Power automate, anyone??

[Dieselboy]

I started playing with power automate a short while ago and was blown away by it's power and reach. So much so I was considering owning 365 personally.

I've just discovered I already have access personally. When I go to office.com it says 'FREE' in small writing and I can use cloud versions of word/excel etc but I have power automate cloud and desktop.

I was looking to use power automate to pull data out of connectwise API as well as integrate MS (Teams / Forms / sharepoint) with pushing data into connectwise eg raising tickets or jobs based on a questionnaire.

Had a quick look at the suggestions in the app on the desktop and it has examples such as pulling data out of PDFs. Other examples are renaming new files on the pc to include the date/timestamp and GUI testing (calc.exe is used in the example).

Do any of you use this already and have any cool examples?

[deanwebb]

What's the 10,000 km view of power automate? This is new to me.

[Dieselboy]

You use it to create "flows".

For the example above I created this flow:
1. after a Microsoft form is completed
2. take the input data (like name, job title, start date) and fire a webhook to connectwise API url (to create tickets)
3. also take the data and send 2 emails:
3.a send a custom email to the IT dept. about the new user starting, using the input data in the form as variables. Such as "Hi IT dept. We have {new user firstname, lastname} starting on {start date}...etc"
3.b send another separate custom email to the management team using the input data variables

This is through the web app.  There are a shed ton of different connectors and with a connector like "web hook" you basically have a very large shed ton of flexibility options. The only limitation is my (limited) imagination.

Other cloud options on their pre-made flows (that you can hack around using the gui pretty easily) are around emails, attachments, sharepoint and approvals. For example:
1. when a new doc is uploaded to sharepoint, fire off an approvals request to a group of people (to approve the doc)
2. at my last job, when a new customer came on board the management team created a new folder in sharepoint to begin storing documentation. Sometimes communication was a bit slow to advise the support staff of the new customer. So sometimes there were surprises when the new customer was eager to get support. So I created a flow to monitor the customer directory on sharepoint and if anyone created a new directory then it would email me that a) a new directory was created and b) the name of the directory (which would be the customer name).


There are also tutorials there. For personal and business use this tool is probably one of the best things I have seen in the IT world since webex teams / microsoft teams came out to replace the legacy clunky clients.

Power automate "desktop" extends this automation to the windows desktop. Honestly I have to google for ideas on this because I really struggle creatively. (Give me some logical problem and I'm good with that but ask me to do anything creative and I hit brick walls).

One idea for a desktop use is to create a job timer. You could create a button that times your hours spent on a job ticket. Now I havent looked at this in any detail but I think you can have power automate pick up the ticket number from your ticket system and track your time from the moment you opened the ticket until the time you opened the next one. Then you can log your time spent on it.
Or you could have some simple data collection where you manually types some things but TBH it would be better being automated.


Another example, automatically create and save PDF versions of your documents after you save a word doc.
Automatically send a Teams message when a sharepoint doc is uploaded.

Basically, there's a trigger whether it is manually triggered by you or some automated way. Then there are actions. You can have dependent actions or you can run multiple simultaneous actions (like the two emails above).

I think if you need to repeat tasks then this will be helpful.

[Dieselboy]

An example for IT admins:

https://tocalai.medium.com/power-automate-desktop-d7d11a2acfd1

Another one to create a teams chat from an email. This is really helpful. We had something similar for webex teams, very handy because sometimes email chains arent helpful to discuss things when a teams group would be more appropriate.

[deanwebb]

OK, this is cool stuff. Should I hire a tech writer to implement it all for me?

[Dieselboy]

No, it's no-code