Microsoft's Power Automate represents a valuable resource for companies looking to optimize their operational processes. This automation platform offers a wide range of features designed to simplify daily tasks, allowing organizations to save time and focus on more strategic business objectives. From the creation of customized workflows to the automatic management of communications and the integration of different business applications, Power Automate offers a wide range of tools that allow companies to improve operational efficiency and overall productivity.
In recent years, we have witnessed a significant transformation in the way in which companies manage their application automations, moving from traditional automations such as SharePoint Designer to modern workflows offered by platforms such as Power Automate of Microsoft Power Platform.
This evolution represents a paradigm shift towards a generation of more intuitive and adaptable workflows, which stand out for their ease of construction and flexibility of use. With Power Automate, you can automate a wide range of tasks and processes through a user-friendly, low-code interface, requiring no programming skills.
The platform offers its users predefined templates and personalized suggestions, allowing them to easily create workflows tailored to their needs.
In this article, we'll explore the reasons why Power Automate proves to be an indispensable tool for improving workplace efficiency, its key features, and the process of creating one of its modern workflows.
The Microsoft 365 Power Platform suite is a comprehensive set of tools designed to optimize and automate critical business processes. At its core, we find Power Automate, an application included in the normal Microsoft 365 licenses, which aims to simplify and automate daily activities within complex organizations, such as companies and institutions.
This tool fits perfectly into the suite's wider objective, which aims to provide advanced solutions for managing and optimizing business workflows. Alongside Power Automate, there are other complementary tools, such as Power Apps and Power BI, which together constitute an integrated ecosystem for automation and data analysis.
Power Apps allows users to create stand-alone applications highly customizable, which can integrate with other platforms to extend their functionality and improve operational efficiency. This tool offers the flexibility necessary to adapt applications to the specific needs of the company, allowing for modifying native system elements and the implementation of advanced operating logic.
On the other hand, Power BI simplifies the integration of different data sources for the creation of dynamic reports and interactive graphs, giving users a comprehensive overview of business performance and market trends. Overall, the three Power Platform applications represent a breakthrough in the design of a digital work environment, offering users a wide range of tools for automating tasks, customizing applications and advanced data analysis.
Importantly, the suite is designed to be accessible to everyone, regardless of the level of technical expertise, thanks to an intuitive interface and a series of integrated support tools. In this way, Power Platform is a valuable ally for companies looking for innovative solutions to improve operational efficiency and stimulate business growth.
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As anticipated, the purpose of Power Automate of Microsoft Power Platform is to simplify the automation of a myriad of activities and business processes. In most cases, it involves automating repetitive procedures that, when carried out manually, drain the time and energy of the people involved. To achieve its goal, Power Automate is based on 5 main features (which you can find in the command bar on the left of the user interface). Let's see them in detail.
By clicking on the 'Create' tab, you can start build a personalized workflow. In other words, from scratch.
However, Power Automate was created to be practical and intuitive and, therefore, throughout the process of configuring your workflow, will offer you advice and instructions to guide you from the first steps. In fact, after selecting 'Create', it will propose 3 types of flow to choose from to direct the configuration of your flow. Specifically, you can choose to create:
In short, the “Create” functionality allows you to configure an automatic, manual or programmed flow starting from an empty design canvas. If you are wondering if it is possible to use a pre-configured base to save time in creating your flows, find the answer in the following point.
By clicking on the 'Templates' tab, find a catalog containing the most popular workflows.nYou just have to select one to open the related flow already set up and start customizing the Actions it contains. In this way, you will obtain your automation, fast and precise.
It is important to emphasize that the Power Automate catalog contains ready-to-use flow canvases with +80 combinations of different connectors. Connectors are nothing more than the applications to which it is possible to link automation, which can also lead to the integration of two or more of these platforms. For example, you can start an approval flow that starts from Approvals to arrive in SharePoint Online and Microsoft Teams environments.
In addition, the applications that perform the function of Connectors belong both to the various Microsoft suites and to third parties. Let's think about the Twitter app, Adobe and many others. The latter may prove useful for expanding the functionality of Microsoft tools; however, you should know that some of these external apps can only be connected to your flows in Premium mode.
From the 'Monitor' tab, you can access the Power Automate section that provides you with dashboards, tables and graphs to keep your desktop and cloud flows under control.
By filtering these analytical tools, you can obtain useful information such as:
Thanks to these and many other metrics, Power Automate tries to help you verify the effectiveness of your automations, tracking them in detail and showing you where to intervene to prevent them from failing.
AI Builder is a new feature in Power Automate. It was designed for Add artificial intelligence to personalized user flows, thus helping them to predict the performance of individual workflows and their impact on business processes.
In fact, the models you find in the “AI Builder” tab allow you to create flows integrated with Microsoft's artificial intelligence, which makes your workflows improve with each execution cycle. What does it mean? In practice, you have the option of create flows capable of learning and improving over time.
For example, you can teach them to recognize and catalog certain sets of products based on different business data, such as images or tags. After a period of training, your intelligent flow can recognize the type and number of products present in a single image. In short, the use cases are numerous, since you can create them both with the models that Power Automate makes available to you and with the flows that you decide to create from scratch.
The constant remains the ability to apply AI-based flows to your company's processes without you having to write code and without the need to integrate different platforms to achieve satisfactory automations. In a single environment, you will find all the tools you need and that you can use intuitively, following the indications of your design canvases.
This Power Automate feature is particularly useful for companies, professionals and professionals who are taking their first steps in the world of automation. Process Advisor, in fact, identify the processes and activities to be automated. To do this, analyze your company's processes and give priority to those that:
These processes can then be automated in their entirety or only in part. In fact, Process Advisor breaks down each process into individual activities, ordered according to their execution time, so that you can understand which of them represent the best opportunities for automation.
