me know if you have problems accessing https://FlowStudio.app

Decode InfoPath attachments with a bit of JS AzureFunctions

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Serge, April and me were discussing a problem with pulling out InfoPath Attachment from InfoPath form XML and writing them into a SharePoint document library.

This is a problem I tried to tackle before, but came to realization that I would need an AzureFunction. The main reason is that the InfoPath attachment is a base 64 byte array but the byte array has a variable length header that includes the attachment file name. Flow doesn’t have amazing byte manipulation or left-shift abilities. So we need to write an AzureFunction to help.

As I brood over the problem I also thought it might be easier to handle the byte array with JavaScript. So I gave it a go.

This blog is my version of the answer.

The original decoder code in C#

There is a pretty old MSDN article on the C# code

private void DecodeAttachment(BinaryReader theReader)
{
  //Position the reader to get the file size.
  byte[] headerData = new byte[FIXED_HEADER];
  headerData = theReader.ReadBytes(headerData.Length);

  fileSize = (int)theReader.ReadUInt32();
  attachmentNameLength = (int)theReader.ReadUInt32() * 2;

  byte[] fileNameBytes = theReader.ReadBytes(attachmentNameLength);
  //InfoPath uses UTF8 encoding.
  Encoding enc = Encoding.Unicode;
  attachmentName = enc.GetString(fileNameBytes, 0, attachmentNameLength - 2);
  decodedAttachment = theReader.ReadBytes(fileSize);
}

The updated code in JS AzureFunctions

module.exports = function (context, req) {
    context.log('JavaScript HTTP trigger function processed a request.');
    if (req.body && req.body.file) {
        // https://support.microsoft.com/en-us/help/892730/how-to-encode-and-decode-a-file-attachment-programmatically-by-using-v
        var buffer = Buffer.from(req.body.file, 'base64')
        //var header = buffer.slice(0, 16);  // unused header
        var fileSize = buffer.readUInt32LE(16);  // test is 5923 bytes
        var fileNameLength = buffer.readUInt32LE(20);  // test is 13 chars
        // article lies - it's utf16 now
        var fileName = buffer.toString('utf16le', 24, (fileNameLength-1)*4 -1);  
        var binary = buffer.slice(24 + fileNameLength * 2);
        context.res = {
            // status: 200, /* Defaults to 200 */            
            body: {
                fileName: fileName,
                fileNameLength: fileNameLength,
                fileSize: fileSize,
                fileContent: binary.toString('base64')
            }
        };
    }
    else {
        context.res = {
            status: 400,
            body: "Please pass a base64 file in the request body"
        };
    }
    context.done();
};


The InfoPath form


The Microsoft Flow that coordinates the work


Results

  • Need Azure Function here

  • JavaScript buffer is pretty good at doing byte decoding, easy to read too

  • Debugging and tweaking the byte offset is quite a bit of trial and error, was not expecting that. May be that MSDN article is too old, it is from 2003.

  • You may think - John 2018 is not the right year, or decade to be writing about InfoPath. But hear me out. As companies move their form technology forward, they will need to consider how to migrate the data and attachments in their current InfoPath forms somewhere - having this blog post as a reference is important for that eventual migration. Good luck!