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

Understanding Dataverse

Microsoft Dataverse (formerly Common Data Service or CDS) can be thought of in similar terms to a database. It is comprised of data objects called entities. Compared to a database, entities can be described in terms of database tables. Whereas database tables have the concept of columns, the corresponding object in an entity is called an attribute.

Microsoft documentation currently has two separate descriptions for the types of objects stored in Dataverse. We covered the new nomenclature in Chapter 1, Introduction to Power Automate. In some cases, however, Dataverse terminology may change, depending on the user interface, protocol, or technologies being used.

One of the biggest terminology changes is the renaming of entity to table. Since table has distinct database implications for this book, we’ll use the old terminology of entity. Many of the UI components that you’ll encounter will still reference Dataverse elements by their...