We are very excited to announce the public release of our Logic Apps Preview Refresh. This brings a number of major improvements to the platform’s design, deploy, and manage experiences based on feedback from users. Creating powerful workflows and integrations in the cloud has never been easier. If you want to get started building a simple Logic App now, follow our getting started guide.

Here’s a few of the main highlights from the updates released this week:

Improved designer experience

We’ve deployed a brand new designer experience to make authoring workflows simple and powerful. You can easily search a number of available APIs, and flow data through each step of a workflow. In addition, you can deploy your own custom API Apps and access them easily in the designer. Within seconds you can have a reliable and scalable workflow to complete a task like: “When an FTP file is added, copy it to Azure Blob and add an entry to a SQL Azure database.”

Managed API connections

Previously in Logic Apps, when adding a connection to a service or protocol like OneDrive, Logic Apps would need to deploy a connector in your subscription as an API App. This added a lot of time and overhead during design, and made deployments of Logic Apps complex. We now have a set of secure, reliable, and scalable API connections already deployed that you can quickly include in your Logic App. This not only makes creating your first Logic Apps much faster, it also makes deployments very simple. For a full list of APIs we currently support out-of-the-box, check out this article.

Native Webhook support

Many services (Visual Studio Online, GitHub, Stripe, PayPal, and many more) allow you to subscribe to events by Webhook, and you can now have a Logic App trigger whenever an HTTP POST is received. In addition, you can pause and wait for a Webhook in the middle of a workflow. You can also return a customized response to the caller as an action within a workflow. Want to receive a text message whenever code is committed into your master branch, or a Stripe payment is processed? Logic Apps is perfect for that, allowing you to quickly integrate with a number of services and APIs.

What’s coming next?

This is just the beginning of some exciting new features we will be publishing over the next few months, including a growing list of managed APIs. If you’ve never used Logic Apps before, there has never been a better time to start. You more information about Logic Apps on our documentation page.

We also hope you can join our next monthly webcast on February 25 at 11:00 am PST. Follow us on Twitter to ask questions and stay up-to-date on the latest news.