Do you find yourself overwhelmed
with repetitive business tasks? Well, Microsoft power automate, which is
all about process automation can help, in this lesson you will be
introduced to power automate. By the end of this lesson, you will be
able to describe the business value and features and power automate, and
recognize how power automate works. And looks from the user's perspective. You may have previously known
Power Automate as Microsoft flow. In October of 2019, Microsoft Flow
was renamed to Power Automate to better convey that the service is able
to do more than just create workflows. Although you still use power
automate to create flows. It's important to note this change, as you may see some confusion and legacy
content around Microsoft flow and flows. This lesson will use
the terms appropriately. Now, let's get back to it,
what is power automate? Microsoft power automate, is a no code, low code platform used to automate
repetitive business processes. This can be done regardless
of your skill level, simply using your knowledge of the
business process, you'd like to automate. You can create a repeatable
flow with power automate, when triggered this flow leaps into
action and performs the process for you. You may be wondering what kinds of
things power automate can do beyond simple workflows. Some common scenarios and
capabilities of power automate include, automating repetitive tasks like moving
business data from one system to another. Guiding a user through a process, so
they can complete the different stages, connecting to external data sources
via one of the hundreds of connectors. Or directly via any publicly available
application programming interface or API. And automating desktop based processes
with robotic process automation, or RPA capabilities,
such as computing data in Excel. Now let's take a moment to work through
an example of process automation in power automate. This example looks at building a purchase
order approval process in Power Automate as approvals are often defined yet manual. Imagine that getting a new purchase order
approved involves you taking a form from desk to desk, to get signed off. With Power Automate you can
automate this approval process. To start, you will first need
to go into a power apps app, and create a purchase order request. Once you submit the request
the information is sent to a Power automate flow. The first action could be to send
the request to the user's manager. The manager could be automatically
retrieved from azure active directory, avoiding prompting for
duplicate information. The flow can be built to evaluate the
request, and then route the request based on criteria such as submitting user,
and request amount. Let's see, the purchase order request
has now been sent to the manager for approval, after the manager
receives it and approves the flow can then
provide conditional logic. This could be, if the purchase order
request is greater than $10,000, send it to the vice president for
approval. If not, then automatically
approved the purchase order. Although the business process has
many decision points as you can see, your flow can easily handle these
decisions without you writing any code. You now know that power automate
works by creating flows, which are built with triggers and actions, triggers determine what starts the flows
while actions determine what happens. Currently, there are three types of flows. Cloud flows, business process flows and
desktop flows. Let's take a closer look at each of them. The first type of flow is, cloud flows,
cloud flows can be automatic, instant or via a schedule. Automated flows create an automation that
is triggered by an event such as receiving an email from a specific person. Instant flows allow you to automate
repetitive tasks with the click of a button from your desktop,
or mobile devices. For example, instantly sending a reminder
to your team with a push of a button from your mobile device. Lastly, scheduled flows, schedule and automation such as daily
data upload to a database. You may have previously heard of event
driven flows instead of cloud flows, these would also be built with a trigger,
and then one or more actions. Thanks to the existing connectors, there
are multitude of triggers and actions. Event driven flows can be seen as my
flows, and team flows and power automate. The only difference is ownership,
with a my flow, you are the sole owner, while a team flow has more than one owner. Next, a business process flows
which provides a guide for people to get work done. With business process flows in
conjunction with Microsoft power apps, you can create a streamlined
user experience. This user experience guides people through
the process is their organization has defined for interactions that need to be
advanced to a conclusion of some kind. It can also be tailored, so that people
with different security roles can have an experience that best
suits the work they do. Business process flows were previously
described as being built to augment the experience when using model
driven apps and Microsoft data verse. You could use them to create a guided
experience in your model driven apps. Lastly, you can create desktop
flows which enable you to automate repetitive desktop processes. Using robotic process automation or
RPA capabilities, you can record yourself performing actions
on your desktop, or within a web browser. You can then trigger a flow to
perform that process for you. You can also pass data in or get data out of the process letting you
automate even manual business processes. You have now been introduced to Power
Automate, its wide ranging capabilities, and the kind of flows that you can create
to automate your business processes. Aren't the possibilities exciting?