Learn the basics of Microsoft Power Automate to create workflows to streamline your business processes and improve your productivity. Step-by-step guide.

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Why you need Power Automate and Azure Logic App for your enterprise All companies are built by people. Their employees are the foundations that keep the business sustainable and growing. Ideally, your staff will spend most of their time to collaborate, share knowledge and be productive by focusing on your company’s core business. However, manual and repetitive tasks are still common and could limit your employees potential. As a business decision maker, are you constantly waiting for your staff to update various data sources for your reports? As a resource manager, have you been spending too much time on administrative follow ups of your employees? As a process manager, are you overwhelmed by the email threads being exchanged to approve or reject specific requests? As an administrative assistant, are you struggling to keep up with email requests to organize? If those sounds familiar, and even if they don’t, you need to consider automating your workflows. Hence comes Microsoft Power Platform’s Power Automate, which was previously named Microsoft Flow. What is the Power Platform? Microsoft Power Platform overview diagram from docs.microsoft.com Microsoft Power Platform comprise these applications: Power BI: create dashboards and reports for data analysis from multiple sources. Power Apps: easily build apps that can run on multiple devices, web or mobile. Power Automate: automate workflow without code connecting to popular services. Power Virtual Agents: quickly build chatbots, coding-free. The Power Platform is designed to simplify the creation of fully functional solutions free of coding by business users. These products leverage the Common Data Service (CDS), an abstraction layer for secure data storage and management over Azure. The CDS enforces business rules and automation against the data, and simplifies the provisioning of resources on the Cloud, by exposing the Common Data Model (CDM), a set of standardized metadata definition to provide data consistency across applications and business processes. Power Automate provides an user-friendly interface over Azure Logic Apps, the first targeting business users and the later, IT professionals and developers. What is Azure Integration Services? Azure Integration Services overview diagram from Microsoft white paper Azure Integration Services is a set of cloud services for enterprise integration: API Management: an API service that handles requests volume, security control, responses caching and monitors usage patterns. Logic Apps: serverless technology to create multi-steps processes to connect two or more applications, for system-to-system or user-to-system workflows. Service Bus: an enterprise message queueing system to allow non-blocking interactions between application components. Event Grid: a highly scalable service that invokes receivers when a particular event has occurred, removing the need for applications polling. Azure Integration Services lets you connect cloud and on-premises applications, but the real value is when all core services are used together. As an example, your customers submit orders through your Web site, going through the Service Bus they then generate an Event Grid which triggers a Logic App to execute your business process. This could involve querying your CRM, updating on-premises inventory and creating transactions on SAP. By leveraging the Azure Integration Services, your IT team could save a lot of development time and simplify maintenance. Why automate workflow? Going back to our workflow and process challenges, we will focus on Power Automate and Azure Logic App. So how can Power Automate or Azure Logic App help your workflow processes? Use Case Power Automate / Azure Logic App Example Decision maker has to wait for a report. Update Power BI dataset when a file is updated. Resource managers need to follow up constantly. Track Microsoft Forms responses in Sharepoint and send notification. Process manager overwhelmed by approval threads. Use approval email workflow to redirect to proper channel. Administrative assistants with too many email requests to organize. Filter and save email content or attachments automatically into Sharepoint or organized folders. These are just a few basic examples of the functionalities available. More advanced features include: Track Tweets about a particular keyword and stream their sentiments to Power BI for analysis. Open a bug in Azure DevOps and get an email notification whenever a rising trend in error traces is detected. Request approval from your team members whenever a new document is uploaded in Sharepoint, via Teams. Send an approval request when a purchase order is created in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Business Central, and on approval, take additional actions on that purchasing document. And many more possibilities you can create with the available connected services. How to design a workflow? You can design your workflow from scratch or find a suitable predefined template among the vast collection offered by Power Automate. They are designed mainly for desktop applications, such as Productivity or Data collection. This is the recommended method to start your workflow; find the closest to what you wish to accomplish, then you can modify the generated template with the user-friendly designer, with simple clicks and edit. Power Automate offers many pre-defined templates Azure Logic App also provides its own set of pre-defined templates, though the options are limited and primarily designed for technical processes, such as Enterprise integration and Schedule. However most if not all, connectors available on Power Automate can also be found on Azure Logic App. Azure Logic App provides its own set of templates, more technical-oriented If you create a custom workflow on Power Automate, it can be exported to a JSON file which can then be imported into Azure Logic App. This is a great way