Introduction to Power Automate Desktop: Features & Use Cases

Microsoft Power Automate is a cloud-based platform that allows users to create automated workflows between the business-critical applications and services they use daily. Power Automate can be used to synchronize files between two or more locations, show push notifications related to tasks, and automate data collection between apps and services. It is a low-code platform that enables businesses to automate many tedious manual processes related to their IT operations without extensive coding knowledge. In this blog post, we will discuss how CIOs at small-to-midsize businesses (SMBs) can use Microsoft Power Automate to enhance their IT operations while helping them save time and money by automating repetitive tasks and improving productivity.

What is Microsoft Power Automate Desktop?

Power Automate Desktop is a free application for Microsoft Windows that enables robotic process automation (RPA). Robotic process automation uses software to automate repetitive tasks based on "bots" that follow a specific set of rules.

For example, the Acme Corporation could use robotic process automation to monitor their sales@acme.corp email address, scan the text of incoming emails for order requests, then fulfill customers' orders automatically.

The automated processes created using Microsoft Power Automate Desktop are called desktop flows. Desktop flows are automations that can interact with local resources and applications on your PC, such as files, folders, keyboard, mouse, web browsers, etc. For example, you can use Power Automate Desktop to automate tasks like filling out forms, copying and pasting data, sending emails, or working with legacy systems that do not have an application programming interface (API).

One of the key advantages of Microsoft Power Automate Desktop for SMBs is its user-friendly interface. You can create desktop flows using drag-and-drop actions or recording a user's steps. Most importantly, users do not need to have any software programming skills or experience to effectively use Power Automate Desktop. This allows anyone to use the simple, drag-and-drop interface with a little bit of logical thinking to build an automated workflow.

Record and Visualize End-To-End Processes With Process Advisor in Microsoft Power Automate

Process Advisor is a powerful tool that helps you understand and improve your business processes by discovering workflow bottlenecks and automation opportunities using process and task mining. Let’s discuss process and task mining, how Process Advisor works, and what benefits it can bring to your organization.

What Are Process and Task Mining?

Process and task mining are techniques that use data and artificial intelligence (AI) to analyze how people work and perform tasks. They can help you gain insights into the efficiency, effectiveness, and compliance of your processes and identify areas for improvement and automation.

Process mining focuses on organization-wide processes that involve multiple systems and people. It uses event log files from your system of recording (such as apps or databases) to create visual maps of your processes with data and metrics. You can use process mining to see your processes' actual steps, variations, and performance issues, as well as compare different processes or scenarios.

On the other hand, task mining zooms in on specific tasks that happen on the desktop. It uses recorded user actions and keystrokes to collect data from these tasks. You can use task mining to understand how your employees perform each task, what actions are common or unnecessary, what mistakes or errors occur, and what tasks can be automated.

How Does Process Advisor Work?

Process Advisor is a Microsoft Power Automate desktop app feature that offers both process and task mining capabilities. You can access Process Advisor from the Details screen of your process in Power Automate for desktop.

To use Process Advisor, you need to follow these steps:

1. Create a process: A process is a collection of related tasks that achieve a specific goal. You can create a new process or use an existing one from Power Automate.
2. Add recordings: Recordings are the data sources for Process Advisor. You can add recordings from different sources, such as event log files for process mining or user actions for task mining. You can also invite other users to contribute recordings to your process.
3. Analyze results: Process Advisor will analyze your recordings and generate results showing how your process works and where it can be improved. You can view different types of results, such as process maps, task maps, automation recommendations, metrics, and reports.
4. Optimize your process: Based on the results, you can identify bottlenecks, inefficiencies, variations, non-compliance, and automation opportunities in your process. You can then use Power Automate to create workflows that automate or optimize your process.

What are the Benefits of a Process Advisor?

Process Advisor can help you achieve various benefits for your organization, such as:

• Save time and money: By optimizing your processes, you can reduce waste, errors, delays, and costs.
• Improve quality and customer satisfaction: You can deliver better products or services to your customers faster and more reliably by improving your processes.
• Increase productivity and innovation: Automating your processes can free up time and resources for more creative and strategic tasks.
• Enhance compliance and governance: By monitoring your processes, you can ensure that they follow the rules and regulations of your industry or organization.

