Google Workspace Workflow Automation

Google Workspace (formerly G Suite or Google Apps) is a popular collaboration tool and productivity platform, used by more than half of businesses globally. Born in the cloud, the Google Suite provides excellent services that suit modern businesses – and we just love the integrated, collaborative features on offer. With Google Workspace tools at our fingertips including Gmail, Google Drive, Google Sheets, Google Docs, and Google Forms, we’re able to work more efficiently, and smarter, with other people.

However, that’s only going to get you so far. Considering increasing competition and a challenging market, regardless of your industry, it’s time to enable a competitive advantage for your business with an intelligent Google Workspace workflow automation platform.

Until recently, the only option for Google Workspace users to automate their workflows has been with Apps Script, which creates serious limitations for some businesses as it requires programming skills to create and maintain the code. A great fit for automating more complex processes, Apps Script automations can be incredibly time and cost intensive to maintain and adapt to your ever-changing business environment, if used to automate all your business’ Google workflows.

Google Workspace Workflow Automation, Simplified.

This is where zenphi shines. An extremely powerful and easy to use no-code Google Workspace workflow automation platform, zenphi empowers all Google Workspace users to automate their own processes. Built on Google, for Google, zenphi runs on the Google Cloud, providing peace of mind that your data is treated with the same care for security and privacy as your Google Workspace data.

With zenphi, you can create Google Forms Workflows that act automatically on a Google Forms submission, or easily create a Document Approval Workflow for your Google Docs. Plus, you can combine human and Artificial Intelligence in your workflows with Intelligent Document Processing (IDP) solutions. And, what about creating Gmail Mail Merges using your data stored in Google Sheets and integrating with other systems you use like Jira, Salesforce, HubSpot or Twilio?

You can achieve this all in a few drags and drops, without writing a single line of code. The best part is that if you can draw a flowchart for your process, you can automate it with zenphi.

Check out zenphi’s YouTube channel to learn more and see how zenphi users successfully automate their Google Workspace workflows.

What is zenphi?

Zenphi is a no-code process automation tool built specifically for Google Workspace, empowering IT teams and business users to automate any process without writing a single line of code. From simple workflows to your most complex processes that take months or even years to run completely across multiple departments, zenphi can help you to automate it.

Equipped with advanced features like State Machine, Parallel, Branches, Task Form and Conditional Switch, zenphi enables you to create solutions as sophisticated as you need them to be. And, aside from zenphi’s extensive integration with Google Workspace, its native integration with systems like Salesforce, HubSpot, Jira, Twilio, DocuSign and many more, opens the door to easily communicate with multiple systems as part of your unique automated process, with no Apps Script or code required.

Before getting started, here are the five basic concepts of zenphi’s no-code automation to familiarize yourself with:

1. Flow

Everything in zenphi revolves around Flows. A Flow is the implementation of a process or part of a process. For example, you may have a process for employees to request a new laptop, in which an employee submits a request. In that case the manager should approve it, and then IT should order the laptop.

To automate this process, you create a Flow that starts with the Google Form that employees use to submit their requests. The Flow then identifies the requester’s manager and assigns her a task to approve the request. If she approves the request, it will send an email to IT or over the laptop.


: Easily automate your Workflow on Google Workspace.

2. Trigger

We call the event that initiates your process (or Flow in this case) a Trigger. For example, you may want your Flow to start when a specific Google Form is submitted or when an email arrives in a particular Gmail inbox.

The events that trigger a Flow to start are not limited to the world of Google Workspace. They also can be events from other systems that you use and integrate with zenphi, or even manual events that you or your colleagues initiate.

Once you tell zenphi the systems and events you want to monitor, zenphi continuously keeps an eye on it.

Each Trigger may have metadata that translates into Start Parameters for the Flow. For example, if your Google Form captures First Name, Last Name, and Date of Birth, those values are passed to the Flow as Start Parameters. Please note that the type of Trigger you choose determines which Start Parameters you can use in a Flow.

A selection of Triggers available in zenphi.

3. Action/Step

Actions or Steps are the building blocks of your Flow. Each Action can perform one of the following tasks:

Interact with another system or person, e.g. add a row to Sheets, post a message to Slack, send an email, or assign a task to a person
Evaluate a condition, e.g. if condition, switch based on a certain value, state machine, loop until
Perform an operation, e.g. format a date or a number, convert a number, get the current date and time, multiply/add/subtract/divide numbers
Auditing and debugging, e.g. log to history.

Depending on how you define your process, Actions happen one after the other (sequentially) or at the same moment (in parallel). To add an Action to your process, simply drag, drop and configure it.

Some Actions have output, and some don’t. If they do, the output of that Action is available to all following Actions in the Flow.

To configure an Action, click on the cogs icon, and start setting values in the sliding panel. Wherever you see the “variable picker” icon, it means you can dynamically configure that Action to use Start Parameters or the output of previous Actions. For example, you can construct the email subject to use the values you received from the Google Form that started the Flow.

4. Connection

If you want to update a Google Sheet as part of your process, you need to create a Google Sheet Connection so that zenphi can update your Google Sheet. This Connection grants zenphi access to the Google Sheet file on your behalf. Some of the Connections are read-only, which are good enough if you only need to read data from those systems. If your process needs to edit anything in a system, you should use the standard Connection.

Some of the out-of-the-box Connections available with zenphi.

Above are some of the out-of-the-box Connections zenphi has made available. New Connections are frequently made available to allow you to connect easily with the systems and platforms of your choice. Plus, with zenphi’s Webhook/HTTP Connection, you can connect to any system or platform for which zenphi does not have an out-of-the-box Connection.

To use a Connection, you must first create and authorize that Connection to access data on your behalf. After this, simply add the Connection to your Flow in the settings from an Action.

You can create a connection from the Connections page or click on the “+” sign in the Connections control in an Action. You don’t need to create new Connections for every Action or Flow – different actions in different Flows can reuse the same Connections.

5. Flow Runs

Once you finish the design of your Flow, you publish the Flow so that a Trigger will start the execution of the Flow. Each time the configured Trigger fires, zenphi creates an instance of the Flow and executes it. We call the execution of a Flow a “Flow Run”.

When Google Forms are submitted, zenphi creates an instance of the Flow linked with the Google Form, and will execute all Actions you have defined in the Flow. Or, if you have configured your Flow Trigger to run every one hour, an instance of the Flow is started and completed every hour.

A Flow Run can have different statuses: Executing, Completed, Failed, Canceled, or Skipped. When a Flow Run fails, something went wrong during the execution of the Flow. You can then identify the cause of the failure, correct it, and re-run the flow. In some cases, you can continue the execution from the moment the Flow Run failed.

You can see all Flow Runs in the “Recent Runs” section, including previous Flow Runs and their status. If you would like to see the details of a Flow Run, you can click on it and see the executed Actions, how long it took, and more information about the Flow Run.

Now that you understand the five fundamental concepts of zenphi as it relates to business workflow automation, it’s time to try zenphi for yourself and experience how easy it can be to automate your Google Workspace processes.

If you have any questions or need assistance with setting up your workflows, our Success team is here to help you get up and running in no time. Simply book in for a complimentary 1:1 demo to get started.