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
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21
Index

Getting Started with Approvals

The flows you’ve worked with up to this point are largely automated (like detecting new files or emails) or triggered by a user action (such as the button flow to send a template email). In this chapter, we’re going to begin exploring flows that require additional user action to continue, such as an approval flow.

Approval flows require a special service that’s used to hold state information pertinent to the flow. Dataverse (formerly the Common Data Service) is the foundation for more complex flows such as approvals.

Specifically, this chapter will cover the following topics:

  • Understanding Dataverse
  • Creating an approval flow
  • Responding to approvals

By the end of this chapter, you’ll have some introductory knowledge of Dataverse and be able to create basic approval flows.

Let’s dive in!