Desktop Flow Ownership questions

[ksoze92]

Hello there,

I am building a PAD flow that I want to share with some colleagues so that they can run it locally under their computer.

I have built this desktop flow under my personal user account and my idea is to share it with ~20 colleagues. 

Thing is that I don't want the desktop flow to be removed or disabled in case I leave the company, hence my idea is to change the ownership of the Desktop Flow to a service account (e.g. "pa_techaccount").

My questions are:

1. Is it a good idea to make a service generic account the Owner of the flow and put myself and other 1-2 colleagues as co-owners? (in case the PAD flow needs to be changed or fixes, it would be me or these 1-2 colleagues the ones who would fix it). We would share the flow (with run-only permissions) with the remaining business users
2. What happens if the Owner of the desktop flow (let's assume that in this scenario the owner is my personal user) leaves the company? (i.e. his account is removed) Is the desktop flow removed? If there are other co-owners and the owner account is the one being removed, is the desktop flow removed?

Thanks a lot!

[Deenuji · Accepted solution]

@ksoze92
Is it a good idea to make a service generic account the Owner of the flow and put myself and other 1-2 colleagues as co-owners?: You can create genric service account or add other 2 collegues as co-owners. Both approach should be fine.

What happens if the Owner of the desktop flow (let's assume that in this scenario the owner is my personal user) leaves the company? Since other co-owner are still exists in the organization your flow won't be consider as orphan flow hence it will not be removed as well. your flow will be in active till other two co-owner still there in your organization.

Hope this helps!!

Thanks,
Deenuji Loganathan 👩‍💻
Automation Evangelist 🤖
Follow me on LinkedIn 👥

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[cwischnewski]

That is one good option and what we do in our group.  We have 3 person group all creating and running desktop flows.  We login to a virtual machine as our service account to create the flows and share them with all members of the team.

Two other things to be aware of are putting flows in to environments other than the O365 Personal Productivity default environment, and use solutions.  So your company should have the ability to create environments, and it is good practice to build and test in different environments from daily run type production.  That also helps in keeping flows available after developers leave the company.  Then the Solution is how make copies of your flows to either capture point in time backups but also how you move flows between the environments.

Our practice is to develop and test our the flows, when ready to run on production data, we create and export a solution for the flow twice, once as unmanaged and once as managed.  The unmanaged solution can be useful if you get down the road and find something changed but you don't remember what, you can import an older unmanaged solution in dev to look at that older flow steps.  The managed solution is intended for migrating to production, with the idea that if there are changes needed once you migrate to that production environment, you make those changes in dev, re-export and import the update to prod.

Hope that helps.

[ksoze92]

Thanks a lot for the answer!

Yours is a great approach, but it's an approach for a company that has already a environment policy setup and are serious about ALM and development. My situation is within a company that is starting to "crawl" in Power Automate world and their intend is to make automations for citizen developers (accountants, finance people without coding expertise and basic knowledge of PAD) so that they can maintain and fix it, so simplicity is key here.

For now I'd stick to a PAD flow, making other 2-3 people as co-owners (including this service account), so that should do.

Thanks a lot!