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

Introducing Robotic Process Automation

As you’ve seen so far, Power Automate is an extraordinarily capable cloud automation platform. While Power Automate’s focus had originally been to integrate cloud services through the use of REST API interfaces, Microsoft recognized a gap and released its tooling for robotic process automation (RPA) flows in mid-2020.

Originally named user interface (UI) flows, RPA flows are designed to capture and replay operations performed by manual intervention, such as data entry via keyboard and mouse clicks. RPA flows can help automate tasks where no scripted or API interface opportunities exist. Common examples might include:

  • Duplicating data entry into multiple systems through copy and paste
  • Reading handwritten order forms and translating them to an application
  • Performing a series of keyboard presses or acknowledgments for legacy machinery

Each of these scenarios presents different types of challenges...