What is Microsoft Power Automate? What about Microsoft Flow?

Power Automate… Microsoft Flow… has left us with a lot of doubts about these hugely related names. You may have researched and now you are more lost than before. Wondering what their differences are? Are they really the same tool? What are those for? In this post, you’ll find everything you need to know about Power Automate (and standard Microsoft Flow).

What is Power Automate?

Power Automate is a new business system from Microsoft that automatically integrates and synchronizes all of our data analytics and applications, with the goal of increasing productivity and business efficiency.

In addition to automating processes and tasks, this online service also allows a functional flow in a simple and intuitive way without the need to develop code (or with a minimum of code). With Power Automate, you can connect two or more applications (either from Office 365 or from third parties) and perform actions that automate the most routine business processes.

Some of the functions of this tool are to move data between systems, send reminders about tasks, support data from any API, automate tasks from a local device…

With Microsoft Teams, users can now easily share meeting invitations.

What was Microsoft Flow?

Microsoft Flow was an Office 365 tool aimed at improving employee productivity by automating multiple tasks and combining different cloud applications and services. The creation of these automated workflows provided the ability to receive notifications, synchronize files, collect data…

Finally, Microsoft decided to rename that tool and include it in the Power Platform, making it part of the Microsoft Power Automate fabric.

How do I use Microsoft Power Automate?

Getting started with Power Automate is easy, all you need is an email address and a web browser. The first step is to register for free and you are ready to go.

The app comes with ready-made templates and recommendations to which applications can be linked. The navigation is very intuitive, which makes it perfect for users with little or no programming knowledge.

From there, you can create a flow that takes a lead’s data into Dynamics, capture tweets with certain parameters and retweet them automatically, save document attachments to emails on OneDrive or SharePoint, receive notifications on your mobile device… The list is endless .

What are connectors in Power Automate?

Another major advantage of Power Automate is its total integration with other Microsoft or third-party services. The connectors are responsible for making this possible and is that the tool has almost 300 predefined connectors including Sharepoint, Outlook, Mailchimp, GitHub, Dropbox, YouTube, WordPress…

This list is growing and allows us to work with data in the cloud or on-premise. In addition, if none of these connectors meet our needs, we can provide a custom one.

To better understand them, we need three clear terms:

triggers

They are the ones who start the workflow. It can be a new email, when a new document is saved or a new video on your YouTube channel. Each connector has at least one trigger.

Actions

If the process has already started, we need to determine what actions to take. For example, upload a file to OneDrive, start an approval process, when we receive an email from a specific person… Each flow has one or more actions.

Connections

The third element refers to when we want to connect two applications, because the tool asks for the credentials of each application that we want to connect. These are encrypted with Microsoft security and can be easily removed whenever we want.

Benefits of using Microsoft Power Automate

Increase productivity

You can create time-saving workflows, from individual tasks to large-scale systems. All this with perfect integration via hundreds of predefined connectors.

Faster and safer automation

You have the ability to let any users you consider create secure workflows through a guided programming-only experience. This facilitates the automation of robotic processes (RPA).

Smart Workflows

You can now automate time-consuming manual tasks thanks to the capabilities of artificial intelligence. This gives you more time to focus on other strategic tasks that require more investment.

Here’s a video to see what Microsoft Power Automate is all about:

Source: plainconcepts