Sharing Your Power Automate Flows - Collaborate with Coworkers

[@chrisblunt7627]

Good video, appreciate the time it took to create. There are some negatives to using a service account: 1) You will need to license it. 2) if you use the same service account cross departments, you shouldn't really then share the workflows with others as the connectors could in theory allow access to content users should not have. A follow up with a security focus would be useful.

[@BulbDigital]

Good call, thanks Chris. There is definitely some nuance to service accounts and when they're the right choice. We'll add your suggestion to our list!

[@gt2scale]

Great tips, thanks for the video! A great video idea would be a deeper dive into creating a Service Account. I worked with my IT group to create a generic user account that we share for this purpose but it feels like a Band-Aid method.

[@BulbDigital]

Hey, George! We appreciate the video suggestion and we're happy you like the video 😁

[@sherideiter9801]

@bulbdigital, if the flows are owned by the service account, can you still use an email account to trigger a flow, i.e. email with attached report? How would you go about that? Does the Service account have an email address?

[@BulbDigital]

Since a this type of account is a regular user, you can still configure the flow to be triggered based on emails that are received. However, the mailbox that will be monitored is the mailbox for the service account.

[@davidadams421]

Export/Import is not strictly speaking the _only_ way to change the primary owner of a flow, you can just add the flow to a solution. Once within a solution, you can change the primary owner to whomever you like e.g. service account or service principle. Solutions are useful if you want a little more structure around the update and deployment of flows e.g. version control, or creating flows for other people, using environment variables, for example. Great video, nice pace, engaging, nice mix of camera and screen demo. Oh, and you do actually look like Elon Musk! I don't dislike the background music (per other commenters), though perhaps a little quieter and maybe not so toe-tapping! 😉

[@BulbDigital]

Thanks for the thoughtful note here! Solutions are definitely a good way to manage these things as well (and they unlock a lot more capabilities, which is great).

[@johnfromireland7551]

You didn't mention about Service Principal Accounts?

[@BulbDigital]

Service Principals is a special type of Service Account that is possible to use as an owner of a Flow, but we didn't think would apply to most users. It also has an impact on the licensing require to run the flows. Since Service Principals do not have Office 365 licenses you have to purchase Pay As You Go, associate the flow to an app, or get a per flow license. learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/change-cloud-flow-owner#change-the-owner-of-a-cloud-flow-to-a-service-principal-application-user. Are you using Service Principals regularly? If so how do you see them being used?

[@samsonwossenu]

Excellent Video

[@BulbDigital]

Thank you very much!

[@conceptusCS]

is there a way of sharing a flow with another employee without them having to manually update the connections every time they want the flow to work with their for example outlook accounts? if a huge company wants to install flows for every employee they wouldnt have to update the connections manually for thousand of employees. maybe this is possible with an admin account?

[@BulbDigital]

You can make anyone an owner of your flow to share it with them, but it sounds like you're referring to a service account to manage the flow and act as a link to connect these apps? Signing into a basic shared user account (not just a shared mailbox) lets multiple owners create flows with that one central owner and send alerts, make changes, etc.

[@Johan-qy6yb]

I'm surprised how bad MS is at building something that is more enterprise centric when it comes to deployment, like why are these so tied to a user/developer, rather than an environment and IT building for business. Because thats whats probably is going to happen the most, at least in larger companies

[@BulbDigital]

I think this is an eternal struggle between satisfying the wants of knowledgeable and tech-savvy admin level users and the needs of entry level users. Scalability is definitely a big concerns, but as these tools become modernized to more low-code solutions I'd expect to see more user/team owner functionality so that individual users can take these builds and push them to each other. Hopefully we see more integration and control that's structured around the environment!

[@draushaus912]

Good video! I like your presentation and how you explain things. Personally, I would prefer that you lose the background music. I don't see it adding value to the video. Rather, I find it distracting. I wanted to leave and search out another video on the subject. I'd like to see the same video without background music.

[@BulbDigital]

Thanks for the feedback Andrew! In many of our newer videos we've dropped the music to make it easier to focus because of feedback like this.

[@hamsikafelicia1775]

Very noisy background

[@BulbDigital]

Thanks for the feedback!