For those of you working on Microsoft cloud systems specially Office 365 might have noticed that Microsoft has a new personal productivity tool to replace the now deprecated SharePoint Designer.

People sometimes ask me if I have any comment on the announcement of Microsoft Flow and how it impacts or integrates with AgilePoint NX Workflow & eForms and if I see it as a competitor to AgilePoint NX? I tend to think differently on this. To me Microsoft Flow is a trusted partner instead of a competitor and complements AgilePoint NX enterprise scale applications very well.

Microsoft Flow was designed as personal productivity tool to automate repetitive tasks into simple workflows. It covers a lot of scenarios like sending notifications when a new trigger takes place in one of the numerous systems it supports. For more powerful process driven applications, customers and partners will need products like AgilePoint NX. So instead of replacing AgilePoint NX, it acts as trusted partner where it acts like a feeder system leveraging its numerous triggers and AgilePoint NX provides the sophisticated forms and workflow driven logic on top of the trigger.

Microsoft has a big community and at the time of writing this article, Flow has 163 trigger types. AgilePoint NX itself supports variety of native triggers like SharePoint, Salesforce, file system, emails received, scheduled flows etc. but it can very well leverage Flow as a trigger mechanism for less commonly used systems for which trigger might not be present in AgilePoint NX.

Reason the integration works well is that AgilePoint NX REST API is compatible with Open API specification which is commonly known as Swagger. Microsoft Flow can consume Swagger enabled API endpoint and pass information to AgilePoint process based application to kickoff new workflow or even perform some operations on running workflows.

For those of you who had an opportunity to work with Event Services in AgilePoint NX OnPrem/Private Cloud and were looking for similar capabilities in AgilePoint NX OnDemand, now it is possible through Flow integration so this becomes the equivalent option for Event Services in AgilePoint NX OnDemand.

So next time someone asks you if an AgilePoint process can be kicked off based on an non native external event, before trying to create one, first look at the list of available triggers on Flow and if a trigger is available over there then the answer would be yes.

Here is a short video on how a Flow based application can be integrated with AgilePoint NX.