If This Then That popularly abbreviated as IFTTT and now known as just IF after a recent rebrand is a popular process and task automation service used by many to get many things done on the internet. From letting your washing machine post to your Facebook page when your washing is done to keeping my awesome Discover Weekly playlists on Spotify after a new set is delivered every Monday afternoon.
IFTTT and other such like apps operate simply by interlinking two services one uses so that an action on one triggers a reaction in another as long as the conditions set out by the user are met. For instance, if the Techweez team needs to be alerted on its Slack channel every time one of us posts an article here, we only need to specify the conditions that need to be met and voila! We are home and dry. The specifying of parameters and setting up conditions ends up in what is called a ‘recipe’. The recipe can then be shared with other users so that they don’t have to redo the same thing all over again. I’m not sure if that sounds simple enough but that is it in a few words.
Microsoft has built its own IFTTT equivalent called Flow. It is meant to act as a connector of sorts between Microsoft products like Office 365 and third party solutions like cloud services and others.
Flow has been around for a while and back in June was made available on the iOS platform as an app.
Now, Microsoft is reaching out to users of the world’s most popular mobile platform, Android, as well.
Flow’s Android app is now available to everyone on the Play Store as a beta. The app had been in a closed beta previously. It is targeted at business users (one needs an Office 365 Business or Education account in order to use Flow) so don’t expect it to be your all-in-one go-to process automation app just yet.
If you happen to juggle between a work chat and collaboration app like Slack and Microsoft’s bevy of productivity services like its Office suite as well as cloud storage services like Dropbox then Flow is something you are likely to want to try out. Besides Office 365, Dropbox and Slack, other supported services include OneDrive, Google Drive, Twitter, Mailchimp, GitHub, Dynamics CRM, Salesforce, SQL and SharePoint. So, pretty much serious stuff only.
