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Business activities in the Information age are filled with repetitive tasks: receive an email, generate a purchase order, send a message, route a document, approve a time-off request. In many cases, these activities don't generate real value, though they do need to get done to help support business goals.Computers introduced the promise of helping us do more, but a lot of that has resulted in there being more to do in order to get the same value. What if we could use technology to handle routine tasks and save our strength for doing the things that require skill and thinking?In this book, we're going to learn the basics of Microsoft Power Automate, a tool designed to help you automate repetitive tasks and get you back to generating value. This newly-revised third edition includes expansions to include robotic process automation (RPA), artificial intelligence (AI), generative AI (GenAI), and governance...

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate, part of the Power Platform family of products, is a workflow engine that can be used to automate common business processes or sequences based on conditions or scenarios. Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow) is primarily a web-based tool designed to interface with a growing library of software from both Microsoft and other vendors. Due to its no-code/low-code design, Power Automate can be approached by individuals with any technical skill level—including office or business users with no coding experience, system administrators, and analysts. Power Automate also allows more advanced programmers to use complex integrations and develop custom code.

Power Automate Desktop

In early 2021, Microsoft introduced Power Automate Desktop—a product that could be used to help automate legacy business applications and processes using a new feature called Robotic Process Automation (RPA...

Choosing what to automate

Frequently, people do work that they don't need to do. However, it's important to differentiate between work that doesn't need to be done at all and work that needs to be done but doesn't require you to do it.From both the administrative and end-user perspectives, there are a number of activities, processes, and tasks in Office 365 and other line-of-business applications that can be automated through the use of Power Automate. Automation is a key business technology to reduce the impact of repetitive, low-skill tasks on the workforce. When thinking about business processes, they can generally be divided into one of the following four quadrants:

These quadrants make up a type of priority matrix (sometimes called an effort-impact or value-skill matrix). Here’s a breakdown of what each area means:

• High value, low skill: Requires...

Getting up to speed on general terminology

You've already seen a few terms, and if you're familiar with SharePoint or other collaboration tools, they may be recognizable. But just to make sure we have a solid foundation, we're going to go over some basic terminology, and then we'll start getting into specific Power Automate terminology.

Expanding into Power Automate terminology

As we begin working with Power Automate, it will be important to understand the core terminology that is being used. It’s also important to note that terminology periodically changes, so if you started using Power Automate a few years ago (for example, back when it was called Flow), you may want to read through and make sure you’re using current terminology and concepts. The following terms are generally organized in the order that you’ll encounter them in the book, which also corresponds to their increasing complexity and usage. You'll need to understand them so you can choose where to apply the correct business logic and processes. As you go through this book, if you encounter terms you don’t recognize, you can refer back to this section to help reorient yourself.

Getting Power Automate

Before you get started, you’ll need to make sure you have licenses that support the type of flows you want to create.As mentioned previously, Power Automate contains the concepts of standard and premium connectors. Standard connectors are available for all Power Automate plans, including the Power Automate plans that come with Microsoft 365 (also sometimes referred to as seeded licenses). Premium connectors (or features such as AI builder and robotic process automation) may require the use of a separate standalone Power Automate license. Additionally, Power Automate supports User and Capacity licensing. User licenses are applied to directly to users while capacity licenses are allocated to automations (such as a flow).

• Power Automate Premium (user license)
• Power Automate Process (capacity license)
• Power Automate Process Mining (user license)
• Power Automate Hosted RPA (capacity license)
• Power...

Summary

In this chapter, we discussed the high-level concepts of Power Automate, including how it relates to solving problems (such as business processes or workflows). We also covered introductory knowledge concepts such as actions, triggers, and conditions. Understanding the types of triggers and connectors will help you design flows and business processes that reduce repetitive work and produce value in your organization.In addition, understanding the features and terminology, we covered some of the updates and changes to Microsoft Power Automate since the last revision of this book, including the introduction of Power Automate Desktop and general availability of both Robotic Process Automation and AI Builder (along with the expansion and inclusion of generative AI features).We also touched on the licensing necessary to take advantage of Power Automate features.In the next chapter, we're going to begin exploring the Power Automate interface and use it to create simple...