Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By : Peter Krause
Book Image

Democratizing RPA with Power Automate Desktop

By: Peter Krause

Overview of this book

Whether you want to organize simple files or perform more complex consolidations between different Office programs and remote-control applications that don't allow outside access, Power Automate Desktop helps meet these challenges. This book shows you how to leverage this workflow automation platform by explaining the underlying RPA concepts in a step-by-step way. You’ll start with simple flows that can be easily recorded and further processed using the built-in recorder. Later, you’ll learn how to use the more advanced actions to automate folder and file management and enable Office programs to interact with each other. You’ll also get to grips with integrating desktop flows into other cloud environments and further enhance their value using AI. As you progress, you’ll understand how flows can run unattended and how they are managed in the Power Platform, as well as key concepts such as creating, modifying, debugging, and error-handling UI flows. Finally, the book will guide you to use Process Automation Designer (PAD) in conjunction with your frequently used desktop systems to automate routine tasks. By the end of this book, you’ll have become a Power Automate Desktop expert, automating both professional and personal tasks.
Table of Contents (15 chapters)

Working with web protocols and formats

In the previous section, we discussed various web protocols such as LDAP and IMAP, and saw how they are supported by PAD. Next, we’ll move on to probably the most common and well-known protocols FTP and HTTP, before we take a closer look at the different data formats for the web

FTP

Not so common nowadays, FTP was and still is a very efficient way to upload and download folders and files to and from a server. PAD is also able to use this protocol and access an FTP server. The following actions are provided within the FTP actions group:

  • Open / Open secure / Close connection: These are required to establish a connection to the FTP server.
  • List directory / Change working directory: Comparable to DIR / CD command in Windows command prompt to list the content of the current directory or change the current directory.
  • Create / Delete / Synchronize directory: These actions do exactly what they are named after. We will look...