Microsoft Power Automate
What is it?
Microsoft Power Automate, is the new name of the program formerly known as Microsoft Flow, it is a cloud-based tool, capable of connecting two or more applications (both Office 365 or third parties) and performing actions with the aim of automating routine business processes.
The Microsoft Power Automate tool allows you to create workflows by connecting two or more applications, using predesigned connectors, as well as providing the ability to create custom connectors, minimizing the time spent on repetitive tasks in a company. The workflows that can be created are automated and scalable and require no programming skills. This new Microsoft business system allows us to integrate and synchronize all of our data analysis with automated flows and applications. Microsoft Power Automate is designed to increase our business productivity and efficiency.
This application can migrate business data between systems, it communicates with almost 300 data sources or any publicly available API, which increases efficiency in any business and can even automate tasks on your local computer, such as calculating data in Excel. All this can be done by any type of user, thanks to its no-code / little-code platform.
In short, the goal of Microsoft Power Automate is to automate any repetitive, low-effort, time-consuming tasks such as sorting notifications, collecting data, alerts, etc. In addition, this tool comes with ready-to-use templates and recommendations of which applications can be linked.
Today there are powerful applications on the market capable of exponentially increasing productivity at work, but none of them are under a single platform like Microsoft Office 365.
General characteristics
- Microsoft Power Automate allows to create automated workflows between applications and services to get notifications, sync files, collect data, and much more.
- Allows you to automate almost any time-consuming task or process.
- Connect services. One flow connects your cloud-based data, files, and web services to save time and effort for all users.
- Start with a template. Microsoft Flow saves time and simplifies work life by connecting your services in one flow.
A practical example is to connect Sharepoint to Outlook, for example: every time a colleague sends you an attachment by email, with Microsoft Power Automate you upload the file directly to SharePoint. Another example could be linking Twitter to your Microsoft Power Automate. In this case, a process between these two can be automated; and that every time someone tweets about your brand, you receive a notification via email.
How does it add value to the organization?
In addition to announcing the name change to Power Automate, Redmond also announced the addition of robotic process automation (RPA) in this solution in November. With this capacity, Microsoft allows you to create connectors between almost 300 applications for companies in any sector and with different workflows. With this function access to APIs is no longer required. In addition, Microsoft seeks to solve the request of many of its clients, who did not have access to the systems APIs and had to waste a great deal of time in procedures to request them from their developers; With Power Automate you can finally solve this problem.
What Do RPA Features Offer?
With the RPA functionality, your company’s processes are automated using bots. With the help of this Artificial Intelligence, both you and your workers will stop performing repetitive tasks that are worthless for your organization, delegating them to these bots.
The new RPA capability in Power Automate is called UI flows. Which allows in case of not having access to the APIs, an automated workflow can be created by recording the manual interactions of a person with the system and reproducing them later.
With the RPA tool it is an end-to-end solution that encompasses artificial intelligence, API and UI. You can use Microsoft Power Automate to connect your applications and create a flow between them. For example, you can use Flow to copy data from one application to another automatically. In this way, your colleagues can easily share and access the data through various web applications.
As mentioned above for those of us who have previously worked with SharePoint Designer, Power Automate is the improved redesign of workflows that we could do with that tool. Now we can not only connect the SharePoint information, but all the Office 365 and third-party applications.
What are Power Automate connectors?
The connectors are the applications that we want to connect between them. Each connector or application has three important elements:
- Triggers: these start the workflow. For example, when a new email arrives or when a new document is saved to a specific folder, each connector has at least one or more triggers.
- Actions: Once the trigger has started, we must indicate what actions it has to perform. For example, when we receive an email from a certain person, I want Power Automate to do two actions: save the document in a certain folder and send an email to a certain person.
- Connections: Let’s not forget that when we want to connect two applications, Power Automate will ask us to enter credentials (username and password) for each application we want to use. The credentials we enter are encrypted with Microsoft’s security and can be easily erased whenever we want.
In the future we will be able to tell you about the integration with other new functionalities for Microsoft Power Platform
- Power Virtual Agents: this new “low code” service allows you to easily create intelligent virtual agents (without the need for programming) using a graphical interface that guides you through the process. Questions from clients or other types of external and internal inquiries are handled by a virtual agent, freeing up staff to focus on other tasks. If you want to create more complex applications (and that require programming), you will always have access to Azure Cognitive Services and Microsoft Bot Framework.
- Security enhancements for Power BI: Microsoft has added the information protection labels already used in Office to Power BI. These allow to differentiate the data that is confidential, even when it “leaves” Power BI to other applications such as Excel, Powerpoint or PDF. All this under the umbrella of Microsoft Cloud App Security, which allows you to monitor and protect activities that use critical data.
- Power Platform integration with Teams: Moving Power Platform apps to Teams means dashboards, apps, and automations will be within this app, making them easier to find, share with colleagues, and use on a day-to-day basis. There are quite a few news regarding this integration: For example, applications created in Power Apps can be shared in the Teams application gallery, and the possibility of pinning Power Apps to this application will be offered. Interactive cards that have content from a Power BI dashboard can also be created, and new Power Automate for Teams triggers will be enabled.
- AI Builder, new AI scenarios: It allows adapting AI to the specific needs of companies without the need to hire developers. Microsoft has introduced new pre-built AI models, which means that companies do not have to collect data, build or train their models. New AI scenarios include language detection, sentiment analysis, text recognition, or key phrase extraction.
Licensing
The price listed above is for business purposes only and may not reflect the actual price due to currency, country and regional variance factors. The actual price will be reflected at the completion of the purchase.
- 1 Purchasing and assigning plan licenses per flow or per user with Power Automate Attended RPA requires access to the Microsoft 365 Admin Center with the Global Admin or Billing Administrator roles.
- 2 Additional streams purchased for $ 1930 per stream / month can be purchased.
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