Dropbox New File to SharePoint Governance

Overview

This flow centralizes Dropbox content into governed Microsoft 365 storage. When a file lands in a watched Dropbox folder, the flow reads the file bytes and its Dropbox metadata, copies it into a structured SharePoint document library, writes an immutable audit row to a Dataverse governance-log table (file name, source path, SharePoint URL, size, retention label, correlation id), and notifies the content owner in Microsoft Teams.

Why it matters: content split between Dropbox and Microsoft 365 is hard to govern. Mirroring Dropbox files into SharePoint with metadata, a retention label, and a system-of-record audit trail brings shadow content under policy and gives compliance a single place to query what was ingested, from where, and when.

Ships Off (demo).

Use Case

A team receives working files in a shared Dropbox folder that must be governed in SharePoint under a retention policy. IT Admins and Operations want every inbound file automatically copied into a governed library, logged for audit, and surfaced to the owner.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Note — All connections are referenced as solution connection references; the flow is portable between environments as long as a connection is mapped at import time.

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Dedup

Before copy, query the governance log by Dropbox file id (or hash) and skip if already ingested.

Routing by type/path

Switch the governed library path based on file extension or Dropbox subfolder to land files in different libraries.

Real retention

Map flowlibs_RetentionLabel to a published SharePoint retention/compliance label and apply it to the created file's list item.

Owner resolution

Derive the owner from the Dropbox path or a lookup table instead of a single env var.

Two-way sync

Add an OnUpdatedFile companion flow to keep Dropbox and SharePoint aligned (propagate the same correlation id).

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

triggerOutputs()?['headers']?['x-ms-file-name']

triggerBody()

concat(variables('varSharePointSite'), body('Copy_File_to_Governed_SharePoint_Library')?['Path'])

body('Get_Dropbox_File_Metadata')?['Size']