PURPOSE: How to design and execute the process with smarter automation is the biggest deal in today’s world, to put forth all the possibilities in which Power Automate came into the picture by providing all features within the Microsoft package, a process can be designed by using templates and connectors.

INTENDED AUDIENCE: To all people who deal with automation to make the automation process easier and smarter to get accurate output.

TOOL: POWER AUTOMATE

TECHNOLOGY: RPA

KEYWORDS: Connectors, Templates, drag and drop activities, Monitoring, etc

Introduction:
Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow) is used to automate the repetitive business processes that help us to create automated workflows between our favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data.

It is a completely cloud-based automation program that unlocks the analog data with AI, automates UI with RPA. It automates the cloud-based applications and databases with built-in connectors.

Expansion of RPA technology in power automation with a new desktop-based solution, called Microsoft power Automate Desktop. Power Automate is a unified platform with API & UI-based automation for Enterprise customers. It provides a new feature with RPA capabilities called UI-flows. It enables the creation and automates workflows and tasks across multiple applications and services without help from developers.

Power Automate can connect to external data sources via one of the hundreds of connectors or directly via an API. Beyond simple workflows, Power Automate can send reminders on past tasks, move business data between systems on a schedule.it allows you to easily integrate with other applications or services through connectors.

Components of Power Automate:

It was classified into two types one is under office 365 which is part of Microsoft and one more is power automate desktop which is a desktop application.

Flow Portal:

Login to o365 portal >> Select Power Automate.
Once you arrive on the Flow Portal, you will see the environment as shown in the below image. Where we can be able to design the workflows, and we can able to invoke the workflows whatever we have designed in UiFlows under the selenium IDE environment.

Once you navigate to the Flow Portal, you will see the below options there.

• My Flows: These are the flow created by you, but you are not able to share with anyone.
• Team Flows: Flows that you can share with someone or someone who has shared with you.
• Advances process flows are Business Process flows and UI flows.
  By this, we will create separate articles to cover all those.

Types of Flows:

Power Automate contains different types of flows. The difference between these flows is the running process. Let us look at the different types and the difference in triggering these to run.

Once you arrive on the Flow Portal, click on create you will see Five types of there.

• Automated Flows
• Button Flows
• Scheduled Flows
• Business Process Flows
• Ui Flows

Automated Flows: This is used to run when an event triggers the flow to run. For example, in the Common Data Service, during the creation and deletion and updating of records we can monitor our flow by running.

Instant Flows: These flows do not have a trigger; they are triggered manually.

Scheduled Flows: Scheduled Flows also do not have triggers, and run on a schedule you define, e.g. repeated every second, minute, hour, day, week, month.

Business Process Flows: With business process flows, you define a set of stages and steps that are then displayed in a control at the top of the form.

Ui flows: it brings (RPA) capabilities to power automate.it is used to automate repetitive tasks in windows and web applications, Applications that won’t have easy to use or complete we can make use of APIS.

How to Create a web Ui flow:

1.Enter a name for your UI flow into the Flow name field.

2.Type the URL for the Website you want to automate into the Base URL field and then select Launch recorder. Then the Selenium IDE launches.

3.You can record actions across multiple HTTP, HTTPS websites within the same tab.

When to use Ui Flows: When we do not have an API option then we will make use of Ui Flows.

Types of Automation: It provides both attended and unattended automation:

• Attended automation: Automating desktop-based activities one step further with a new desktop app called Win Automation. It provides additional features for RPA on the desktop and is available  free of cost to customers with an attended RPA license in power automate.

• Un Attended automation: Unattended bots do the work for you by recording and playing back actions -without the need for anyone to be at their computer-and can use triggers and schedule automated events.

Connectors: A connector is a proxy around an API that allows the underlying service to connect with Microsoft Power Automate, Microsoft Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps. Connector delivers users a way to connect their accounts and leverage a set of pre-built actions and activates. It allows users to build their apps and workflows.  By using this we connect more than 100 data sources out of the box.

some examples of data sources and services are listed below:

• SharePoint
• Dynamics 365
• OneDrive
• Google Drive
• Twitter

• Customer APIs
• SalesForce.com

Templates: These are the pre-built flows for popular and common scenarios. We need to access the services in the template and fill out all the required settings. There are many preconfigured templates to use.

Power Automate Desktop:  It is a desktop-based robotic process automate (RPA). It provides a low-code automation capability.

• It provides the value of Softomotive capabilities into Microsoft Power Automate.

• It extends the automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and tasks, making it possible to automate any desktop or web-based application.
• It introduces a drag-and-drop visual designer with 370+ actions that run on your desktop, we can automate everyday tasks to more complex business processes and workflows.

REFERENCES: Refer to the link for pricing details:

https://flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing

MOURITECH SERVICE: Microsoft 365 Dynamic – RPA

Conclusion: Microsoft Power Automate allows you to bring automation to your business processes, With different types of flows to cover different business processes plus the ability to connect to data from hundreds of data sources with a few clicks, Power Automate affords great flexibility.

LAKSHMI LAVANYA POTLAPADU
ASSOCIATE TRAINEE, RPA
MOURI Tech