Business activities in the Information Age are filled with repetitive tasks: receive an email, generate a purchase order, send a message, route a document, approve a time-off request. In many cases, these activities don’t generate real value, though they do need to get done to help support business goals.

Computers introduced the promise of helping us do more, but a lot of that has resulted in there being more to do in order to get the same value. What if we could use technology to handle routine tasks and save our strength for doing the things that require skill and thinking?

In this book, we’re going to learn the basics of Microsoft Power Automate, a tool designed to help you automate repetitive tasks and get you back to generating value.

This chapter focuses on getting an understanding of some of the basic concepts of Power Automate:

• What is Power Automate?
• Choosing what to automate
• Reviewing...

Power Automate, part of the Power Platform family of products, is a workflow engine that can be used to automate common business processes or sequences based on conditions or scenarios. Power Automate (formerly known as Microsoft Flow) is primarily a web-based tool designed to interface with a growing library of software from both Microsoft and other vendors. Due to its no-code/low-code design, Power Automate can be approached by individuals with any technical skill level—including office or business users with no coding experience, system administrators, and programmers.

Many readers may be familiar with the concept of...

Frequently, people do work that they don’t need to do. It’s important to differentiate between work that doesn’t need to be done at all and work that needs to be done, but doesn’t require you to do it.

From both the administrative and end user perspectives, there are a number of activities, processes, and tasks in Office 365 and other line-of-business applications that can be automated through the use of Power Automate.

Automation is a key business technology to reduce the impact of repetitive, low-skill tasks on the workforce. Consider the following diagram:

Figure 1.2: Candidates for automation

When looking at business processes, they can generally be divided into one of the four quadrants:

• High value, low skill: Requires minimal specialist skill, but is critical or produces high-value output.
• High value, high skill: Requires human intelligence or processing to determine value, skills, and...

You’ve already seen a few terms, and if you’re familiar with SharePoint or other collaboration tools, they may be recognizable. But just to make sure we have a solid foundation on which to build, we’re going to go over some basic terminology, and then we’ll start getting into specific Power Automate terminology.

Business process

A business process is any sequence of tasks needed to accomplish the business’s purpose. This may be something as simple as submitting a timecard or getting a signature on a purchase order. Business processes generally fall into three categories:

• Primary or operating processes: These typically result in some sort of customer value delivery, such as a customer placing an order and the business shipping a product. They also may include things such as product design and engineering.
• Support: These processes are necessary for the primary or operating processes to take place...

As we begin working with Power Automate, it will be important to understand the core terminology that is being used. It’s also important to note that terminology periodically changes, so if you started using Power Automate a few years ago, you may want to read through and make sure you’re using current terminology and concepts.

The following terms are generally organized in the order that you’ll encounter them in the book, which also corresponds to their increasing complexity and usage. You’ll need to understand them so you can choose where to apply the correct business logic and processes. As you go through this book, if you encounter terms you don’t recognize, you can refer back to this section.

Flow

A flow is simply the logical grouping of conditions and tasks used to automate a process. Flows can be identified using a variety of characteristics, such as where they originate (cloud or desktop),...

Before you get started, you’ll need to make sure you have licenses that support the type of flows you want to create.

As mentioned previously, Power Automate contains the concepts of standard and premium connectors. Standard connectors are available for all Power Automate plans, including the Power Automate plans that come with Office 365 (also sometimes referred to as seeded licenses). Premium connectors (or features such as AI Builder and RPA) may require the use of a separate standalone Power Automate license:

• Power Automate per user plan
• Power Automate per user with attended RPA plan
• Power Automate per flow plan
• Legacy Power Automate P1 or P2 plan

A per user plan is best for organizations that have broad adoption of Power Automate and wide usage. A per flow plan may be more appropriate for organizations that only have a few flows that are used by everyone in the organization. For up-to-date licensing details...

In this chapter, we discussed the high-level concepts of Power Automate, including how it relates to solving problems (such as business processes or workflows). We also covered introductory knowledge concepts such as actions, triggers, and conditions. Understanding the types of triggers and connectors will help you design flows and business processes that reduce repetitive work and produce value in your organization.

In addition to understanding the features and terminology, we covered some of the updates and changes to Microsoft Power Automate since the last revision of this book, including the introduction of Power Automate Desktop and the general availability of both RPA and AI Builder.

We also touched on the licensing necessary to take advantage of Power Automate features.

In the next chapter, we’re going to begin exploring the Power Automate interface and use it to create simple flows.

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