Ignite Productivity with Microsoft Power Automate

The State of Microsoft

Microsoft has been building a cohesive set of applications and services with Office 365 and Dynamics 365 to increase productivity within organizations. Over the past few years, Microsoft has been building its Power Platform by creating applications that allow for a no-code or low-code approach to develop them.

This allows citizen developers and business users across organizations to add value by streamlining processes, even without having a development team on hand. The lineup includes Power BI, Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power Virtual Agents.

Although Microsoft Ignite 2019 encompassed a variety of key messages from subject matter experts, the biggest announcements for the platform were centered on Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents.

Microsoft Flow to Power Automate

At the conference, it was announced that Microsoft Flow has been officially renamed to Power Automate. At its heart, Microsoft Power Automate is a workflow automation platform that integrates with hundreds of applications. Altogether, this platform provides a sizable amount of power and was quickly adopted (as long as you were in an API centric world).

Businesses are increasingly using applications that have exposed Application Programming Interfaces (APIs), but many businesses still rely on legacy applications. These applications could be terminal-based, Windows applications, or custom web applications. They have been in the business for years and play a critical role in many organizational processes.

Explore our RPA expertise and solutions

Microsoft has also added Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with UI flows. Through RPA, a user can easily incorporate a legacy application into a workflow by recording clicks and data entry points. The automation can be ran with different data each time, saving the user time and decreasing the potential for mistakes. This is a great new tool that can get some quick wins in the enterprise.

Power Virtual Agents

People have become accustomed to chatting on their phones and on the web, which leads to a new method of customer service – chat. Increasingly, this chat option can be automated since many customers are looking for the same type of information. The creation of Power Virtual Agents can be created in the Power Automate platform without writing code. The drag and drop interface makes it easy to set up the workflow and incorporate other applications as needed. Because it uses Azure AI, it can build on your existing knowledge base to provide information so you don’t have to define every possible question or response. For some additional examples of this type of solution, explore our blog post on RPA and chatbot integration.

By building these solutions on top of the already powerful Azure platform, Microsoft is putting power in the hands of the people closest to the business. Instead of waiting weeks or months to improve productivity, users can start creating value right away. Office 365 has built-in governance for the Microsoft Power Automate platform to give users more control over their automations than they previously had. If you require more power and functionality than what the platform provides, you can seamlessly integrate your automations with other Azure services. In the end, through the Microsoft Power Automation platform, you are saving time, money, and gaining more value from the data already in your organization.

Keep Reading: Market Basket Analysis 101: Anticipating Customer Behavior