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

Reviewing general terminology

You’ve already seen a few terms, and if you’re familiar with SharePoint or other collaboration tools, they may be recognizable. But just to make sure we have a solid foundation on which to build, we’re going to go over some basic terminology, and then we’ll start getting into specific Power Automate terminology.

Business process

A business process is any sequence of tasks needed to accomplish the business’s purpose. This may be something as simple as submitting a timecard or getting a signature on a purchase order. Business processes generally fall into three categories:

  • Primary or operating processes: These typically result in some sort of customer value delivery, such as a customer placing an order and the business shipping a product. They also may include things such as product design and engineering.
  • Support: These processes are necessary for the primary or operating processes to take place...