I did it again. There are way too many Teams references below but what do I do? Teams is now the center of the SharePoint world and it is working to become the center of the Power Platform universe. So, embrace your Teams overlord. But in all seriousness, the Teams integrations announced below are super exciting. And for goodness sakes, go check on your SharePoint workflow situation, the clock is ticking.

General News

SharePoint 2010 Workflows are on the clock

As of August 1, you can no longer create a SharePoint 2010 workflow in SharePoint Online AND on November 1, 2020 (like 90 days from now) they will be turning off SharePoint 2010 workflows in SharePoint Online forever: Microsoft’s official announcement.

Why I am telling you? Because Power Automate (flow) is their successor, so you are going to be busy. And don’t think no big deal for us, we just started in SharePoint a couple of years ago. HA! Most of the workflows you have been creating have been 2010 workflows. This is a real issue that you need to investigate. I did a video walkthrough over how to find them and ways to replace them to help SharePoint Workflow Retirement. The clock is ticking.

Teams is adding native Power Platform

Microsoft announced that the Common Data Service is being renamed to Microsoft DataFlex Pro. This is roughly the 100^th name for what is a super-powerful data platform. But that isn’t interesting. What is interesting is they are going to introduce a Microsoft DataFlex Pro for Teams.

And now that we have a data platform just for Teams, we can also start building Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agent solutions directly inside of Teams using that platform. This is going to be a huge deal and I expect it will fundamentally change a lot of the business solutions we build today. More technical details here. Hopefully, next month, this thing will be in public preview so we can start trying it out.

Oh, and Teams and Power Automate added more integrations

I missed this when it was announced, whoops. Power Automate Teams connector update which will include two sorely needed pieces of functionality. The trigger “For a selected message” and the action to “Create a Teams meeting”. The trigger will allow us rich integration like we see inside SharePoint Online today to action on a specific item and the ability to create a meeting is super needed. Who has meetings without a Teams link these days? Pretty excited for this stuff, wish they had of given a release date.

They all integrate in Teams natively

I guess what I am really trying to say is when this wave of updates ships, Power Apps, Power Bi, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents will all be built into Teams. So you will open Teams and you can build solutions using all of that tech without leaving Teams. Talk about one-stop shopping. The annoying part right now is they write about it like it is all done but best I can tell none of it has shipped.

Technical things you should know:

Office365 connector name changed to Microsoft365: UGH. This makes every piece of documentation ever wrong for no good reason.

Formulas: ThisRecord, As, and Sequence: As may be the greatest function ever, followed closely by Sequence. Learn both.

CDS Column Comparison: Wait is it CDS or Common Data Service for Apps or Common Data Service or Dataflex Pro?

On prem data gateway update: Remember, if you use the gateway you need to always stay up to date on its patches.

Citrix UI flows: I do not do much with UI Flows (RPA) today but seems pretty cool if you do.