Power Automate Flow Types Explained

hey there makers april dunham here are you new to power automate and confused by all the different options that you have when you go to create a workflow well in this video i'm going to break down everything you need to know about the different types of workflows or flows that we can create in power automate in the use cases for each one i'll break it all down right after this so what am i talking about when i talk about the types of flows that you can create so if we go to float.microsoft.com and we can click on the my flows button on the left hand side if we want to create a new flow we would click this button and these are all the types of options that i want to explain today there are five key different types of flows that we can create that you want to make sure you understand the differences between each so that you can choose the right one for your use case so let's switch over to some slides and i'll break down each one of these different types of workflows and explain how they work and where you might use them so i'm going to start with the business process flow now this is a special type of flow that allows you to provide a user experience that will guide your users through a particular process so really like we're seeing here in this screenshot a good example of this would be a sales process so when you have a lead in some kind of sales system you probably first need to qualify that lead and there's different processes involved there then you would move into the development stage and have different actions there and finally propose and the closing stage so with these business process flows they're organized in two stages like you see so that's the qualify develop close and steps within the stages the key thing to know about business process flows is the scope of which you can use them these business process flows are specifically for dataverse and can only be used on those dataverse tables and used within dynamics 365 or model driven applications so this wouldn't be something that you would use say with sharepoint as a data source or in a canvas powerapp or anything like that it's a very highly particular use case for these and there's different associated licensing as well anytime you want to use a business process flow you're going to need additional licensing on top of what we call the seated or included version of power automation within some of your microsoft 365 licenses like your e3s or business premium so you'll need to pay for that per flow plan or business process flows since they are so tightly coupled with dynamics 365 certain dynamics 365 plans do include the ability and the correct licensing to allow you to create these business process flows next up is desktop flows if you watched my video last week about power automate desktop then you already know what desktop flows are this is a special type of flow that uses something called robotic process automation or rpa for short to create these type of flows you'll actually need to download and install the power automate desktop application on your computer what that will allow you to do is open up the application and it will run a recorder and record the actions that you take on your desktop machine using a bot and can help automate those processes the type of things that we would automate with something like power automate desktop in these desktop flows are those services or systems that we don't have access to possibly in the cloud this might be legacy software that you have loaded on your computer or it could be excel sheets that you're working with maybe it's screen scraping getting data from other websites that you want to automate and if you want an example of exactly what you can do with power automate desktop and how it works be sure to check out the video that i did last week on that which i'll show somewhere up there and i'll also put a link to down in the video notes with power automated desktop there is potentially some additional licensing included as well now one of the announcements with ignite recently was that there is a free version now of power automate desktop for all windows 10 users so if you have windows 10 and a microsoft account it doesn't have to be like a paid business premium or a work account just a personal account then you can use power automate desktop to automate some personal scenarios now there are some scenarios where you might need to upgrade to a premium licensing for these desktop flows that would be if you want to share what you're building and collaborate on that with your team or call other flows or use some premium functionality like ai builder things like that you would need to pay for the additional licensing next up we have automated flows these are probably the most common type of flow that you'll see in power automate how these particular flows work is they wait for an event to happen automatically at the data source and that serves as the trigger for the workflow to kick off a common example that you'll see of this which is what i have shown here is say with sharepoint so when an item is added into a sharepoint list or when a file is added into a sharepoint document library you would want that action to automatically trigger a workflow process to kick off for say an approval now this could be for the variety of over 500 different connectors that we can currently use with pyrotomy have their own distinct triggers that we can leverage in these automated flows it could be say outlook so when a new message is received it can automatically kick off when you get a new email and then perform the subsequent actions or steps that you have built out in your flow the key thing here of the automated flows is no action is needed from you for this process to be kicked off it's all done at the connector level or the data source that you're consuming now let's talk about something called instant floats unlike automated these won't get kicked off automatically it needs some kind of interaction for the workflow