John Liu .NET

View Original

Power Studio Update April 2020

John Liu

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.