Power Automate

What is Power Automate? 

Power Automate used to be called Microsoft flow and is a tool in the Microsoft O365 environment. Its main goal is to empower users to automate repetitive business tasks. For example: receiving notifications or data alerts, automating repetitive extraction of data from different sources and saving them on multiple directories in your network, updating Power BI datamodels, or sending automated emails to groups or users. 

The power of Power Automate lies within its connectors, a connector is something that allows you to connect to (data) sources or applications that can be used in your workflow. 

Five benefits can clearly be seen: 

• No code/low code platform – there is almost no coding needed to create workflows.  
• No special license is needed if you have a Microsoft dynamics license 
• There are many different connectors available to connect to various sources 
• Many templates are available within Power Automate that function as an example or can be used to further develop your own workflow 
• Different types of triggers to start your workflow 

Triggering your workflow 

When it comes to triggering your workflow, there are three options you can choose from depending on your needs. These are: 

• Manual, for workflows that only need to be run incidentally and on call by a user. 
• Scheduled, for workflows that need to be run on specific times and recurrences. 
• Webhook or app, for when you want another program or workflow to trigger the flow. 

Create time for your teams 

All the benefits above lead to one big advantage for customers: time. With the current business environment and personnel shortages, Power Automate gives teams in your company more time to focus on challenging work which brings significant value to a business. Another welcome benefit is that automation reduces errors, as there are fewer manual inputs and dependencies. 

Customers will also be pleased to find that Power Automate is actually included in the license costs for Microsoft Dynamics, so customers already in or transitioning to the Microsoft stack have an easy time adopting this tool for their solutions. 

Rockfeather and Power Automate 

We at Rockfeather see Power Automate as a perfect solution when a customer wants specific tasks to be automated. When we implement other solutions we implement at our customers, we quickly face the limits of these tools. For instance, when we want to notify users from a specific group in the Active Directory that a Power BI report has been refreshed, we can create a solution connecting different sources and use these resources to automate this business process. After this, there is no actual person needed anymore to perform this task. Because of the relative technical simplicity of the application, we guarantee a smooth transfer of knowledge and documentation to our clients.