Turning a new page

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Wanted to write again, and let everyone know what I’ve been up to. I ended up taking a break through most of 2021 and 2022 simply resting, recovering, and doing light work from home.

2023 resumed with a big bang, I found motivation and drive to dive back into the many projects I’ve temporarily shelved in the last two years. I’ve also became pretty handy with a bunch of home DIY projects. It was a big change to the old me that only knew how to do digital projects but not physical projects. Perhaps more on that in a future post.

Flow Studio

We’ve had several Flow Studio fixes in the last two months

  • there was an API pagination fix since the API no longer accepts 250 records at once and restricts us to only 50. (That means more pages and API call takes longer)

  • API auth fix relating to Power Apps is in-progress.

  • There’s a second API skip/continuation token fix.

  • We’ve also tweaked the way trail is applied when anyone wants to try Flow Studio pro - you can sign up and trial will be available for two weeks - you can cancel the subscription before the trial end date to avoid being charged, if Flow Studio isn’t suitable for you.

Clarity / Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise

We’ve had renewed interest in Flow Studio for Teams and Enterprise (Clarity) through the last few years.

  • Flow Studio for Teams will be tweaked to focus on monitoring critical flows and alerting users when their business critical flows fail. This will be priced simply and does not offer governance capabilities.

  • Flow Studio for Enterprise will be focused on the turnkey Power Platform Governance story, adding new features to scan more areas of the Power Platform, and integrate with CoE starter kit.

  • So far this year, we’ve added BYO Azure Storage. There’s been a lot of fixes to API breakages in Power Apps area this year.

Contract Work

I started a regular part time contract work in Sydney CBD, so if you are local, hit me up for a coffee.

  • I’m working with a lot of Power BI reports

  • There’s a lot of Power Automate doing the heavy lifting as well.

  • We are also talking about adding some Power Apps visuals to allow executive comments to be collected during a report presentation.

Community

Several of the meetups, conferences and events that I used to participate in are becoming active again. I hope to see more of the community not just virtually, but physically as well. I hope to be able to grab a coffee with you soon.

Tiny forward steps for me and Flow Studio

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I’ve been taking little tiny steps forward, this is a good time to share what I’ve been up to.

Flow Studio

There are several Flow Studio updates in the works. v1.1.00 is coming out very soon, and there are several important updates:

  • The development build is on https://dev.flowstudio.app/

  • The major update are changes to the backend APIs that flow studio calls. I am really thankful for the extra time given for me to work on this.

  • In subscriptions link there is now a way to see and manage your own subscriptions, using the Stripe billing support page.

  • There are a number of UX fixes to improve performance and bug fixes since last update.

Please let me know if you have any issues with Flow Studio. Bug fixes are priority.

Branding and Product Offerings

I renamed from Flow Studio to Power Studio last year, and introduced a new product Power Clarity. This has created a lot of additional branding work that’s time consuming to manage. So I’ve decided to simplify everything.

Original Updated Notes
Power Studio Flow Studio
Flow Studio Flow Studio We are going back to our original name
Power Studio Free   Flow Studio Free The freemium offering
Power Studio Pro Flow Studio Pro US$20 Monthly / US$200 Yearly
Power Clarity Flow Studio Teams US$2000 Yearly
Power Clarity Flow Studio Enterprise   Enquire

Flow Studio Free is for everyone

  • quickly see all your own flows

  • manage them using a tool designed for bulk operations.

Flow Studio Pro is for power users who needs more operations

  • Editing Flow JSON

  • Migrate flows

  • Bulk cancellation

  • Export flow history

  • Restore Flow to earlier versions.

  • Administrators that wants to see all the flows in their environment

Flow Studio Teams is for teams to manage all the flows used by their team

  • See all your flows, across multiple accounts

  • Manage them in bulk

  • Continuous monitoring of flow runs

  • Continuous backups

Flow Studio Enterprise is for IT and compliance departments that wants to have full visibility to understand, manage and utilize all the flows used within an organization.

  • Licensing assistance

  • Backup, migrate flows between accounts

  • DLP policy assistance and violations

  • Continuous reports

  • Cross tenancy support


How are you doing, John?

I’m OK, thank you for reaching out. Some days are really good, other days I can’t do it and just take a break.

It is currently school holidays in Sydney and we are in a new lockdown, so stuck at home. Let me know if you want to chat, I can find time to chat (remotely is OK).

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:

kurt-cotoaga-9Nq1IUhhayg-unsplash.jpg


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.