Power Automate Training Guide: How to Get Your Team Started

 

 

Power Automate is one of the four hero apps covered within the Power Platform (PowerApps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents) that plays venture automation and workflow execution for quite a few user construct techniques in Microsoft 365. If you have ever obtained an approval workflow e-mail or an adaptive card from a custom solution built into Microsoft 365 or the Power Platform, you’ve in all likelihood been at the receiving stop of a Power Automate training.

Flows are the call of the exercises that you create in Power Automate. They’re an extremely good manner of adding fees to present processes thru automation and can serve as the “glue” for solutions built with Microsoft 365 and the Power Platform.

How to Get Started With Power Automate Licensing

Power Platform licensing is a complicated issue, and as it relates to Power Automate, it’s important to apprehend the licensing fashions because they can have an effect on your layout decisions. There are two major licensing fashions for Power Automate: 

Standalone Plans permit Flows to run through facts sources out of doors of Microsoft 365 and are suitable for customers who require full-fledged, fashionable-motive workflow and business procedure automation abilities. Do you need to connect to Salesforce or to on-premises records then you will need a Power Automate Standalone plan?

Microsoft 365 lets users increase the functionality of Microsoft 365 with the aid of going for walks Flows against data assets inside of Microsoft 365 albeit with restrained capability in comparison to the Standalone Plans. If you need to ship a reminder message to a Teams user primarily based on a Microsoft Lists statistics column then you definitely must be best with the Microsoft 365 plan.

Check out the Microsoft Power Apps and Power Automate Licensing Guide for distinct information on the licensing in Power Automate. Specifically see Appendix B: Dynamics 365, Office 365, and Windows licenses that include Power Platform skills.

How to Navigate Power Automate Training

Training and assistance for Power Automate can are available in many forms and in my experience follows a sample of:

 

Getting began to understand fundamental concepts and get palm–on experience with tutorials and the usage of curated content material brought via Microsoft Learn. At the time of writing, Learn has 144 properly-crafted publications that stabilize presenting product information and fingers-on labs. Be sure to check out the Automate a commercial enterprise method the use of the Power Automate learning path.

Understanding capacities and barriers of the triggers and moves that dictate Flow development and the use of Microsoft Docs. Docs additionally include situation-based steering on styles, satisfactory practices, and platform-precise improvements like SharePoint and Teams.

Flow refinement with assistance from the MS Power Automate Community. At a sure point, your Flow improvement will exceed the extent of assistance mentioned in Learn and Docs, and it is at this point in the Community comes in. Stuck on a difficulty? Need steering on a sample? Connect with the Power Automate Community to get assistance from professionals and the product crew alike.

Your First Flow

Your first Power Automate Flow has to be a guided workout where you can create an end-to-quit solution with the tools at your disposal so that you can get familiarity with the interface, understand triggers, and movement patterns, and eventually see the potential in Power Automate. I even have had awesome stories about using the Power Automate in a Day network-evolved schooling content material on Github.

Your Team’s First Flow

Are you geared up to automate the mundane? Is your team geared up to add cost via automation? If you replied yes, then it’s time to create your group’s first Power Automate Flow. Some awesome situations for group automation consist of: 

Posting a channel message welcoming a brand new member to the crew.

Sending a be aware whilst a team member is taking a vacation day.

Saving customer emails and attachments to the consumer group.

It can be tempting to try to automate every little bit of your team’s workload. Still, you must pass in advance incrementally and goal the predictable and easy eventualities where value can be introduced to users. Flows can grow in functionality as your teams enjoy Power Automate increases.

Getting Your Power Automate Flow Production-Ready

When growing “production” grade Flows it’s vital to safeguard execution against statistics inconsistencies due to surprising or null values being brought into the Flow execution that may result in execution mistakes. For example, if a Flow requires an email to ship a notification, then we ought to add situation checking to make sure that the cost is populated as predicted. 

 

Once you’ve got created a manufacturing Flow, it’s important that you enlarge possession to others which will help the workflow in your absence and hold the investment that you and your enterprise have made. On a related notice, and if viable, configure all Flow connections to apply a “service account” so that you aren’t sharing get entry to on your user–unique resources like Outlook and OneDrive for Business.

Final Thoughts

Power Automate is a splendid platform for including fee-to-business approaches thru the automation of mundane duties. This price is amplified whilst undertaken through citizen developers who take the equipment “blessed” through traditional IT and make new enterprise solutions made for enterprise users. If you find yourself repeating steps that are part of a commercial enterprise method, ask yourself in the event that they may be automatic. Does the triggering occasion take place in a steady location? Do the required inputs and outputs system in a constant manner? If you answered yes you then have a candidate for a Power Automate Flow!

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