Blog

Have you ever had a service go down because an Azure App Registration secret expired without anyone noticing? Client secrets and key certificates come with expiration dates, and failing to renew them in time can lead to service disruptions and security vulnerabilities. In this post, I’ll walk you through a super efficient Power Automate flow that monitors your Azure App Registrations for expiring keys using the Graph API and XPath — without the nested loops and API overhead that most solutions rely on. ...

Living with heart disease brings challenges that are hard to fully appreciate until you’ve experienced them firsthand. In this post, I’m sharing my personal journey with AV block, amiodarone, and ultimately receiving a leadless pacemaker — in the hope that it might help someone else navigating a similar path. Please note that I do not have a medical background. Atrioventricular Block I was recently admitted to A&E after a faint and subsequently diagnosed with atrioventricular block. AV block refers to a condition where there is a delay or interruption in the transmission of electrical signals from the upper chambers (atria) to the lower chambers (ventricles) of the heart. This can result in a slower heart rate or even a complete block of electrical impulses, which can be dangerous and lead to symptoms such as dizziness, fainting, or heart failure. AV block and tachycardia are not directly related, and their treatments can be different depending on the underlying cause. I already had an ICD implanted in April 2020 after a suspected cardiac arrest caused by ventrical tachycardia (ventricular tachycardia is a fast heart rate that originates in the ventricles of the heart), whilst out riding my bike The unexpected diagnosis – ARVC and this was extracted and replaced by an S-ICD in February 2023 Living with ICD complications. ...

Can you encrypt and decrypt a string using Power Automate? My son challenged me with this question after covering the Vigenère Cipher in school, and I couldn’t resist building it. In this post, I’ll show you how to implement a full Vigenère Cipher in Power Automate — without a single Apply to Each — and there’s even a live version you can try yourself. What is the Vigenere Cipher? The Vigenere cipher was invented by Blaise de Vigenere in the 16th century. It is a method of encrypting alphabetic text by using a series of interwoven Caesar ciphers, with each letter of the plaintext being shifted based on a keyword. ...

Want to keep your organisation informed about Microsoft 365 service health without constantly checking the admin centre? In this post, I’ll show you how I used Power Automate with an Azure App Registration and the Graph API to pull service health and message centre data into a SharePoint List, Teams alerts, and more. We’ll start by creating an Azure app registration and using the Graph API to bring data into Power Automate. From there, you can save this information to a SharePoint List, publish it to your organisation, build a Power App, or set alerts for degraded service health via Teams or email. ...

In 2020, I survived a suspected cardiac arrest and crashed my bike. An implantable cardioverter-defibrillator (ICD) — a small device placed under the skin of the chest to monitor and treat dangerous heart rhythms — was implanted as my safety net. Apart from greatly reducing my exercise levels due to the nature of my diagnosis, ARVC, I was living a relatively normal life. I even took part in Caledonia Etape on an Ebike in September 2021 — until I started noticing my neck swell and jugular veins pop out when I bent over, went swimming, lightly exerted, vacuumed or stirred a sauce for dinner. ...

If you’ve heard of Microsoft’s Power Platform but aren’t sure exactly what it includes, this post gives you a clear overview of all five components. Power Platform is a collection of low-code, no-code tools created by Microsoft that allows users to automate business processes, create custom apps, build chatbots, visualise data, and publish web pages — spanning five main components: Power Automate, Power Apps, Power Virtual Agents, Power BI, and Power Pages. ...

Ever since Microsoft removed the ability to add users to Exchange Distribution Lists via the Graph API, Power Automate users have been stuck. In this post, I’ll walk you through a workaround using PowerShell and Azure Runbooks to get distribution list management back into your flows. It’s been over 12 months since I wrote my blog post Add members to a distribution list – Power Automate where initially it was possible to add members directly. That functionality was removed by design and has never made a comeback. Fortunately, I came across PowerShell commands to both add and remove users from a distribution group — and we can bring this to an Azure Runbook. For more details on the Graph API limitation, see Working with groups in Microsoft Graph. ...

Need to filter a deeply nested JSON object in Power Automate without burning through your API limits? In this post, I’ll show you how to repurpose and filter a JSON array in just two actions — no Apply to Each required — saving you thousands of API calls when working with large datasets. Here is an interesting sample JSON object {}, that contains a JSON array [] with 3 objects. The final solution will have 3000 objects. The aim is to retrieve two key values from the object whilst checking another nested array for a common string ‘ACABA’. Whilst it is perfectly acceptable to use an apply to each and loop through all 3000 objects, this will eat into your 24 hour API limit on the Power Platform and whilst this hasn’t really been a concern in the past, Microsoft are lowering those limits and will begin enforcement once a new admin level report has been released. ...

Need to load a bunch of tasks into Microsoft Planner without clicking through the UI one by one? Using Power Automate and Excel (or any other available data source 😉), you can bulk import tasks into Planner in a single flow run. I have previously recorded a video on this process and use both a tasks table and a config table to support this cloud flow. This will enable you to dynamically choose the group and plan name, as well as import planner tasks involving a title, bucket id / name, start and due date, assigned user ids, a category, priority, check list and file attachment(s)! This flow is not for the faint hearted but should support you with your goal to build a Planner Power Automate integration. ...

Power Automate has an action “Export to File for Power BI Reports” which enables you to export a Power BI Visual or Page as a PDF, Power Point (PPTX) or Image (PNG) file. Below you will learn about the Workspace requirements, how to identify the report page and visual names and how to implement a report level filter. We will explore common errors, how to setup your Power Automate Cloud flow, some of the limitations, the Power BI Playground and finally saving the exported file to SharePoint and sending via Teams or Email. ...