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 IaaS offerings (Azure/AWS)

If we go through the list of PAD actions, we will also come across Azure and AWS. Therefore, PAD addresses the two largest providers of so-called IaaS providers, namely AWS and Microsoft Azure. Although both providers have other offerings for cloud services (Platform-as-a-Service and Software-as-a-Service), we can only use a limited area of the cloud offering with the actions available here, namely for controlling virtual machines and storage. The backgrounds for the use of VMs are manifold:

  • With PAD, we automate those applications that can only run on a local machine and do not provide any interfaces to the outside. However, this application does not necessarily have to run on the machine where PAD is also executed. As shown in the previous chapters, we can also use Remote Desktop to access other machines and control applications installed there.
  • A VM can be set up in such a way that a certain operating system or special components...