Some thoughts about Microsoft FLOW

After watching Deep dive: Advanced workflow automation with Microsoft Flow, I have to admit that FLOW is much more powerful than I thought. It can replace SharePoint workflows in most of the cases!

However, as it is designed for power users, I smelled something bad.

1. Now I start to understand that why "everyone needs to learn coding". Simple coding(or drag and drop style software development) allows users to do much more work efficiently.

2. We will get millions of worst "software programmers" to build billions of FLOW modules. These FLOW modules may run very slow, may consume a lot of hardware resource, and almost no one can maintain them. Because these FLOW modules are running in Azure, clients need to pay much higher fee than normal. (Microsoft will be very happy about that, and we cannot blame Microsoft)

3. No user would write document for the FLOW functionalities they build.

4. Fix/improve those FLOW modules is not easy, and troubleshooting on those modules would be nightmare.

5. Who is going to test the FLOW modules built by users? A module may accidentally delete a lot of data (which may not be able of recovering), or send out thousands of emails.

6. For most of the FLOW functionalities, if a developer can do it through C# in one day, he/she may need 3 days to do it through "drag and drop". And it's pretty hard to maintain those functionalities. It would take much more time to make minor changes.

7. Not sure how many security issues it will cause if we allow users to build their own FLOW modules.

8. If Microsoft decides to change/upgrade/obsolete some API/function, who is going to upgrade existing customized FLOW modules?

Conclusion: FLOW is too powerful, so it is not for power users but for developers. Normal power users can use it, but only for very simple functionality, especially when some system other than SharePoint is involved. Only in those cases, FLOW is useful to power users and can improve productivity.