Access needs to be granted, equipment prepared, documentation completed, and teams aligned long before day one. As a result, onboarding success depends less on how employee data is stored and more on the ability of an organization to collaborate across teams.

This is where SharePoint and Power Automate can play a critical role.

At DMC, we have evolved our own onboarding approach over time, moving from SharePoint Designer workflows to a more modern solution built on Power Automate, SharePoint lists, and Modern Pages. This approach has allowed our organization, as well as clients we’ve assisted, to create a more flexible and maintainable onboarding system aligned with current Microsoft 365 best practices.

If you are considering a SharePoint and Power Automate solution because you’ve outgrown the capabilities of your HRIS or you want to add some rigor to current manual processes, there are some important considerations to make before making the switch.

1. Consider Where HRIS Platforms Add Value and Where They Fall Short

HRISs play an essential role in onboarding. They are designed to manage employee records, benefits, and compliance-related processes, and they do this very well.

However, HRIS platforms are not typically built to orchestrate dynamic, cross-department workflows.

Common limitations include:

• Rigid, one-size-fits-all workflows.
• Limited configurability without vendor involvement.
• Lack of visibility for non-HR teams.
• Weak integration with the tools employees use every day, such as Teams and SharePoint.

As a result, teams often fall back on email, spreadsheets, or ad hoc tracking methods to fill the gaps.

HRIS systems are designed to manage employee data, not to coordinate operational tasks. And when those tasks apply to different teams across departments, HRIS systems can really fall short. This is not a shortcoming of HRIS platforms; it’s simply a matter of scope.

That said, the most effective approach is not to fully replace an HRIS but to extend it. This is where SharePoint and Power Automate can act as a flexible coordination layer, connecting people, tasks, and systems across the onboarding lifecycle.

2. Assess Your Current Onboarding Process and Requirements

Before designing a solution, it is important to understand how onboarding actually works in your organization today.

As we’ve mentioned, onboarding is not a single workflow. It is a collection of tasks owned by different teams, each with its own processes, timing, and requirements.

So, it’s important to ask some of the following questions before designing a new onboarding system:

• Who is responsible for each task? Responsibility often varies depending on the task and the employee. For example, setting up IT credentials may be handled centrally by a single team member, while preparing a desk or workspace may depend on local office staff.
• What tasks are required for different types of hires? Full-time employees, contractors, and remote workers may all follow different onboarding paths.
• How do onboarding tasks vary by office location? On-site onboarding tasks often differ from office to office. For example, one location may need to coordinate building access and employee badging, while another may need to prepare a parking space or other workspace accommodations.
• What documents, approvals, or systems are involved? Consider offer letters, compliance forms, equipment requests, and system access.
• How is progress tracked today? Many teams rely on email threads, spreadsheets, or disconnected tools, which can make it difficult to maintain visibility.

An effective onboarding system must reflect this complexity and variation. It needs to support cross-functional ownership while providing a single, clear view of progress.

3. Evaluate the Tradeoffs of Hard-Coded Onboarding Workflows

When HRIS platforms fall short in coordinating tasks, organizations often turn to custom workflows.

In many cases, these workflows are hard-coded to define:

• Which tasks are created.
• Who each task is assigned to.
• When tasks are triggered.
• How dependencies and due dates are structured.
• Which onboarding stage initiates the work.

This approach can work initially, especially for straightforward onboarding processes. However, onboarding rarely stays static.

As organizations grow and evolve, certain changes are inevitable. HR might introduce new compliance steps; a team may suddenly need to reassign responsibilities; new office locations may require different onboarding activities; a start date or timeline changes, etc.

When these rules are embedded into a workflow, even small changes call for developers to update, test, and redeploy every solution. Over time, this approach slows system improvement, increases maintenance, and introduces risk. Over time, this slows down improvement, increases maintenance overhead, and introduces risk.

The more rigid the system, the harder it becomes to adapt.

4. Consider a Configurable, Template-Driven Approach with SharePoint and Power Automate

A more flexible approach is to separate workflow logic from task definition.

Instead of hard-coding tasks into Power Automate flows, onboarding tasks can be stored as configurable templates in SharePoint lists. Each template defines the task, its owner, timing, and any relevant dependencies.

Power Automate can then dynamically read these templates and generate tasks based on the specific onboarding scenario.