to migrate a custom workflow created by a Business user; for example, to be evolved into a more elaborate process and then shared with the team. Every flow starts with a trigger, either instant or scheduled, followed by a series of actions. Triggers and actions, may or may not establish a connection to a data source. Examples of triggers include, a file created or HTTP request received, a record created in SQL Server or Dynamics 365. Triggers can also be initiated from other vendor products such as Salesforce, Bitbucket or Gmail and more. Both platforms offer similar connectors, triggers and actions. A partial view of the supported connector and triggers in Power Automate A partial view of the supported connector and triggers in Azure Logic App The designer interface on both platforms is very user-friendly and identical in use, as you can see below. You edit a trigger or action by simply clicking on the box which expands with the properties available for customization. Additional settings can be updated by clicking on “...”. To insert new actions, click on the “(+)” or “New Step” button. Workflow example in Power Automate, the designer is similar to Azure Logic App To test the execution of your workflow on Power Automate, click on “Test”; on Azure Logic App, click on “Run”. In both cases, this action will execute your workflow. Some tips for designing workflow: Your workflow must be in Enabled state to be executed. Always disable your workflow after design and test; this will ensure your recurring trigger does not automatically start your process or that it remains offline. Azure Logic App keeps a history of every version you saved, so you can always go back to a previous version in case of accidental changes. This is not available on Power Automate, so remember to use the “Save As” feature to make backups. Both platforms allow you to export the template to a JSON file, although some restrictions may apply to Power Automate. The exported JSON template is a great option for IT professionals and developers to leverage ARM templates automation. By using Azure CLI or PowerShell, you can automate the creation of your Azure resource, along with Logic App. What about on-premise connectivity? Many enterprises may still be running an hybrid architecture, with part of their servers and databases still hosted on-premise, while new services are created on Azure. If your Power Automate or Azure Logic App requires a connection to data located on-premise, you do have a few options: Create a Site-to-Site Virtual Private Network (S2S VPN) that establishes a connection between two endpoints: a VPN device on the on-premise network and an Azure VPN gateway on the Azure VPN. Traffic will travel over the public internet. For better security and reliability, use ExpressRoute, which is a direct connection between your organization and Microsoft’s network. Traffic does not travel over the public internet. To keep your architecture simple, you can install an on-premises data gateway. This will handle encrypted communication between the on-premises data gateway and Azure gateway cloud service, allowing Power Automate and Azure Logic App to access your organization’s data sources. Power Automate or Azure Logic App? If you are a productivity user, go with Power Automate; the Power Platform will manage all the required Cloud resources. You do have the option to share a workflow with others, granting them access to edit and execute your template. If you are an IT professional or developer, the preferred solution is Azure Logic App. The benefits include: Managed versioning of your Logic App on Azure portal. Development using Visual Studio or Visual Studio Code. JSON templates and parameter files for customization. Deployment automation with Azure CLI or PowerShell. And because you will be developing the solution for other users, the deployment model on Azure allows you to centralized the maintenance of your application without granting users access to modify your workflow. Power Automate workflow is suitable for individual users who need their own custom processes. Azure Logic App is for workflow shared by multiple users or complex processes maintained by IT. This decision is also driven by their specific pricing model. Power Automate license by user: $15 USD per user per month. Azure Logic App is charged by execution: $0.000025 USD per action, and $0.000125 USD per Standard Connector. Follow the links under References for more details on their pricing. Unless you have few power users who are creating a lot of workflows on Power Automate, Azure Logic App will be the most economical solution. This article was an overview of Microsoft Power Automate and Azure Logic App, offering a brief comparison. I encourage you to log on Microsoft Flow and Azure Logic App to try them out and explore their potential for automation of your business. Note There is a bug caused by the workflow designer interface with the action “Create HTML table”. The property “Columns” is reset to “Automatic” each time it is open in the designer. If your workflow does not use the default value for this action property, you will need to edit each time you modify the workflow in the designer UI. - Eric Chan References What is Common Data Service? https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/common-data-service/data-platform-intro Common Data Model https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/common-data-model/ About Common Data Service https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/wp-cds-for-apps Azure Integration Services white paper https://azure.microsoft.com/mediahandler/files/resourcefiles/azure-integration-services/Azure-Integration-Services-Whitepaper-v1-0.pdf On-premises data gateway architecture https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/data-integration/gateway/service-gateway-onprem-indepth Power Automate pricing https://canada.flow.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/ Logic Apps pricing https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/details/logic-apps/

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