Recently, I took upon myself the challenge of automating a manual process for the first time using Microsoft Flow. The purpose was to teach myself flow and boy did I learn a ton and had a lot of fun doing it.

Think of HR in your company using SharePoint to manage their new employees. Whenever an employee joins the organization, they create a folder in the name of the new employee in SharePoint and then break inheritance so only that user can have access to the folder. Imagine doing that for hundreds of new folks at a time. That can become quite tedious.

Here’s how I automated that process in Flow.

Here’s my setup:
— I have a SharePoint List named ‘Onboarding List’ (It can be names whatever you want) with the following columns
** Employee Name (Person or Group)
** Department (Choice column of all departments)

— I have a document library named ‘Onboarding Library’

Here’s my flow and a link to a video showing two methods on how to create a document library using Flow.

In the video, I did not show what action to use to create the panel for the api, so I will provide that step here.

Before creating either method 1 or method 2 below, follow these steps below:

Step 1: Add an action

Step 2: Search for ‘Send HTTP’ and select ‘Send an HTTP request to SharePoint

Step 3: Fill in the details. You can click on the ellipsis (…) to rename appropriately.

Method 1 on Creating a folder (video)

Method 2 on Creating a folder (video)

Breaking Inheritance

SharePoint Break Inheritance Create Folder Microsoft Flow