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)

Enterprise automation scenarios with PAD

We have already encountered many examples in this book, sometimes applicable to enterprises and sometimes to citizen scenarios. As we have also seen, PAD is a natural part of Power Platform and is therefore suitable for all applications that involve connecting locally installed applications. Nevertheless, care should be taken to ensure that the overall architecture also fits the requirements and the circumstances. Furthermore, there is usually always more than one way to implement a requirement. In our example, we want to map the following scenario:

  • A company has external vendors who sell specific products or services to the company’s customers.
  • For each customer, sales opportunities exist in an internal CRM system represented by Dynamics 365 (Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)), which represents the potential business. The internal system is not accessible to external sellers.
  • External vendors are managed by internal staff...