Innovation Backlog Weekly Digest

Overview

This flow compiles a weekly digest of automation ideas submitted via Microsoft Forms and logged to a Dataverse backlog table. Every Friday morning, it queries Dataverse for new backlog entries from the past week, builds an HTML digest with idea titles, submitter names, and descriptions, then emails the digest to stakeholders and posts a summary to the COE Teams channel for prioritization.

Use Case

Organizations running a Center of Excellence (COE) need a structured way to collect, track, and prioritize automation ideas from across the business. This flow closes the feedback loop by surfacing ideas, delivering them to decision-makers, and providing a discussion anchor in the COE Teams channel for weekly prioritization meetings.

The flow is ideal for teams that:

• Surfacing all ideas submitted during the week in a single digest
• Delivering the digest to decision-makers via email and Teams
• Providing a discussion anchor in the COE Teams channel for weekly prioritization meetings

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Update environment variable values

After importing the solution, set flowlibs_InnovationFormId to your actual Forms ID, and flowlibs_InnovationTeamsGroupId / flowlibs_InnovationTeamsChannelId to the Group and Channel IDs of the COE Teams channel that should receive the summary.

Authorize the three connections

Authorize Dataverse, Office 365 Outlook, and Microsoft Teams using a service account or the flow owner before turning the flow on.

Create the Dataverse backlog table

Create flowlibs_innovationbacklog with at minimum: flowlibs_ideatitle (Text), flowlibs_submittername (Text), flowlibs_ideadescription (Text), createdon (DateTime, auto).

Wire up the Microsoft Forms intake

Create the automation ideas Form and either point a companion flow at it or use a manual process to insert each submission into the Dataverse backlog table.

Tune the lookback window

Set flowlibs_InnovationLookbackDays to any integer (default 7). The recurrence trigger and lookback are independent, so a 14-day lookback with a weekly recurrence gives an overlapping rolling view.

Change cadence or recipient without editing the flow

Recipient, Teams target, and lookback are all environment-variable driven so updates are config-only. Adjust the Recurrence trigger only if you want a different day or time of week.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

concat('createdon ge ', formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow(), mul(int(variables('varLookbackDays')), -1)), 'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ'))

length(outputs('List_Recent_Backlog_Items')?['body/value'])

concat('<tr><td>', if(empty(items('Loop_Through_Backlog_Items')?['flowlibs_ideatitle']), '(no title)', items('Loop_Through_Backlog_Items')?['flowlibs_ideatitle']), '</td></tr>')

concat('Innovation Backlog Weekly Digest - ', formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'MMMM dd, yyyy'))