Power Automate:
Definition:
Power Automate is Microsoft’s cloud-based workflow engine. The platform can swiftly automate any task or process. Businesses can use it to automate recurring tasks to save time. It comes with a wide range of connectors that businesses can use to automate their current processes particularly if they are based on MS Office 365
Power Platform is a cloud-based platform that assists people in orchestrating workflows in their organization without placing any limits on their team sizes.
It has a low-code development mechanism that is packed with pre-built templates to provide further ease in developing automated workflows.
Robotic Process Automation (RPA) features for businesses are incorporated in Power Platform and these allow businesses to develop software solutions using modern apps with proper APIs and legacy applications that have missing or incomplete APIs.
Power Automate supports no-code/low-code development methodology which means anyone with basic or no coding knowledge can use it.
Anyone in a business organization who has permission to access Power Automate can use it to automate workflows and processes. With every new update, Microsoft makes Power Automate easier for people to use.
Power Platform work:
Now, some non-technical people may wonder what wizardry supports Power Platform. There are just five core flows that keep Power Platform running seamlessly like a well-oiled machine.
Automated Flows:
In automated flows, tasks are performed automatically after a set action or event is triggered.
Example:- A retail business can create a flow that would dispatch an email or a push notification on an app when someone buys a product using a specific discount code
Button Flows:
Button flows are seen as key time-savers in many organizations. These are flows that automate recurring tasks at a click or tap of a button depending on the hardware being used.
Example:- A department manager creates a button that automatically reminds their entire team to join a meeting or update their tasks. It may seem minuscule to some people, but it truly saves a lot of time in the long term.
Scheduled Flows:-
Scheduled flows, as the name suggests, are developed for pre-planned automated processes.
Example:- you need an hourly update on the sales figures across your multiple retail stores. You can create a scheduled flow here so one or more related tasks can execute automatically on regular basis to deliver timely reports into your inbox
Business Process Flows:-
Business process flows are used in governance management or matters related to compliance. These automate human-centric processes and ensure teams have a defined set of steps that need to be followed so the desired outcome is reached
UI Flows
These flows are extensively useful for applications that lack APIs for automation. UI flows bring RPA into workflows and aim to automate repetitive tasks by learning from user interface actions. It is done by recording and playing back actions carried out by users while they are working on a particular user interface.
Advantage of power automate
Boost productivity Build time-saving workflows into everything from individual tasks to large-scale systems with seamless integration using hundreds of prebuilt connectors.
Quickly and securely automate – at scale Enable everyon to build secure workflows with a no-code guided experience and cloud-based data loss prevention, identity, and access management services.
Put intelligent workflows to work Automate time-consuming manual tasks with built-in AI capabilities, giving you more time to focus on strategic, high-value opportunities
In Power Automate, creating a UI flow is a point-and-click experience, though it does require some coding experience.
We can do both API-based automation and UI-based automation.
It has pre-built connectors for more than 275 apps and services that do support API automation.
Power Automate enables us to automate windows-based applications using recorders, orchestrate tasks across APIs, SAS providers, and databases.
Power virtual agents and AI builders let us create a chat-bot that can be integrated with Teams, Facebook messenger, and in our own application.
It’s AI models provide Key phrase extraction, Language detection, Text recognition, Sentiment analysis, etc.
AI builder let Think form processing, object detection, and text and binary classification.
It has the Microsoft bot framework and cognitive technology integrated with it to develop chat-bots seamlessly.
Thousands of pre-built templates to automate common business processes immediately
Power Platform work:
People spend extensive hours executing recurring tasks. These tasks, if automated, can save a lot of time.
The saved time can then be used to focus on the strategic side of the business or to improve the skills of the employees and boost the efficiency of the organizations.
Email attachments received on Outlook get automatically saved in the right folders in your OneDrive.
You receive periodic sales insights or weekly notifications of financial operations from your CRM (Customer Relationship Management) solution without having to manually generate reports against set KPIs (Key Performance Indicators).
You schedule any new event in your calendar and you, along with all other relevant people, receive an alert email in your Outlook.