But this feature doesn't just show you the way: it accompanies you on your way.
Once critical processes and activities have been identified, Process Advisor guides you in creating the right workflow to automate them. In particular, you are recommended the Connectors to be inserted in the process and the necessary Actions that the flow must perform to achieve the objective. In this way, you will be sure not only that you have built effective automations, but also that you have eliminated precise and concrete obstacles with them for your work and that of your team.
Now that we've seen what the main features of Power Automate are and what they allow you to do, it's time to address another key topic for our talk. We're talking about how you can build an automated flow in practice. As a result, it's essential to know which components you need to use to get the right workflow for every occasion. From the Connectors to the Conditions, Power Automate will have no more secrets for you.
The term 'Trigger' refers to the event that triggers a flow.
When creating an automation, it is essential to indicate the event that will start the process. Depending on the type of event, you will create a manual, programmed or automatic flow (as we saw in the previous chapter).
To select your Trigger, however, you must first choose the Starting Connector.
As mentioned in the last chapter, Connectors are nothing more than the applications that Power Automate allows you to integrate into its flows. Among these platforms, you can find applications from all Microsoft suites or from third parties (although the latter can often only be used in Premium mode). What we want to emphasize here is the fact that each Connector has a particular set of Trigger, deriving from its functionalities.
Let's consider the example of SharePoint. In this case, users have at their disposal a list of +10 Triggers related to events that may happen on this specific platform, such as the creation of a new object in a list or the request by a vertical site to be connected to a hub site.
Therefore, users must understand which platform offers them the most suitable functionality for the process to be automated and choose one of the predefined Triggers to start configuring their workflow.
Actions are what the flow must do to achieve its purpose.
These components may depend on a Connector, therefore on its functionality, or they may carry out a control activity. Let's start with the first type.
The Actions linked to a Connector are the actions that the flow can carry out based on the specific functionality of the chosen Connector. For example, SharePoint may allow your workflow to perform one or more of the following Actions:
Control Actions, on the other hand, are independent of the Connectors and are responsible for giving a precise direction to your flow. Sometimes, in fact, it may be necessary customize the consequences of a Trigger or Action. For example, in the case of a Trigger such as 'Creating a New File' in a SharePoint list, you might want to direct your workflow more closely to start it only when the file is marked with the 'Approved' tag. In addition, you may want to insert a bifurcation within your flow, giving it a precise direction depending on the result of a previous Action.
To do it, it will be enough for you enter the Control Action called 'Condition'.
By selecting this type of Action, you can indicate the logical expression that will determine if the Condition is met or not. In the first case, the flow proceeds to carry out the Actions that constitute the defined path”If yes”. In the second case, however, it will proceed along the path called”If no”. In this way, you can create two paths based on a logic of mutual exclusion. But let's take an example to clarify.
If you have included the Forms Connector in your flow, you could send a notification to a group of users each time you receive a 5-star score in response to one of the questions in the form. So, you must enter a Condition and match the name of the specific question with the value you want. In this case, you will write an expression like the following: “Give your assessment of our course” Equal To “5”.
Along the way”If yes”, you can then compose the notification email and indicate the group of users to whom the flow should send it every time the Condition is met, or when you receive 5 as an answer to your question.
An additional type of Action that you can use is the one called”Scope”, or of scope. The Scope Action is used to group a series of thematic activities into a single section of the workflow. In other words, Power Automate allows you to isolate a group of Actions that the flow must perform and that relate to a specific part of the process.
For example, you could bring together in one section all the Actions involving the Microsoft Teams platform in the context of a larger approval process. By doing so, if errors should occur in the part of the flow that concerns its interaction with Teams, you can quickly locate the Actions to be checked.
After you have finished configuring your workflow, know that you can save your workflows to use them again in the future. To do this, you have two ways:
These steps allow you to connect the same workflow to different lists, libraries, and other elements. In fact, keep in mind that an element of a platform can connect to different automated flows, but A flow can only bind to one element at a time. The unidirectionality of the workflows is a small disadvantage compared to the landscape of opportunities to which Power Automate gives access; however, it is not the only limitation of this tool. We'll talk more about it in the next chapter.
As we have seen, Power Automate puts in your hands the tools you need to improve not only your digital work environment, but your company's processes as a whole.
With features like”AI Builder”,”Process Advisor”, “Models” and “Monitor”, this tool helps you to identify the structural weaknesses of your processes, to build flows capable of learning, to keep under control the execution of your automations and to solve any problem as quickly and painlessly as possible. It is not necessary to extend the list of advantages to understand their scope.
On the contrary, we think it's useful to dwell on the limitations of Power Automate to conclude the picture we've explored together so far. Here's everything you can't do with Power Automate:
If the flow does not reach the end of its cycle within this period, it will be deactivated and you will have to restart it manually to complete the process. This limitation, although the only one limiting the capabilities of the platform, is quite impactful for users, especially when they find themselves managing particularly long and structured flows.
However, there is a solution. In fact, two.
If the flow needs to get a response from one or more users to continue on its journey, enter an Action at the beginning of the process to send a notification on Teams as a reminder for the people involved. If you think that the risk of delays is still important, then we recommend that you divide your flow into shorter and concatenated processes. This way, you don't have to fear that your automations will fail and you won't have to restart them manually.
The Modern Apps team specializes in development and integration across the entire Microsoft 365 ecosystem. We design native applications for Microsoft and Azure platforms, and implement business processes that integrate with and maximize the investment in Microsoft 365.
