John Liu .NET

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Flow Studio 1K users - time for a roadmap update

John Liu

In the past week - total number of Flow Studio users crossed over 1000.

We have 1000 users!

We want to thank you, Flow makers, for your support. When you share a feature you loved, or suggest a feature that was missing or tell me a bug that we’ve never seen before.

We really enjoyed the journey, there is much we didn’t know when we started, but your support made sure we keep going on.

If you don’t know what John does - check out

https://flowstudio.app

What’s next in Flow Studio?

It’s perhaps a good time to talk about what’s coming next on the Flow Studio roadmap.

We have been very busy.



Flow Studio

Flow Studio’s key feature today is a better way to manage a maker’s own inventory of Flows, with a suite of tools to help a maker with making more successful flows.

Along the way, makers relied on:

  • #hashtag grouping

  • Sort by failed runs and last modified runs

  • Run sparklines

  • Edit JSON

  • Runs with Context

  • Bulk run resubmit

  • Flow version history

  • Full definition text search

  • … just to list some of our favourite features.

Our next big roadmap milestone is a Flow deployment wizard

  • Create a deployment plan to copy a template Flow, with variable, URL or connection replacements, to a set of destinations.
    Ideally, the target scenario is for 1 Flow to be copied to 50 SharePoint sites.

  • Keep the deployment plan to perform future updates. Because deployment is never a one-off process.

  • We will be able to copy between 1 to many sites

  • Between multiple Flow environments

  • And eventually, between different accounts - for user migration (and even tenants)

This work is progressing, you can support us right now by trying Flow Studio - and reach out and tell us what scenarios you need.

Get started with Flow Studio for free: https://flowstudio.app/

Flow Studio for IT

Flow Studio is designed for an individual maker, or even a consulting company creating Flows under a single account. It helps us manage the Flows in that one account.

It turns out, an inventory management tool for an individual maker and a fast way to see the runs immediately, is actually a scaled down version of what an IT management and governance portal needs.

IT wants to know what’s in every maker’s toolbox. What is running across the enterprise. What’s successful and keep them that way, and what’s not successful and needs to be mitigated.

Picture ourselves across the fog of war that is today’s IT - how many Flows are we able to see? Are they successful? If they aren’t successful, do we know? Are they business critical? If they are business critical but not successful… Is that a risk?

To begin to answer all these questions, we think we need to understand the landscape - let’s produce a Map. Is there a way we can get a bird’s eye view of the entire map of Flows across the entire company.

This is a picture of London underground.
The FLOWS IN YOUR ORG LOOKS LIKE THIS.

Our second roadmap milestone - is to create a governance dashboard.

We want to know

  • All the Flows and the runs, are they successful, are they failing, when have they been last modified?

  • All the Users - who are our Makers, what Flows do they do?

  • All the Systems - what systems do they touch - not just SharePoint, which Site? Not just Exchange - which email account?

    • You can use SharePoint connectors. But you can’t use it on any site URL

    • You can use Exchange connectors. But you can’t use it on certain email addresses

  • All the solutions - we understand

    • Flow solutions (managed and unmanaged)

    • Teams Flows

    • Personal Flows

    • Resource Owner Flows

    • We also understand if a maker is using Flow Studio tags.

  • All the connectors

  • Monitor, Alert Agents, Reports

  • Bring the bulk editing tooling from Flow Studio and scale it to IT

We want to ensure

  • All your business critical processes are automated and monitored

  • Maintain Flow success - we want green ticks across the map

We are in the process of building this out with several partners that has expressed interest. Please do reach out if you think your IT needs this. We are looking out for early pilot companies that wants to see and be on top of the Flows that are being created across their business. We think we have the perfect product you might want to try and build it with us.

Contact us: support @ flowstudio.app

Business

I leave this one at the end - Flow Studio is supported by a separate business entity Flow Studio Solutions, which is also John’s first company. So, aside from writing all that wonderful code (code is so wonderful), I’m also learning everything that I loved about learning. From the next Australian financial year forward, Flow Studio invoices will come out of a company entity.

There is much uncertainty of what I just don’t know. Sales, tax, marketing, support. My problems have their own problems. Like IT needs a MAP to see their Flows, John also needs a mental map to see his business.

If you feel hey John’s cadence has slowed down - I’m sorry. My efforts are split between several major roadmap milestone features. These are bigger pieces that needs more work to get right before I can push them out the door. Hope you understand.

Reminding myself to be more kind. Scary is the unknown path I have chosen, but I need to remind myself to be more kind, there’s enough stress in the world, I shall not add more.

We hope to bring you the latest in Flow Studio very very soon! Drop us a comment or note about anything!