I learned recently that the effort I’ve been spending to automate workflows and the transfer of information to help my team work more efficiently has a name, I could be classified as a citizen integrator. If you use tools like IFTTT, Zapier, or Microsoft Flow, then you might be one, too.

In a business environment with Office 365 I’ve spent the most time using MS Flow to tie together SharePoint, Teams, Planner, and our new implementation of Salesforce. Using MS Flow to sync data between SharePoint and Salesforce allows for greater customization than using the Salesforce External Data Connection to SharePoint. It’s well worth the price of the Salesforce premium connector in MS Flow.

I think it’s easy for a domain expert to be excited by the automation possibilities available to them today. It’s very cool to set up some tasks using a GUI and then see work you used to several minutes on multiple times a day suddenly transform into a background process you can rely on.