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

Learning about file connectors and actions

In Chapter 3, Working with Email, you saw that Power Automate can work with files as attachments to emails. Work processes that require us to automate file attachments may also benefit from automating further processing with those files. Files may need to be copied or moved, uploaded to a new service, ingested into another platform, archived, parsed, analyzed, or require approvals. Learning how to reference files and their properties is an important building block to building more complex flows.

Here’s a quick rundown of some of the file storage mechanisms that are available to use:

  • SharePoint Online
  • OneDrive for Business
  • OneDrive
  • Azure Files
  • Google Drive
  • Box
  • Dropbox
  • FTP/SFTP

Most organizations will use Power Automate primarily within the context of SharePoint Online and OneDrive for Business. However, most organizations also have access to or use other file-hosting...