How to get the best performance with Power Automate

As we saw in our previous post about Power Automate, Microsoft’s automation tool is a powerful solution to increase our productivity and that of our business by automating manual, complex or simple processes, thus saving time and optimizing our resources.

An easy to use online tool, with a very intuitive interface and templates with which to achieve great results without coding or programming but we can squeeze the most to achieve much more, thanks to the many features it incorporates and its constant updates and improvements by Microsoft.

Optimize your work processes with Process Advisor

One of the most interesting features included in Power Automate is Process Advisor. It is a robust analysis tool that will help you simplify the way you work by detecting and recognizing bottlenecks in your work processes and recommending automation opportunities.

With Process Advisor you can easily identify those specific processes that slow down your business and that you could automate by capturing and analyzing the different actions that take place with its process recorder. By recognizing these bottlenecks that hinder your workflow and being able to interpret your processes from start to finish you will be able, in a very visual way, to detect opportunities for improvement and optimize your work in a very efficient way, boosting and increasing your productivity.

In addition, through the use of its guided recommendations you will be able to comfortably choose which connectors you need to use to automate your processes based on everything previously learned in the analysis performed by Process Advisor.

Always up-to-date

In these times it is important to be always up to date, that’s why Power Automate keeps growing day by day so that all your needs and those of your business are always covered. It has recently incorporated more than 20 new connectors, including different solutions and tools for inventory management, IT operation, document management, threat identification, gamification and much more.

Another of the new enhancements incorporated by Power Automate is aimed at optimizing collaborative work and improving the user experience.

Parallel work helps to develop complex workflows faster. With Power Automate, different users can share workflows with other members of their team to develop them together, so that multiple users can work on the same workflow simultaneously. To know who is collaborating on the project at all times, the avatars of active users who are editing or querying the flow are displayed in real time.

In addition, if different users make changes to the flow at the same time, the system is able to detect possible conflicts during the save operation and displays a wide range of options to solve them, such as discarding the changes, saving a copy of the flow so as not to lose the changes made, or even overwriting the changes of another user.

If previously we saw how the use of Artificial Intelligence in task automation was one of the main advantages of Power Automate now, with the arrival of AI Builder, Microsoft goes a step further.

This new Microsoft Power Platform capability allows you to add artificial intelligence to your automated processes to predict outcomes and help optimize business performance in a solution that integrates directly into Power Apps and Power Automate.

The importance of teamwork

Continuing with collaborative teamwork, Microsoft Teams is one of the main platforms and communication channels between teams. To facilitate the exchange of information between Teams and other services, Power Automate has Adaptive Cards, adaptive cards for sharing and displaying blocks of information without the complexity of having to customize CSS or HTML to represent them. Generated in JSON format, when delivered to a specific host, such as Microsoft Teams, it is transformed into a native user interface that automatically adapts, thus facilitating the sharing of information. This, among other things, allows you to target content by differentiating whether it is done to your team members in Teams and AAD users or Teams channels.

In the first scenario we can publish our own adaptive cards as a flow bot to a specific user by providing the recipient’s email address. In this way, the card will appear in the recipient’s chat and/or activity feeds during the flow execution, although there is also the possibility to require a response to inputs that are required on the card for the flow execution to continue. The flow will continue after the recipient responds, returning dynamic content for one response per recipient and card.

In the second scenario, targeting content to Teams channels, the same options are given to publish adaptive cards as a flow bot to a specific channel waiting for a response or not. The main differences are that, in this case, you will be prompted for the Teams instance and a channel where the card will be published so the stream creator must have access to the instance to be able to publish the adaptive card there.

In the same way as in the first scenario, if a response is required to continue the flow this will happen once someone from the Teams channel responds, but with the particularity that it will only return dynamic content for one response per responder and card.

Use of Data Operations

Of course, more advanced users with basic programming skills will be able to get more out of Power Automate by using data operations to create their flows through different actions.

Among the main operations that can be used with Power Automate are the compose, join, select, filter array, and CSV and HTML table creation actions, which we will summarize below.

• The compose action saves us from having to enter the same data over and over again when designing an online flow.
• The join action can be used to delimit an array with the separator of your choice.
• Selection will allow us to transform the shape of the objects in an array. For example, adding, replacing or even removing the name of elements in each object in the array.
• The filter array reduces the number of objects in a array to a subset that matches the set criteria.
• Table creation changes a JSON array entry to a comma-separated values (CSV) table or an HTML table.

A whole series of recommendations, new capabilities and connections or tools to take full advantage of process automation with Power Automate and multiply the productivity of our business.