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

Creating an approval flow

Approval flows can cover a number of scenarios, such as requesting time away, manager sign-off on an expense report, or business owner sign-off on product marketing materials that are to be published. Approval flows typically fall into two categories:

  • Automated, such as when a new item is added to a SharePoint document library or list. You might use an automated flow to start the approval process for an expense report, which is triggered when a document is uploaded to a site.
  • Instant, such as when a user manually starts an approval workflow from an existing document, list item, or application. You might configure an instant approval to start a process for approving an individual piece of content for external publication.

Regardless of the use case and configuration, an approval flow will require the Approvals connector. The Approvals connector has a number of actions and object types that the flow can interact with, though mostly...