Make Smarter Automations with AI Builder in Microsoft Power Automate

AI Builder is a feature in Power Automate for desktop that infuses AI into your flows, allowing the flows to predict outcomes and help improve business performance with cloud-powered AI developed by Microsoft.

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As with the Process Advisor feature, you don't need any coding or data science skills to use AI Builder. You can simply select a model type, provide some data, and train and publish your model.

AI Builder offers a variety of model types that cover different scenarios, such as:

• Document/form processing: Extract information from documents or forms, such as invoices, receipts, or identity documents.
• Receipt/invoice processing: Extract key information from receipts or invoices, such as total amount, date, vendor name, or tax amount.
• Identity document processing: Extract key information from identity documents, such as a passport, driver's license, or national ID card.
• Business card reader: Extract contact information from business cards, such as name, phone number, email address, or company name.
• Object detection: Detects and counts objects in images, such as products, logos, or animals.
• Prediction: Predict outcomes based on historical data, such as customer churn, sales forecast, or product quality.
• Text: Analyze text for various purposes, such as category classification, entity extraction, key phrase extraction, language detection, text translation, or sentiment analysis.

How does AI Builder work?

AI Builder is a Microsoft Power Automate desktop app feature that offers both process and task-mining capabilities. You can access the AI Builder feature from the left nav of the Power Automate (online or desktop versions).

To use AI Builder, you need to follow these steps:

1. Select a model type: Choose a model type that suits your scenario from the list of available options.
2. Provide data: Upload some data for your model to learn from. Depending on the model type, you may need to provide different data types, such as images, documents, tables, or text.
3. Train your model: Click the Train button to start the training process. AI Builder will use your data to create a custom model that fits your needs. You can monitor the progress and status of your training on the Model details page.
4. Test your model: After it is trained, you can test it on some new data to see how well it performs. You can also review the accuracy and quality of your model on the Model Details page.
5. Publish your model: When you are satisfied with your model's performance, you can publish it to make it available for use in Power Apps and Power Automate. You can also share your model with other users in your organization.

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What are the benefits of AI Builder?

Power Automate Desktop vs. Online and Mobile

Although this blog post has focused on the features of the Microsoft Power Automate Desktop app, there are also versions of Power Automate for mobile devices and use on a web browser. These different versions are designed to fit specific use cases.

Cloud-based Automation with Power Automate Online

Power Automate Online is a cloud-based service that you can access from any web browser and use to create cloud flows. Cloud flows are automations connecting to various online resources and applications, such as Office 365, SharePoint, Dynamics 365, and more. You can also use hundreds of pre-built connectors or create your own custom connectors to integrate with any publicly available API. For example, you can use Power Automate Online to automate tasks like sending notifications, syncing data, requesting approvals, or creating reports.

Like Power Automate for desktop, the Online version can also use AI Builder to add intelligence to your cloud flows, such as sentiment analysis, language detection, or text translation. Power Automate Online has different plans and pricing options depending on your needs and usage.

With Power Automate Online, you can:

• Use hundreds of pre-built connectors to integrate with popular cloud services.
• Use thousands of templates to quickly create cloud flows for common scenarios, such as sending email notifications, approving requests, posting messages, and more.
• Use AI assistance to generate cloud flows based on your natural language queries or suggestions from your data.
• Customize your cloud flows by using advanced features such as triggers, conditions, actions, loops, variables, expressions, and more.
• Use the Power Automate portal to monitor, manage, share, and troubleshoot your cloud flows.

Power Automate Online is ideal for automating tasks that involve cloud-based applications and services. For example, you can use Power Automate Online to:

• Sync data between different cloud platforms.
• Automate document generation and approval.
• Create chatbots and virtual agents.
• Analyze sentiment and extract insights from text.
• Generate reports and dashboards.

Mobile-based Automation with Power Automate Mobile

Power Automate Mobile is the mobile version of Power Automate that allows you to run and manage cloud flows on the go. You can use your smartphone or tablet to trigger flows from buttons, scan barcodes, record location data, and more.

With Power Automate Mobile, you can use:

• The Power Automate app to access your cloud flows from anywhere.
• Buttons to trigger flows manually or automatically based on time or location.
• Inputs to provide data or feedback to your flows.
• Outputs to receive notifications or results from your flows.
• The camera to scan barcodes or QR codes.
• GPS to record location data.

