Power Platform part 1: Power Automate

Power Platform consists of 4 different low-code applications, which are:

Power Automate: Boost business productivity to get more done by giving everyone the ability to automate organizational processes.

Power Apps: Turn ideas into organizational solutions by enabling everyone to build custom apps that solve business challenges.

Power BI: Make informed, confident business decisions by putting data-driven insights into everyone’s hands.

Power Virtual Agents: Easily build chatbots to engage conversationally with your customers and employees—no coding required.

Simplicity

The second picture shows how it looks like if we expand all parts of it:

Integrations

In Power Automate, we have something called “Connectors”. It is basically integrations where you can connect your Power Automate Flow to another application/system. We mentioned previously that we have a seamless integration to your Dynamics 365 system through Dataverse, but that is just scratching on the surface when it comes to integrations. I googled the number of different connectors that Power Automate now supports, and the latest figure I found was from February 2020 where the number of connectors was over 300, with about 10 new connectors being added each month. This means that if you want to connect your flow to a system that is not under the Microsoft umbrella, there is a great chance that there already exists a standard connector for this. Also, if you are a developer, you can build you own connectors meaning that the possibilities for integrations are endless

Testing

If you are working with any form of IT-implementation, you know that testing new functionality rigorously is one of the most important steps in order to have a successful deploy. In Power Automate, we have a built in test tool that lets you test every step of your flow in order to make sure that it is working as intended. If any error occurs, you can get a detailed message regarding why the flow is failing and then adjust accordingly. This is not only a helpful tool when creating new flows, but also when debugging existing ones. If a user has experienced issues with an existing flow, you can select that users run and test your flow using the exact same input parameters. You can then go through each step of the flow and identify what the problem might be.

To summarize it, Power Automate is an extremely powerful, yet simple tool to use in order to automate your business processes to decrease manual and repetitive actions and decrease the risk of human error. You can connect it seamlessly to a vast number of systems that your organization uses or build custom connections and since it is a low-code application, you do not need to have any coding knowledge in order to create complex automated processes.

If you have an existing implementation of Dynamics 365 that you need to improve, or are looking into implementing Dynamics 365 from scratch, don´t hesitate to contact us at Sirocco for further information.