Contents
Business Value of Microsoft Power Platform
This course takes you through Power Platform, giving you an understanding of what Microsoft Power Platform is and what kind of value it can provide you and your organization.
Learning Objectives
- Explain each application, what it does, and when to use them
- Understand how Power Platform communications with other Microsoft products
- Understand administrative tasks and determine from which admin center they can be accessed
- Define data loss prevention policies and understand security options within Power Platform
Intended Audience
- Users looking to learn about the core components of Power Platform and additional insight into how their data connects within it
Prerequisites
- No prior knowledge of Microsoft Power Platform is required
Previously known as Microsoft Flow, Power Automate lets users automate repetitive tasks by creating something known as a flow. A flow is essentially the steps, which are taken to automate some business process. And these steps can be one of two different types, either a trigger or an action. Triggers are events that start or trigger a cloud flow where an action is a task that starts once a trigger is engaged. A trigger could be one of many things, but a few examples include things like receiving an email, someone filling out a form, when a file is modified, or even something as simple as manually pushing a button. After any trigger, there is an action that follows. In the case of receiving an email, maybe you want to manually save that email file to your OneDrive. In which case, the trigger would be receiving the email and the action would be saving that file into your OneDrive. There are many types of flows you can create with a wide range of triggers and actions to create simple or more in-depth flows.
Understanding triggers and actions is important to understand the different types of flows. These are cloud flows, desktop flows, and business process flows. Cloud flows could be something like an automated flow, where the trigger is an event such as receiving a team's message, instant flows where the trigger is a user manually starting a flow with something like a button press, or a scheduled flow where the trigger is a timeframe that happens on a schedule. A desktop flow is a little bit more complicated in that it allows for something known as robotic process automation. This essentially allows you to record certain actions on your desktop or web browser, and afterwards allows you to trigger a flow to automatically go through that same process. And finally, we have the business process flow.
Think about a business process flow as a step-by-step guide for users to follow. It essentially leads users through a set of predefined interactions that need to come to a conclusion. An example of this would be something like an IT support technician service flow. You could create a business process flow and have all IT technicians follow the same processes guiding them to a conclusion on how to categorize that support request. Much like Power Apps, Power Automate can interact and communicate across many different tools with the use of connectors, making it an incredibly versatile tool for streamlining repetitive business processes. And since Power Automate also has pre-built templates and uses a simple drag-and-drop user interface, it makes it easy for anyone to make their own flows without knowing coding.
Lee has spent most of his professional career learning as much as he could about PC hardware and software while working as a PC technician with Microsoft. Once covid hit, he moved into a customer training role with the goal to get as many people prepared for remote work as possible using Microsoft 365. Being both Microsoft 365 certified and a self-proclaimed Microsoft Teams expert, Lee continues to expand his knowledge by working through the wide range of Microsoft certifications.