Power Automate is one of the key components on which the Power Platform is built.
Main elements of the Power Platform:
(Update: Power Virtual Agents is now Copilot Studio).
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Microsoft Dataverse provides the data storage, Power Apps is in charge of the data manipulation and Power Automate provides business logic or process automation.
In short, Power Automate provides a canvas where you can graphically build business automation, following the low-code philosophy, which means that little or no code is required to build the desired functionality.
What can you expect from Power Automate? Here are a few examples of what you can do:
- Automate business processes.
- Send automatic reminders for past-due tasks.
- Move business data between systems on a schedule.
- Connect to more than 900 data sources or any publicly available API.
- Automate tasks on your local computer like computing data in Excel.
Power Automate is meant to automate pretty much any business process, following the low-code philosophy. This means that anyone in your organization, with little technical knowledge, can easily create workflows.
Workflow Types available within Power Automate
There are multiple Workflow Types available within Power Automate: Cloud Flows, Desktop Flows and Business Process Flows, and each type is designed to effectively tackle different types of automation.
Business Process Flows are a step-by-step guide for your users to get the work done in a consistent way. Through its stages, guides the users through the required steps to complete a task.
Desktop Flows are a form of automation specifically designed for existing web or desktop applications. Through Desktop flows you can record repetitive interactions, and through the user interface, interact with the application. This is especially useful for legacy applications that do not have an API exposed and can not be automated in any other way.
Cloud flows are the type of automation you want to use when you have access to exposed services or APIs and want to interact with them in a simple, no-coding required way. A good example is creating a flow that saves attachments when you receive an email from a specific person or a certain subject.
As with the other products from the Power Platform, there are various templates available that make the creation of Power Automate flows a very simple process, where you can start from scratch or use an existing example to speed up the creation process.
More information:
- What is Microsoft Dataverse?
- What is Power Apps Portals?
- Get started with Power Automate – Power Automate | Microsoft Docs
Photo by Maksym Tymchyk on Unsplash