Duplicate App Name Detection Report

Overview

A scheduled Power Automate cloud flow that runs every Monday at 8:00 AM UTC, reads the full canvas app inventory from Dataverse, normalizes each app's display name, flags apps whose normalized names collide, appends a snapshot row to an Excel workbook in SharePoint, and emails the COE lead an HTML report of the flagged duplicates. Ships Off — only connection authorization and a few environment variable values are required to enable it in a new tenant.

Use Case

App sprawl is a silent tax on any Power Platform COE. When makers copy apps between environments, rename things inconsistently (Time-Off Tracker, timeoff tracker, Time Off Tracker), or stand up near-identical apps in parallel, the COE ends up with clusters that should be consolidated but nobody notices. This flow gives the COE lead a weekly, automatically generated list of collision candidates so they can have the conversation before the clusters grow.

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.

Authorize all three connections

On first open, authorize Dataverse, Excel Online (Business), and Office 365 Outlook. The designer will prompt; click Add new connection for each.

Create the target Excel workbook

Provision a workbook in the SharePoint site configured by flowlibs_DuplicateAppExcelSiteUrl. The workbook should live at the path in flowlibs_DuplicateAppExcelFile and contain a table whose name matches flowlibs_DuplicateAppExcelTable. Required columns: ReportDate, TotalApps, DuplicateAppCount, Environment.

Update flowlibs_DuplicateAppExcelDriveId

Replace the <configure> placeholder with the real Graph drive ID for that library. You can find it via the Excel Online connector's picker in the designer or via GET https://graph.microsoft.com/v1.0/sites/{siteId}/drives.

Update flowlibs_COELeadEmail

Set the env var to the real distribution list or person who owns app governance.

Tighten the normalization rule (optional)

Inside Select Normalized Apps, the default strips spaces and hyphens. You can extend it to strip underscores, perform plural stripping, or apply Soundex-style encoding depending on how aggressive you want duplicate detection to be.

Turn the flow On

Once env vars and connections are wired up, turn the flow on from the solution page — it ships in the Stopped state.

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.

formatDateTime(utcNow(), 'yyyy-MM-dd')

toLower(trim(replace(replace(coalesce(item()?['displayname'], ''), ' ', ''), '-', '')))

@equals(item()?['normalizedName'], items('Apply_To_Each_App_For_Duplicate_Check')?['normalizedName'])

@greater(length(body('Filter_Apps_With_Same_Normalized_Name')), 1)

@{concat('Duplicate App Name Detection Report - ', variables('varReportDate'))}