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

Choosing what to automate

Frequently, people do work that they don’t need to do. It’s important to differentiate between work that doesn’t need to be done at all and work that needs to be done, but doesn’t require you to do it.

From both the administrative and end user perspectives, there are a number of activities, processes, and tasks in Office 365 and other line-of-business applications that can be automated through the use of Power Automate.

Automation is a key business technology to reduce the impact of repetitive, low-skill tasks on the workforce. Consider the following diagram:

Figure 1.2: Candidates for automation

When looking at business processes, they can generally be divided into one of the four quadrants:

  • High value, low skill: Requires minimal specialist skill, but is critical or produces high-value output.
  • High value, high skill: Requires human intelligence or processing to determine value, skills, and...