More businesses than ever continue to migrate to Microsoft 365 to leverage robust Microsoft Office applications such as Teams, OneDrive, SharePoint and others for collaboration and communication purposes. However, not many realize the benefits they can harness from leveraging Microsoft Power Automate to help with custom app development.
Microsoft Power Automate—formerly known as Microsoft Flow—is a cloud-based service that helps you create automated workflows, streamlining repetitive business tasks and processes without the need for any coding knowledge. Process automation is a critical part of digital transformation, and Power Automate helps make it happen. It’s a, dare we say, powerful tool that facilitates synchronization of all kinds of apps with the help of standard and custom connectors.
Power Automate: Create workflows for all kinds of tasks
Automating business functions has many organizational benefits, but the primary advantage centers on your business being able to concentrate on significant milestones like market growth, service delivery, go-to-market strategy, or any other significant goals you might have. From scraping data, updating calendars and Twitter analysis to automatic email alerts, calling a database or accessing Google Drive, Power Automate has a broad range of applications to help make your life easier.
We’ll cover what some of those applications could be, including automating processes and local tasks, setting reminders, transferring business data and connecting to data sources.
Automate processes
Power Automate is a cloud-based solution that users to automate activities and operations to save ample time and effort on tedious manual tasks. You can use the platform to automate workflows between your applications and services to get notifications, sync files, gather data and much more.
For example, you could create a flow that keeps track of people with more than 100 followers that tweet about your brand. The resulting data can then be automatically inputted to Microsoft Dynamics 365 and in MailChimp. This is one of the most convenient types of workflows in Power Automate, categorized as “automated flows”. It empowers you to build secure flows easily and quickly with zero coding knowledge, making it far more accessible for SMBs, among other benefits.
One of those other benefits is the ability to consolidate business operations so that employees can focus on other high-priority activities and tasks. Using business process flows, organizations can provide internal teams with guides for a variety of situations where a specific outcome is desired or required action needs to be taken; steps for completing client onboarding, or progressing leads through the sales cycle, for example. This improves and boosts your business productivity along with generating quantifiable results for organizational success.
Set reminders
Power Automate lets you integrate with SharePoint, which in turn allows you to easily formulate reminders in the DateTime columns of SharePoint. With reminder flows, you can set up personal email notifications for a certain number of days before the end date of any item or document on your SharePoint sites.
Calendar lists synced with SharePoint also have an alert feature that send you email reminders. Using Power Automate, you can therefore create email reminders that help keep you organized and stay on top of important tasks affecting sales or other critical business areas.
Transfer business data
Power Automate also enables users to exchange data by setting up workflows to transfer files from one place to another. This is done through what can be categorized as “instant flows” or “scheduled flows”. If transferring isn’t what you’re after, you can copy files, too. For instance, when there’s a new file added to OneDrive for Business or Dropbox, an automated workflow can copy the same file to SharePoint.
It’s also possible to integrate other applications through the platform’s 100+ connections to different data sources, consequently giving your workforce easy access to data from the different places your business typically collects and stores it. Moving data from one app to another with connectors streamlines the transfer process and allows for easier access to essential data.
Furthermore, Power Automate’s integration with the Common Data Model (CDM) helps you store and manage business entities. You can set up flows to gather data from sources and store it in CDM, simplifying how users access and leverage that data.
Power Automate’s applications for business data are vast, allowing you to connect to over 220 different services and handle data from both on-premises sources or the cloud. It’s important to note that these connections are secure, and that your information is protected by relevant policies concerning data loss.
Connect to data sources
Beyond moving data around, Power Automate can formulate automated workflows that connect you to your data as well—irrespective of its location. This enhances team collaboration and productivity across your organization, creating seamless integration with OneDrive, SharePoint and Dynamics 365. It also supports automation in the context of the apps you use for day-to-day tasks.
Power Automate lets you connect to about 300 data sources out-of-the-box, such as Microsoft 365, SQL Server, SharePoint, Dropbox, Facebook, Twitter, OneDrive for Business, and so many more. You can also collect data with Power Automate. As an example, to see how others view a particular brand, you can set a trigger to capture all tweets that mention the company and copy them to an SQL database for sentiment mining.
Automate local tasks
On top of manual business processes such as onboarding, training and sales motions, you can create workflows in Power Automate for individual everyday tasks as well. In the same way as back-end processes, automating these types of tasks help save users time and energy, allowing them to be much more efficient and productive overall.
Here’s an example: employees’ hectic schedules can cause them to miss important emails that require prompt action. Power Automate has a template that enables those employees to receive an alert or a notification whenever they get a high priority email, with a reminder to respond.
Go with the workflow
Whether it’s an easy task or a super complex one, Power Automate offers cutting edge digital automation beneficial to both non-coders and coders alike. Accelerate your business with low-code apps and turn your ideas into effective solutions! The possibilities are only limited by your imagination.
Ultimately, Power Automate offers a path to working more efficiently and getting more done. Want to learn more? Contact us with any of your questions, or check out our Partner Guide to learn how Sherweb can support your business with Power Automate and other leading productivity tools.
