The Collaboration Cases Between Office 365 and Cloud-based BPM Workflows

I often write articles about the collaboration between systems.
*You can read past articles here.

Customers have increasingly used Microsoft’s Groupware Office 365 in conjunction with Questetra, a cloud-based BPM Workflow, and I have received many questions from them.

I actually have covered some of them in the articles about the use cases as well.

Nihon Ichi Software, Inc.
They use Questetra for a variety of applications and requests for action, including approval requests for the budget for Developing Projects. In the day-to-day operations, they use the Groupware Office 365, for the Bulletin board, Email, Schedule management, Web conference. Configure and use a single sign-on environment in conjunction with Office365 / Azure AD and Questetra.

A certain parts manufacturer
They use Questetra for office work requests and managing inquiries to the finance department. They were originally almost bankrupted due to trying to manage their workload with Excel, but now their business progress is visible and they can efficiently deal with similar cases. They embed a request form to launch Questetra’s operations into SharePoint and use them in cooperation.

It’s difficult to define „collaboration“ easily because there are various cases, therefore I will introduce some of them in detail.

1: Integration with an Authentication Service (AzureAD)

I am primarily asked by customers about using single sign-on with their Office 365 accounts.That can be configured with Azure Active Directory (AAD or AzureAD) and SAML 2.0.
Please read an article below for more information.
Related article: Single Sign-on to Office 365 via SAML 2.0 (Setting for cooperation with Azure Active Directory)

Incidentally, you can use Active Directory Federation Service (ADFS) to link on-premises Active Directory (AD) via SAML 2.0.

2: Integration with a Chat Service (Teams)

I hear many customers would like to automatically post some processing results to Microsoft Teams.
Please read an article below for more information.
Related article: Posting to Microsoft Teams from Workflow

3: Integration with a Storage Service (OneDrive)

I often receive questions about how to automatically generate documents for customers, such as estimates, and automatically save a PDF file to the designated location in OneDrive.
Please read an article below for more information.
Related article: How to Output Files from Cloud-based Workflow Questetra to OneDrive

4: Integration with Excel

I sometimes receive questions about the automatic creation of a list by outputting data to Excel Online.
Please read the article below for more information.
Related article: How to Output Data to Excel Online From the Cloud-based Workflow Questetra (API Integration Setting Procedure)

On the other hand, I’m often asked how to start a Questetra workflow from an Excel list. I have experience in using VBA from a client application Excel list. (I apologize for not covering that here.)

You can also launch Questetra’s workflow from an individual application form in Excel.
I summarized that below, including VBA samples as well.
Related article: How to easily Start a Workflow from an Excel Spreadsheet

5. Supplement

OAuth requires some preparation (Application Registration) for collaboration with Office 365.
Please refer to the following procedures in the article below.
Related article: Application Registration Procedure in Office 365 for Linking Office 365 and Questetra Cloud Workflow with API

Moreover, Office 365 has multiple endpoints, which is pretty confusing. I’d like you to pay attention to old information when searching on the web site even though v2.0 has become the mainstream these days.
Please check the following article for more information.
Related article: How to Cooperate between Office 365 and Cloud-Based Workflow

This is off-topic, but the string length of the token in Office 365 tends to be so long compared to other services. Due to a specification limitation on Questetra, the token cannot be used as an Add-on XML (an element for the collaborations) for collaboration with OneDrive. (I think that can be changed in the future.)

6: Summary

Many other forms of collaboration can be envisioned, but I have summarized the range of my knowledge at this point.
Questetra has experience of accessing various REST APIs merely by configurations without programming, and I expect Questetra can handle various cases that are not introduced here. If you have other questions about things that are not covered in this article, please contact us via the inquiry form.

Apply for Starter Plan (Free) Here

By applying for the Webform here, you can create your own Free Questetra account and you will be able to use all the Questetra features including what I mentioned above.