Workflow Automation with Microsoft Power Automate

Enhance your organization's productivity by automating repetitive tasks and simplifying business workflows using Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow)

▶Book Description
Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Flow) is a workflow automation tool built into Microsoft 365 to help businesses and users to automate repetitive tasks or trigger business processes without user intervention.

If you are new to Microsoft Power Automate, this book will give you a comprehensive introduction to help you to get up to speed with automating business processes in no time. Complete with hands-on tutorials, projects, and self-assessment questions, this easy-to-follow guide will show you how to configure automation workflows for business processes between hundreds of Microsoft and third-party applications. Once you understand how to use connectors, triggers, and actions to automate business processes, you'll get to grips with managing user inputs, documents, approvals, and database storage using efficient flow controls. This Power Automate book explains key concepts and takes you through creating your own flows step by step.

By the end of the book, you'll have learned how to use Microsoft Power Automate to replace repetitive tasks with business workflow automation technology.

▶What You Will Learn
-Get to grips with the building blocks of Power Automate, its services, and core capabilities
-Explore connectors in Power Automate to automate email workflows
-Discover how to create a flow for copying files between two cloud services
-Understand the business process, connectors, and actions for creating approval flows
-Use flows to save responses submitted to a database through Microsoft Forms
-Find out how to integrate Power Automate with Microsoft Teams

▶Key Features
-Create basic and advanced workflows for automating Twitter posts, sending emails, push notifications, and much more
-Manage user inputs, documents, approvals, and database storage using flow controls
-Create flows that integrate with services both inside and outside the Microsoft 365 ecosystem

▶Who This Book Is For
The book is for technologists, system administrators, and Power users with little or no Microsoft Power Automate experience. Familiarity with basic Microsoft 365 services is expected.

▶What this book covers
This book is divided into sixteen chapters. It starts by covering the basic terminology and providing a general overview of the interface and proceeds to build increasingly detailed and complex workflows.

- Chapter 1, Introducing Power Automate, introduces the basic concepts of workflow and automation.

- Chapter 2, Getting Started with Power Automate, dives into the Power Automate interfaces and application components, and explains how to create a basic flow to see how it all works.

- Chapter 3, Working with Email, explains how to configure Power Automate to interact with email.

- Chapter 4, Copying Files, covers using Power Automate to copy files between cloud services.

- Chapter 5, Creating Button Flows, explains how to use button (also known as manual or instant) flows and shows how they can be executed from mobile devices.

- Chapter 6, Generating Push Notifications, explains how to create a push notification to a mobile device.

- Chapter 7, Working with Team Flows, covers how to share flows with your peers.

- Chapter 8, Working with Conditions, explains how to use conditional execution to cause different outcomes for flows.

- Chapter 9, Getting Started with Approvals, discusses how to use approvals workflows for documents.

- Chapter 10, Working with Multiple Approvals, expands your knowledge of approvals with added branches or sequential approvals.

- Chapter 11, Posting Approvals to Teams, explains how to integrate approval workflows with Microsoft Teams.

- Chapter 12, Using a Database, covers connecting to a database and using it to store or retrieve information for a process.

- Chapter 13, Working with Microsoft Forms, explains how to use Power Automate to process data from Microsoft Forms.

- Chapter 14, Accepting User Input, explores configuring a button or manual flow to accept a variety of user input.

- Chapter 15, Exporting, Importing, and Distributing Flows, discusses how to import, export, and transport your flows between environments.

- Chapter 16, Monitoring and Troubleshooting Flows, contains troubleshooting tips for when things go wrong.