Power Automate Mobile is ideal for automating tasks that involve mobile devices. For example, you can use Power Automate Mobile to:

• Track your work hours and expenses.
• Send emergency alerts or requests.
• Order products or services.
• Check inventory or availability.
• Collect feedback or ratings.

The table below summarizes the features of all three Microsoft Power Automate versions:

Power Automate Desktop and Power Automate Online are designed to complement each other and work together seamlessly. You can connect your desktop flows to cloud flows using the on-premises data gateway or the UI flows connector. This way, you can trigger your desktop flows from the cloud or vice versa and pass data between them. You can also manage and monitor all your flows from the Power Automate portal, where you can see your flows' status, history, performance, and errors.

Using Power Automate to Boost Productivity in Microsoft Teams

With nearly 300 million daily active users globally, Microsoft Teams is the undisputed heavyweight champ of business collaboration. Thanks to the deep integration between all Microsoft products, you can use Microsoft Power Automate to create, edit, and manage flows from inside Teams.

There are hundreds of pre-built connectors for Power Automate that integrate Microsoft Teams with Microsoft 365 apps, SharePoint, and OneDrive but can also link Teams to Salesforce, Google Gmail, and other popular cloud-based services used by businesses. There are also thousands of templates to create flows for common Teams automation scenarios. These automations include sending email notifications, approving file or channel access requests, posting messages, and more.

Here are three (relatively) easy examples of automations for common tasks that you can set up in Microsoft Teams using the integrated Power Automate feature:

1. Send an Email When a New Message Is Added in Microsoft Teams

One of the simplest ways to use Power Automate for Teams is to create a flow that sends an email when a new message is added in a Teams channel or group chat. This can be useful if you want to keep track of important messages or notify someone not in the channel or chat.

To create this flow, you can use the following steps:

1. Open the Power Automate app in Teams by clicking on More added apps (…), searching for Power Automate, and selecting the app.
2. Click on Create from the left navigation pane.
3. Click on Start from blank.
4. Select Automated cloud flow as the flow type.
5. Enter a name for your flow, such as "Send email when there is a new message in Teams."
6. Select When a new channel message is added as the trigger.
7. Select the Team Id and Channel Id from the drop-down menus.
8. Click on Create.
9. Click on + New step.
10. Search for the "Send an email (V2)" option and select it as the action.
11. Enter the email address of the recipient in the To field.
12. Enter a subject for the email in the Subject field, such as "New message in [Channel name]."
13. Enter a body for the email in the Body field. You can use dynamic content from the trigger to include information from the message, such as Message ID, Message Text, Sender Display Name, Sender Email Address, etc.
14. Click on Save.

Now you have created a flow that sends an email when a new message is added to a Teams channel. You can test your flow by sending a message in the channel and checking your email.

2. Create a Task in Planner From Microsoft Forms and Post Message in Teams

Another way to use Power Automate for Teams is to create a flow that creates a task in Planner from Microsoft Forms and posts a message in a Teams channel or group chat. This can be useful if you want to collect feedback or requests from your team members or customers and assign them to someone.

To create this flow, you can use the following steps:

1. Open the Power Automate app in Teams by clicking on More added apps (…), searching for Power Automate, and selecting the app.
2. Click on Templates from the left navigation pane.
3. Search for "Create a task in Planner from Microsoft Forms and post a message in Teams" and select it as the template.
4. Click on Continue.
5. Select the Form Id from the drop-down menu or create a new form by clicking on + New.
6. Select the Plan Id and Bucket Id from the drop-down menus or create a new plan and bucket by clicking on + New.
7. Select the Team Id and Channel Id from the drop-down menus.
8. Customize the message that will be posted in Teams by editing the Message field. You can use dynamic content from the previous actions to include information from the form and the task, such as Response Id, Title, Assigned To, et cetera.
9. Click on Save.

Now you have created a flow that creates a task in Planner from Microsoft Forms and posts a message in Teams. You can test your flow by filling out the form and checking your Planner and Teams.

3. Use Adaptive Cards to Display Rich and Interactive Content in Teams Messages

If you have anyone with some programming experience in your IT organization, then you can take advantage of a more advanced way to use Power Automate for Microsoft Teams by creating a flow that uses adaptive cards to display rich and interactive content in Teams messages. Adaptive cards create customized onscreen displays using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) software code that can contain text, images, buttons, inputs, and more. In Teams, you can use adaptive cards to create surveys, polls, quizzes, feedback forms, dashboards, and more.

