Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

By : Aaron Guilmette
4 (2)
Book Image

Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate - Second Edition

4 (2)
By: Aaron Guilmette

Overview of this book

MS Power Automate is a workflow automation tool built into MS 365 to help businesses automate repetitive tasks or trigger business processes without user intervention. It is a low-code tool that is part of the Microsoft applications framework, the Power Platform. If you are new to Power Automate, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction and a smooth transition from beginner to advanced topics to help you get up to speed with business process automation. Complete with hands-on tutorials and projects, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to configure automation workflows for business processes between hundreds of applications, using examples within Microsoft and including third-party apps like Dropbox and Twitter. Once you understand how to use connectors, triggers, and actions to automate business processes, you’ll learn how to manage user input, documents, and approvals, as well as interact with databases. This edition also introduces new Power Automate features such as using robotic process automation (RPA) to automate legacy applications, interacting with the Microsoft Graph API, and working with artificial intelligence models to do sentiment analysis. By the end of this digital transformation book, you’ll have mastered the basics of using Power Automate to replace repetitive tasks with automation technology.
Table of Contents (22 chapters)
20
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Working with sequential approvals

A sequential approval is an approval scenario requiring various stages of approval before a final approver can accept or reject it. Common scenarios include expense reports or vacation requests where an immediate manager approves an item, which is then routed to a second-level manager.

An example sequential approval sequence is shown in Figure 10.1:

Figure 10.1: Sequential approval

The figure depicts this order of events:

  1. The user adds an item to a SharePoint list.
  2. Power Automate, which is configured to use a new item appearing on the list as a trigger, initiates the approval flow and sends the approval request to the first approver.
  3. The first approver responds to the request (either Approves or Rejects).
  4. The Power Automate flow processes the approval answer. However, unlike a single approval ending the flow, Power Automate instead starts the second stage (or final stage) of the approval.
  5. The second...