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
Other Books You May Enjoy
21
Index

Working with email

The challenge of automating email has been around almost as long as email itself. As we mentioned at the beginning of the chapter, many solutions have been developed to address this over the years using technologies such as VBA scripting, Outlook rules, and COM add-ins. These solutions have required a mix of programming skills to develop and a dependence on a desktop computer always running to be able to execute the commands.

With Power Automate and Microsoft 365, Outlook.com, or Gmail services, the necessary components are always on, so you don’t need to worry about power outages, software updates, or network connectivity issues disrupting a business process. In this section, we’re going to look at options for handling incoming emails, processing attachments, and sending messages.

Reading email

Many organizations use the receiving of an email (typically, mail sent to a shared mailbox) as an informal trigger to start a business process...