To create this flow, you can use the following steps:

1. Open the Power Automate app in Teams by clicking on More added apps (…), searching for Power Automate, and selecting the app.
2. Click on Create from the left navigation pane.
3. Click on Start from blank.
4. Select Instant cloud flow as the flow type.
5. Enter a name for your flow, such as "Use adaptive cards in Teams."
6. Select Manually trigger a flow as the trigger.
7. Click on Create.
8. Click on + New step.
9. In the search box, type Post an Adaptive Card to a Teams channel, wait for a response and select it as the action.
10. Select the Team Id and Channel Id from the drop-down menus.
11. Enter a message that will be posted along with the adaptive card in the Message field, such as "Please fill out this survey."
12. Enter an adaptive card JSON code in the Adaptive Card field. You can use the Adaptive Cards Designer online tool to create your own adaptive card or use one of the Adaptive Cards Samples as a reference.
13. Click on Save.

Now you have created a flow that uses adaptive cards to display rich and interactive content in Teams messages. You can test your flow by clicking on Test from the top-right corner and selecting I'll perform the trigger action.

Power Automate For Desktop Licensing

Power Automate offers various licensing options to match a company's desired business outcomes. Two main types of Power Automate licenses are subscription plans and pay-as-you-go plans.

Subscription Plans

Depending on your needs and preferences, subscription plans allow you to pay a fixed monthly fee for each user or flow. Subscription plans offer various benefits, such as:

• Unlimited number of flow runs (within service limits) for each user or flow.
• Access to standard and premium connectors, including custom connectors and on-premises gateways.
• Access to advanced features like business process flows, AI Builder, process and task mining, and more.
• Access to RPA capabilities, such as desktop flows in attended or unattended mode.
• Ability to share and collaborate on flows with others in your organization.

Subscription plans also have some drawbacks, such as:

• Higher upfront costs than pay-as-you-go plans.
• Minimum purchase requirement of five flows for the per-flow plan.
• No flexibility to scale up or down based on usage or demand.

Power Automate offers three subscription plans: per-user, per-user plans with attended RPA, and per-flow plans.

Pay-As-You-Go Plans

Pay-as-you-go plans are designed for businesses wanting to pay only when a flow connects using premium connectors. Pay-as-you-go plans allow you to pay a variable fee for each flow run, depending on the flow type. Pay-as-you-go plans offer various benefits, such as:

• Lower upfront costs than subscription plans.
• No minimum purchase requirement or commitment.
• Ability to scale up or down based on usage or demand.
• Access to standard and premium connectors, including custom connectors and on-premises gateways.
• Access to RPA features, such as desktop flows in attended or unattended mode.

Pay-as-you-go plans also have drawbacks, such as:

• A Limited number of flow runs (based on Azure cloud subscription limits) for each flow.
• No access to advanced features like business process flows, AI Builder, process and task mining, and more.
• No ability to share and collaborate on flows with others in your organization.

Power Automate offers three pay-as-you-go plans: cloud flow run plan, desktop flow run plan (attended mode), and desktop flow run plan (unattended mode).

Amaxra Helps You Streamline Operations With Power Automate for Desktop

As you can see, Microsoft Power Automate is a powerful tool that can help you streamline your IT operations and save time and money. Whether you want to create simple workflows or complex business processes, Power Automate can help you automate them easily and efficiently.

But if you need some guidance or support to get started with Power Automate, or if you want to take your automation to the next level, you don't have to do it alone. Amaxra is a certified Microsoft Cloud Services Provider that has consultants with the expertise needed to help small-to-midsize businesses use Microsoft Power Automate to enhance their IT operations.

As a Microsoft Gold Partner, Amaxra can help you design, implement, and manage your Power Automate solutions and provide training and support for your staff. Amaxra can also help you integrate Power Automate with other Microsoft cloud services like SharePoint, Microsoft Teams, and more.

If you are interested in learning more about how Amaxra can help you leverage the power of automation, contact us today for a free consultation. We'd love to hear from you and show you how we can help you achieve your IT goals with Microsoft Power Automate.

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