This approach offers several advantages:

• Business users can manage the process without modifying workflows.
• Changes do not require redeployment, reducing dependency on developers.
• Onboarding can scale more easily across roles, locations, and employee types.
• Variations can be handled dynamically, rather than through separate workflows.

This model also complements HRIS platforms well. HRIS systems remain the source of truth for employee data, while SharePoint and Power Automate handle task coordination and execution.

5. Plan for Visibility, Ownership, and Adaptation

The most effective onboarding systems make work visible and ownership clear.

Key design considerations include:

• Role-based views for HR, IT, managers, and employees.
• Clear task ownership, so nothing falls between teams.
• Real-time status tracking, reducing the need for follow-ups.
• Scalability, to support new roles, locations, and hiring volume.
• Reusability, allowing the same framework to support offboarding and other workflows.

When teams can see what needs to be done, who is responsible, and what is complete, onboarding becomes more predictable and less dependent on manual coordination.

A Flexible, Modern Approach to Onboarding

HRIS platforms are essential for managing employee data and meeting compliance standards, but can fall short when it comes to onboarding task management. SharePoint and Power Automate can help coordinate teams through essential onboarding tasks, from the moment a new hire signs their offer letter to long after their first day.

Whether you’re looking to extend an existing onboarding process or build something new, DMC can help! We’ve assisted organizations in moving from spreadsheets and email-driven processes to scalable, automated onboarding systems built on Microsoft 365. By combining these tools and adopting a configurable, template-driven approach using SharePoint and Power Automate, organizations can build onboarding workflows that adapt over time and grow with the team.

The post Extending Your HRIS with SharePoint and Power Automate for Employee Onboarding appeared first on DMC, Inc..

Requirements

Power Automate

We will use Power Automate, Microsoft’s cloud-based business automation platform, to automate this process. In Power Automate, a single executable task is called a flow. Each component of a flow is called an action.

To copy and populate Word documents in Power Automate, we must use an action from the Word Online connector which requires a Power Automate Premium account.

SharePoint Online

For the flow we will write, we need a cloud-based location to source the Word document template and a destination to send the populated template copy. If your organization uses SharePoint Online, there are actions we can add that retrieve and save files in SharePoint out of the box!

Word

The document templates are created in Word and saved as a .docx file.

Implementation

Part 1: Creating Your Word Template

Let us start off with an example document template that has some placeholder fields.

To denote the {insert} placeholder values as fields that we want to be able to overwrite with our flow, mark each of them as a “Plain Text Control” which you can do on the “Developer” tab in the Word editor.

We can then configure the control by selecting it on the page (it should show up as a gray box outline around the placeholder text) and select the “Control Properties” widget next to the plain text control button.

This will open the following dialog. You can name the control anything, but make sure it is descriptive if you are adding multiple controls to your template so there is no confusion when connecting data sources to the controls in Power Automate.

At this point, the file is ready for use as a template. Let us save it to a location in SharePoint Online so that our Power Automate flow can make copies of it. If the account creating the flow is different from the account which uploads the document, make sure that it is saved to a location that the former can also access.

Part 2: Creating the Flow in Power Automate

To create the template population flow, go to the Power Automate console in your browser and click “Create.” The type of flow you create depends on what will trigger it. There are three cloud-native flow types available:

1. Automated Cloud flow – a flow that is triggered through a designated event.
2. Instant Cloud flow – a flow that is triggered manually through the Power Automate console or through an external command like an HTTP request.
3. Scheduled flow – a flow that is triggered automatically on a set schedule.

Your situation may differ, but as an example, we will create a flow that is manually triggered via an HTTP request that contains all the data populated to the template.

Once we’ve created the flow, we need to source the content that will populate our template. Since our content passes into the flow with the HTTP request trigger, we will update the output schema of the trigger so we have references to the values we want to pull from the request body. Again, this will differ based on the type of trigger/data source for your flow. Here is an example of what this looks like with our example HTTP trigger, where we define the input schema and specify that the request includes the “projectName” value.

Next, we will add the “Populate a Microsoft Word Template” action. When we select the template file, we can see the control fields that can be populated in our flow in the “Advanced Parameters” section, identified by the names we specified in the template document. We will specify the values that should be inserted to each field.

