Get Tweets in Email, Send to Yammer: Automated with Microsoft Flow

Automation success! I feel like a weight has been lifted from my shoulders. I used Microsoft Flow today to automate a few tasks that have been on my list for a while.

The Goals

• Keep up with CRM happenings via Twitter without wading through hundreds of "noise" Tweets.
• Receive a filtered set of Tweets into an Office 365 email folder for easy access and review.
• Share my favorite Tweets (and the linked article) with others at Altriva.

The Solution

Microsoft Flow provides the ability to act upon new Tweets based on keywords that you specify.  I created Flows to trigger on Tweets with hashtags #MSDynCRM, #MSDyn365, #Dynamics365, etc.. The Flows send the Tweet message and related details to my Office 365 email. In Outlook, I set up rules to move the emails to a specific inbound folder.

A few times each day, I go through the Tweets (as emails) and move any of them that I want to review further to a "To Read" folder.

After I've had a chance to review the Tweet and the related article, if I think my colleagues at Altriva might also want the information, I drag the Tweet (email) to a folder named "Post to Yammer".  I created another Flow to periodically retrieve the emails in that folder, post the Tweet to Yammer and then delete the email.

Conclusion

I've been critical lately about Microsoft Flow, particularly regarding the several bugs I've run into in dealing with data from Dynamics 365 CRM, but it works very well for a lot of other types of tasks. If you find yourself doing the same repetitive tasks (copy/paste is a big red flag for this) then take a look at Microsoft Flow and see if you can connect the dots to automate things. It feels good when it's all working.