Microsoft Flow 101: Getting Started in Power Automate as an Educator or Administrator

by Scott Muniz | Sep 11, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

This article was written by Gabi Stein from Microsoft’s EDU Engagement Team. Gabi is a Program Manager for Modern Learning Experiences.

Power Automate is one of Microsoft’s best kept secrets, but it’s time for all to know the power of this amazing tool! Power Automate can be broken down into three main pieces: connectors, flows, and power apps.  

Connectors: Are the application actions that you want to put together to make your life easier.  

Flows: Are the actual pieces being put together, so two or more connectors = one flow  

PowerApps: Power apps bring everything together and combine with the user interface (UI) to create a custom app that you can add to your Team.  

Take a look at some of the examples below to get ideas for just a few of the innovative ways you can leverage Power Automate! 

Tracking health in Teams Posts: 

Health tracking can be used among high school teachers, higher ed teachers, and higher ed students to view what types of messages are being sent in your team’s channels. When a new message is posted, have it sent to an excel sheet to build custom reports such as: Seeing what channels have the most messages or building word clouds to surface common themes in your data. In addition, you can add the HTML to text connector to remove HTML tags from your analysis.  

Get updates from the data you have in Power BI  

If you have important data in Power BI, but don’t always remember to check, you can have the data come to you with this simple flow! You can combine the available Power BI alert functions to automatically post an Adaptive Card as a reminder to yourself or send a message to a specific channel. Check out this helpful article for setting up data alerts in Power BI: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-bi/create-reports/service-set-data-alerts 

Send lost email to yourself in Teams:

As an educator or administrator, it’s easy to get overwhelmed with emails and manage all the messages that need attention in Teams and Outlook. Using Power Automate, you can have emails sent by parents go to a specific folder and simultaneously send yourself a reminder message in Teams to remember to chech those messages later. This is just one of many use cases for this handy app.

Daily Reminder Emails/Teams Notes

Do you have any daily tasks that you need to remind yourself about? Use Power Automate to send yourself a message in Teams, email or both! A lot of educators use this feature to remember to view the previous day’s data, but it can be used for any reminder you can think of!

In addition to the flows mentioned here, checkout what Power Automate has in their education templates: https://us.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/collections/education/. If you have ideas for flows you would like to build or need assistance putting one together, please let our team know. We would love to collaborate with you! Just send me an email and we will get back to you right away. 

ADF Data Flows Sneak Peek: Expression Builder UX Updates

by Scott Muniz | Sep 11, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

ADF Data Flows Expression Builder is getting some new enhancements next week. Here’s a sneak peek at some of what’s coming!

Join @daperlov and @Mark Kromer next week for our YouTube Live Stream where we’ll walk through these updates in detail.

• New “Locals” feature where you can now define a variable that is scoped to your current transformation allowing you to reuse logic that used to require you to copy that formula multiple times inside your expressions. Another current technique is to use Derived Columns to generate synthetic columns that were not meant for loading into your destination and were used in this “temporary” way. Now you can use locals to store data that won’t propagate outside of the current scope.

• Now you can edit directly inside Derived Column transformation text boxes without the Expression Builder automatically launching. Typing or editing your formulas directly will also include standard validation and enables copy & paste without needing to open the Expression Builder. This means that the Clone button has moved to the top of the column list as well as a new Open Expression Builder option.

• We are closing in on our 1-year anniversary of the GA of Data Flows in ADF and we gathered a ton of feedback from our community that we consolidated into these updates including making the experience full-screen and adding inline function help. We hope that you will find these changes make for a more productive and enjoyable experience in ADF data flows as we’ve recognized that the bulk of time spent in ADF by our data flow ETL developers ends up being inside the Expression Builder.

ANCM not reading “ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT” variable from local environment.

by Scott Muniz | Sep 11, 2020 | Uncategorized

This article is contributed. See the original author and article here.

After upgrading the asp.net core application to asp.net core 3.1 version, application is not able to read the “ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT” variable from local environment and getting defaulted to web.config values.

ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT value is set as Development in Web.config.

ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT value is set as Production in local environment of Azure App Service application setting.

ANCM is Preferring value set in Web.config over the local environment variable in Azure App service application setting.

Solution:

We need to add a switch “ANCM_PREFER_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES” and set as “true”  to allow ANCM to prefer the local environment over the Web.config values. Below is the screenshot of app service app settings.

If the switch is added in both Web.config and local environment and both of them are set to “true” then web.config “ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT” will take precedence.

After setting “ANCM_PREFER_ENVIRONMENT_VARIABLES” as “true” in App service App settings, ANCM is preferring the local environment variable “ASPNETCORE_ENVIRONMENT” which is set to production .

For more information about these changes, please refer below Github issues.

https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/pull/20006

https://github.com/dotnet/aspnetcore/issues/19450