The output of the Word connector is an unsaved copy of our populated template file, which we will then pipe to the “Create File” action that saves the file in a specified location in SharePoint.

Once you specify the location to save the file, the flow is complete. Go ahead and save the flow and test it out.

Further Considerations

As stated before, access to template documents is not guaranteed when you create the flow, based on the SharePoint sites your account has access to. It may be worth setting up flows with an admin account in your organization to ensure they will not break if permissions for certain users are modified. Additionally, updating the template file may cause issues, as references to the control fields in your flow may break when the source template document is updated in the future. If your flow is mission-critical, make sure there is a well-defined system for modifying your template files to avoid any unexpected failures.

Power Automate is incredibly useful for automating workflows like these Word templates we have populated. Additionally, you can easily extend a flow like this with conditional logic or other downstream actions for SharePoint/other integrated services, all in one portal. DMC has extensive experience with Power Automate and many other digital workplace technologies. To see how your business processes can be optimized, give us a call!

The post Copying and Populating Word Documents in SharePoint Online Using Power Automate appeared first on DMC, Inc..

You may have heard the news on July 6, 2020, that SharePoint 2010 workflows are being retired this year, and likely have a lot of questions. If you are hearing this news for the first time, below is an excerpt from Microsoft’s official announcement.

• Starting August 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants.
• Starting November 1st, 2020, Microsoft will begin to remove the ability to run or create SharePoint 2010 workflows from existing tenants.
• Starting November 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2013 workflows will be turned off for newly created tenants.

If you are not familiar with SharePoint Online tenants and how they work, you may have some questions.

What do these dates mean?

If you are currently using SharePoint Online (Office 365), starting on November 1st, 2020, SharePoint 2010 workflows will stop working. While it may not happen on the first of the month, all tenants will be affected eventually. Microsoft rolls these changes out gradually rather than all at once, and eventually, all tenants are affected, regardless of size.

If you are using SharePoint on-premises, you will not be affected. However, if you are considering migrating your on-premises SharePoint implementation to Office 365, or implementing SharePoint Online for the first time, any tenants created on or after August 1st, 2020, will not have the ability to create or run 2010 workflows. If you are migrating to SharePoint Online and have SharePoint 2010 workflows, you will need to replace them.

Will this affect my SharePoint Sites?

To answer this you must answer two questions.

1. Are you using SharePoint Online or SharePoint on-premises?
   If you are using SharePoint on-premises, then you will not be affected by this change, although you should still consider a migration plan, as what is implemented in SharePoint Online will inevitably follow to the on-premises versions of SharePoint. If you are using SharePoint Online, you may be affected by future changes.
2. Do you have any SharePoint 2010 workflows?
   If you aren’t familiar with what type of workflows you use, you can check using Microsoft’s SharePoint Modernization Scanner. It will scan your SharePoint sites and detect the usage of any legacy workflows, including both SharePoint 2010 and 2013 workflows.

If you are using SharePoint Online and are running any SharePoint 2010 Workflows, you will be affected by this change.

I have 2010 workflows on SharePoint Online what should I do?

The short answer is that you will have to replace them.

The preferred platform to replace SharePoint workflows is Microsoft’s Power Automate. This offers a variety of benefits over using SharePoint workflows and can replace all the default functionality of SharePoint workflows. If you have extended SharePoint’s functionality with custom actions, you should review the available actions in Power Automate to duplicate these actions.

What about my SharePoint 2013 workflows?

As of right now, these workflows will continue to work as intended. They are considered “supported” but are also considered “deprecated”, which means no new features are going to be added to this service. In addition, any tenants created on or after November 1st will not have 2013 workflows as an option. This can be turned on using PowerShell if required.

How can DMC help?

This process can be daunting. Developing a plan of action and relying on experts with Power Automate experience will be invaluable in this time of transition. Our team will:

• Analyze your SharePoint site and prioritize workflows that must be rebuilt
• Determine if the processes that your 2010 workflows support should be rethought or redesigned
• Architect and design your workflows 
• (Re)Build workflows using Power Automate (a.k.a. Flow) 

DMC has a wealth of experience with migrating and building new Flows in Power Automate to manage, automate, and streamline business processes. Please contact us if you need assistance migrating your existing workflows or building new workflows to improve your business processes.

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