Microsoft has introducing a nice new feature for its business customers using the Flow automation service. This has been possible as Muhimbi has brought its SaaS application to Microsoft Flow by building a custom API for their service.
Muhimbi is known for its server based PDF Conversion technology for the SharePoint, Office 365, InfoPath, Java and .NET markets and its service allows you to convert Microsoft Word files to PDF, add watermarks, merge documents, etc. Since it is public, you can automate all of these operations using Flow.
Functionality
So how does this work? We’ll go into a great level of detail during the next few weeks and months, but the summary is as follows.
In Flow’s editor, the Muhimbi actions show up in the same way as other built-in services such as SharePoint, DropBox, and SalesForce. All Muhimbi workflow actions that our customers are already used to — including various conversion, merge, watermarking, security and OCR actions — are displayed in Flow’s list of actions.
Let’s take the Convert Document action as an example. All it takes is the name of the source file, which is typically available from the Flow Trigger that started the workflow, and the file’s content, which tends to be available from the same trigger as well. The Output format defaults to PDF, but — depending on the input format — you can select different output formats as well.
Although there are some other fields available under Show advanced options, that is basically all there is to it.
An example of a completed Flow can be found below. It is basic but powerful and can easily be extended to take files from different sources (SharePoint, Box.com, Google Drive<), carry out multiple operations by feeding the converted document into other Muhimbi actions to watermark and secure the generated PDF, and then send the generated file not only by email but also into SharePoint, DropBox or any of the other gazillions of services that integrate with Flow.
- The flow is triggered when a file is uploaded to a particular OneDrive folder.
- The file name and file content provided by the OneDrive trigger are fed into the Convert Document action.
- The converted file is attached to an email and sent out.
Similar to other Flow actions, each Muhimbi action returns a number of output parameters that can be consumed by other actions in the same Flow. The following screenshot shows how the generated PDF file is attached to the email:
We have made sure that all our Flow actions work in a similar fashion. For detailed information see this Core Concepts Knowledge Base Article.
For more information on Pricing, Muhimbi has a blog post which you can check out here.
