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Automation Redux

Written by Adrian Amos | December 19, 2017

I promised in my webinar last week to publish some of my favorite automations, and I got some great feedback on automations and workflows being used by participants. If you submitted one, thanks!

The first one I got that really caught my attention was using the IFTTT app on an Android phone to crank up the ringtone when the phone is lost. A simple text of “lostphone” (configurable) to an IFTTT-enabled Android phone will roll the volume to whatever you want, enabling you to find it even when you’d set the phone to silent. I told my wife about this one and her jaw hit the floor. Putting the kids down for a nap, she’ll often mute her phone and then leave it somewhere exotic. Speaking of ringtone, ever forget to turn it back on after a meeting?

I’m not much on taxis or ride-sharing, but I have used Uber just often enough to get the heebie-jeebies from a driver or two. I also like to get reimbursed when I have to subject myself to that terror.

I was also notified that Zapier does, indeed, allow team sharing in their premium offerings. Thanks for that update! https://zapier.com/teams/

We use Harvest to track time, and different teams in the organization use Trello. Trying to reconcile the environments has largely been handled by Zaps:

On the Flow front, I got a couple of versions of a question that I wanted to explore in a bit more detail, with regard to Flow support for data-loss prevention policies in Office 365:

“I support an environment that falls under HIPAA compliance. You mentioned copying events from Office 365 to G-cal and stripping everything but the time, but that was a choice: nothing prevented sharing those details. Can an administrator enable controls to ensure users don’t accidentally share confidential data?”

“How do these work with DLP in O365?”

I don’t believe I covered this in either my webinar or any previous blog posts, but Flow has an admin dashboard, and within that dashboard we have the ability to create policies explicitly for DLP.

With the sample data above, Flow would be able to move data within SharePoint Online, OneDrive for Business, and Box. Everything in the lower area would be prohibited from inclusion in Flows. I tested this and found that it instantly broke my Google Calendar integrations. And It can be tailored by building additional environments, and those environments can, in turn, be restricted to/from users as needed. So you can build your workflows for users that don’t contain HIPAA data, but set restrictions for those who do to not have the ability to accidentally automatically ship confidential data out of your environment.