PowerApps and Flow buttons are graduating out of preview!

Thank you all very much for the thoughtful feedback you have provided. I wanted to clarify a few things.

When we first added the PowerApps and Flow buttons to modern lists back in the second half of 2016, these products were still in preview. They have since moved to general availability and completed their certification processes earlier this year to certify that they are in compliance with the standards expected from workloads in Office 365. Microsoft Trust Center has detailed information about the current level of compliance for PowerApps and Flow. We would not be removing them from under the preview features switch if this were not the case. You should not have anything to worry about on the compliance front. We actually have a few customers who have been asking for this change knowing that PowerApps and Flow are now within the compliance boundary. The only exception to this is government cloud and sovereign cloud instances in Germany and China, where the buttons will remain off while PowerApps and Flow work on adding support for these environments.

Features like “Custom forms using PowerApps”, “Flow launch panel” and “Out of box review/approval flow” are set to become major features for SharePoint Online. We hear our customers desire to be able to control each new feature of SharePoint and turn it on or off on your own terms, but the permutations of different features and their interactions with each other makes the maintainability and support of our product prohibitively difficult, and moves us away from viewing SharePoint as a coherent whole, rather than a collection of independent features. So we want to avoid providing a switch for each feature even though this does provide our customers with peace of mind. We are trying to make new features as easy to learn as possible and to provide in box tutorials and guides where it makes sense to help end users succeed, and to also reduce the burden on you for creating comprehensive documentation and training. We acknowledge that we have more work to do here but our designer and UX writers are spending more effort here.

PowerApps and Flow both have admin centers that allow O365 admins to go in and see all of the apps and flows in the tenant, as well as take them over as needed when users leave an organization, or under other circumstances. They also allow you to set policies to prevent mixing SharePoint data with other connectors if you need to do that, and let admins download the list of active users who use these tools in their organizations. We also just announced that activities from Flow are also available in the O365 security and compliance center: https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/blog/security-and-compliance-center/. 

I also wanted to iterate that Flow and PowerApps always run in the context of a user, and they don't allow users to do anything that was beyond their reach previously. Savvy users today can use other third party automation solutions, or create code that will do the things that Flow and PowerApps can help them do without the data controls that Flow and PowerApps allow. It's true that under the trial licenses users can try out different features of Flow and PowerApps such as creating their own environments, but they would not be able to access other environments (including the default environment) like tenant administrators can, and their environments will expire after the trial period. 

The presence of Flow and PowerApps licenses for users is not checked by SharePoint UI. So the buttons will be visible regardless of the state of licenses for a given user. 

We want to find a healthy balance between helping you control your data, and providing your end users tools they can use to get work done without having to resort to non-compliant tools. We still think graduating these features out of preview is the correct thing to do here.

Our plan remains to start rolling this change out to First Release tenants by November 13, and then to Production tenants in two waves on November 27, and December 4th.