Moving Data from a SharePoint List to SQL Using Logic Apps - Introduction
As dev up approaches, I always get a little more inspired to go out and learn something new – and then share it with others! To me, that’s what dev up has always been about!
Lately, I’ve been really fascinated by this idea of democratizing IT. With the latest generation of tools like Power Apps and Power BI, Microsoft and others are making it ever easier to enable power users within our organizations, but the biggest change I’m seeing is the new people that are entering the workforce. Every generation is more tech-savvy than the previous one and it’s exciting to watch how quickly this newest workforce groks the technology, but also what they expect to be able to do.
This new generation of powers users not only do more by themselves, but they create at least two new opportunities:
- These new power users want more access to data. By directing your development staff to build a strong API Economy, you can enable more access to data while maintaining security and governance. (The cloud plays an important role here too, but we can talk about that later.)
- Jeff, you want to add an API Economy to my never-ending developer backlog?! Yes, but developing this API Economy can empower these power users to remove so much from your backlog in turn! Building a strong API Economy will help you modernize and develop your own applications as well. Your organization’s developer resources can then focus on the applications that are more complex and most business-critical.
I'm using SharePoint for a couple reasons, but it was the original power users tool for me. While I really started my development career with custom SharePoint web parts, as we sold our solution to customers, I was shocked by how many non-techies were creating SharePoint lists of all kinds of things that IT didn't have time for - they even created lists that referenced other lists! :0
The value of Logic Apps is appealing both to power users and to developers building an API Economy. Building a Logic App is mostly a drag-and-drop experience so it doesn't require in-depth development experience or tools beyond a browser. Those same Logic Apps can be exposed as an API allowing others to access the underlying data/logic. Flow is another alternative to Logic Apps (mostly because they are built on the same underlying platform).
Let me set the stage for this series of posts...
Sometimes there’s data stored in SharePoint lists that you need to migrate to a database for further analysis. Ideally, you’d just reference the data in the SharePoint list directly, but you may have to apply some transformation to that data. Logic Apps are an inexpensive and easy way to accomplish both.
In this series of posts, I’m going to copy some email aliases from a SharePoint list to my database using a Logic App to do so. This is a fairly straight-forward scenario to get us started, but there are some important concepts that will play out along the way.
If the concepts in this series are interesting to you, go register for the dev up conference near St. Louis, MO on Oct 8-10 and learn more about all kinds of technologies and trends.