Today there are hundreds of thousands of apps that automate every imaginable business process. But, there’s a way to amp up your productivity even more…Microsoft Power Automate.

This solution connects a combination of apps, making them work with each other like a daisy chain. Microsoft Power Automate is a critical tool for automating repetitive tasks and increasing productivity across your organization. Learn how to improve your workflow and save time so your teams can focus on strategic, high-value contributions instead.

What is Microsoft Power Automate?

Automation is no longer a moonshot. It is necessary for survival in our increasingly technology-driven business landscape. Yet, 22% of businesses still don’t have process excellence and workflow automation figured out.

Microsoft Power Automate connects your favorite apps, allowing them to talk to each other with what it calls a “Flow” (short for “workflow”).

You easily design powerful flows that only require a few steps for implementation. Additionally, you create your own multi-step flow across several enterprise applications that include Salesforce, LinkedIn, MailChimp, and of course, all Microsoft Services.

Anyone can sign up and get a free plan for Microsoft Power Automate. Organizations with Office 365 or Dynamics 365 licenses have access to additional features for Power Automate as well. You can start a 90-day free trial or purchase the two paid Power Automate Plans.

The best part? You don’t need special technical wizardry, thanks to the no-code interface anyone can use.

Microsoft Power Automate Key Features

Microsoft Power Automate was rebranded from its earlier avatar, Microsoft Flow. The new name brings new enterprise capabilities, such as RPA (Robotic Process Automation) through UI flows to automate repetitive tasks (e.g. data entry in legacy systems) supported by business intelligence and AI.

Key Microsoft Power Automate features include:

• Seamless connections across 302+ of the most popular enterprise applications.
• Templates and a no-code interface that automates business processes with one click.
• UI flows that work with legacy desktop and web-based applications that lack an API.
• The Robotic Process Automation (RPA) records step-by-step actions, such as mouse clicks, keyboard use, and data entry, then replicates those actions into intelligent workflows that trigger automatically.
• Easy addition of AI intelligence through pre-built AI models, without users needing to know a line of code.
• Power BI connectors within flows that connect to third-party databases and tap into business intelligence and analytics.
• Complex team flow creation, where a project group owns and manages a flow together.
• Mobile app accessibility on Android and iOS for running flows on the go.

Microsoft Power Automate (Automation) Examples

You can set up automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize, get notifications, collect data, and more. Here are a few real-world Microsoft Power Automate examples to consider trying…

1. Receive push notifications for expense approval emails.

With this template, you don’t need to keep checking your inbox or miss critical emails. The next time you need to approve an expense report, you’ll receive a push notification.

2. Process forms between emails and SharePoint.

Use Microsoft Forms for data collection and organize it in Dropbox, OneDrive, or SharePoint while sending an email notification for each response on the form. For instance, customers can rate their experience on a form about a particular product or service. This flow allows anyone to track instant feedback.

3. Sync up tasks and calendar events.

Create a task in Microsoft To Do and Microsoft Power Automate automatically adds it as an event on Google Calendar. Another automation takes this calendar event and creates a page for it on OneNote.

These are simple examples. Microsoft Power Automate gives you an entire library of templates to choose from. Alternatively, simply create your own template from scratch by dragging and dropping.

More Microsoft Power Automate Benefits

Microsoft Power Automate offers a single automation platform within Microsoft’s Business Application Platform that also includes Power BI and Power Apps. Other productivity benefits include:

• Setting up automation, with little or no knowledge of development technologies.
• Adopting automated workflows from pre-built templates.
• Triggering sophisticated attended and unattended workflows for unique business scenarios.
• Integrations with native ecosystems such as Office 365, Slack, and Dropbox but also legacy applications without APIs or connectors.
• Scaling effortlessly as business processes expand, because everything is in the cloud.

Gartner says the worldwide robotic process automation market grew by 63% in 2018. Microsoft Power Automate is still a small cog in that wheel.

But it’s pretty magical—being that Microsoft Power Automate allows you to put the right flows to work on your business processes and have more time to develop new products. Unless you’d rather spend valuable time managing recurring tasks? We didn’t think that was the case.

The Collectiv team is well-versed in Microsoft Power Automate and we’re happy to show you the insane possibilities with task automation in this solution.