Sharing PowerAutomate Flows

Question

How Can I Share a PowerAutomate Flow?

Everything I have read about sharing flows seems to indicate that creating a Team Flow is the only way to do it. This solution really isn't acceptable for me though, because sharing a Team Flow makes everyone an owner. Users shouldn't be able to modify the flow!

Despite every indication that I must share the flow as a Team Flow, I accidentally discovered that maybe this isn't true? On a new testing account with no special permissions I triggered a Flow (using a button in PowerApps - the App is shared) and the flow ran, despite it not being shared! How is this possible? While logged in as the testing account, navigating to the team flows section of PowerAutomate shows that there are, in fact, no shared flows at all.

This behavior is also unacceptable for my project, as only people I specifically share the flow with should be allowed to run it. Am I missing something? The only documentation from Microsoft I can find on the topic is from 2017, which is likely out of date.

Answer 1

Flow has no concept of 'read only' access to the Flow itself. When you share a Flow you create, it automatically promotes it to a Team Flow, but as you noted you can only add them as Owners.

The Flow trigger can be initiated depending on the user permission to the location where the Flow itself triggers or in the case of SharePoint Online, if the List or Library is assigned the Flow. As you noted, because the PowerApp is shared and points to the Flow, end user permission to the Flow itself is not required as that is taken care of by your ownership of both objects.