to be triggered or kicked off there are just a handful of different triggers that we can use to kick off these instant type of flows one way is manually from power automate itself there's actually a trigger for these instant flows where we can use something called flow buttons so if you download the power automate application on your mobile device we have a screen here where we can see different buttons that we can click and that will actually execute a workflow so i'll click on this save contact button and a form will pop up where i can fill out some information and that will kick off the corresponding steps that i have built in my flow another use case for these instant flows is from powerapps so we can actually call flows and power automates from powerapps itself so we can wire up say a button in powerapps and on the click of that button we can have it call and execute a flow that is another great use case of an instant flow there's special types of triggers as well in onedrive sharepoint and even teams where we can kick off a workflow for a selected item so where these get kicked off taking the sharepoint example if you go into a given sharepoint list or library and select a particular item you see that in the ribbon up here we have an automate button this will actually allow us to kick off one of these instant type of flows there's actually a few built-in instant flows one is called request sign-off and another called send a reminder so this is an easy way to based on a date field in sharepoint kick off a reminder and this is using the instant type of flow so the trigger is manual we have to go into sharepoint we have to click the automate button select a workflow to initiate this process so it opens up a panel here on the right hand side we sign in to power automate and we have to click continue we have to have some interaction and input here on how many days in advance we want to have this reminder and we have to click create to actually start the process these type of actions are also available in microsoft teams so say you have a chat message in teams we can use something called a message action and leverage an instant flow to kick off a workflow process so an example of this i have this message from joni if i hover over it click these three dots we see a more actions button and if i click on that we see we have several different options that show here and actually have a few different flows that are instant flows when i click on one i can manually kick off this process here and send a reminder to follow up on a given message so same type of scenario we have available to us in onedrive and even excel we can have an excel spreadsheet and kick off a workflow for the selected row we're also leveraging these instant flows in power virtual agents and if you're leveraging the http actions you can actually make http request and have that trigger the flow and finally one of my favorite types of flows that we can use is what's called the scheduled flow now this one is pretty self-explanatory these are flows that you're able to run on a particular schedule these can be kicked off all the way from the second level to the day level and anything in between so great use case for this is automatic reminders so if you have some kind of list of tasks and you want to make sure that people are notified at different increments before the due date of their task say you want to send one notification out seven days before it's due then another three and then one more the day before we can handle that with a scheduled flow super simple all you do is click these drop downs and you define your schedule so every one day every three days you define the time zone that this should be kicked off in and the start time so in this instance here this particular flow is going to get kicked off every single day at 8 a.m central time and it will go and will look through a sharepoint list of tasks and it will send an email reminding people if they have overdue tasks so that explains the different types of flows one more quick thing i wanted to point out in this video if you go to the flow portal and you click on the my flows button you might notice that we have different groupings here so i wanted to point out where those five different types of flows we just went through will fall under here so that when you create a flow you know where to find it so the first tab we see here is called cloud flows this is where you'll see the instant automated and scheduled flows now obviously the desktop flows or those power automated desktop ones will show here on this tab and business process flows have their own tab as well one more key thing i want to point out you notice that we have a shared with me tab so with power automate we have the ability to make other people co-owners of a flows so if i'm on vacation or i leave the company we have a backup person that can make changes to that so any instant automated or scheduled flow that you have not designated a co-owner for shows up under the cloudflows tab now if you have shared and made a co-owner for those instant automated and scheduled flows those move over and are displayed here in the shared with me tab so a lot of times people will think that flow accidentally got deleted or disappeared when in reality they shared it and just shifted to this tab so definitely something i wanted to point out all right so that's all that i have for you today i wanted to keep this video very short and simple i hope that you have a great understanding now of the different types of flows available and where you might use them i definitely plan to do more introductory videos on power automate so if you have any suggestions please share those in the comments and if you found this video helpful please do me a favor and click that subscribe button thanks for watching and i'll see you in the next video [Music] you

Channel: April Dunnam

Views: 6,927

Keywords: Power Automate Flow Types, April Dunnam, Microsoft, power automate, power Automate Flow Types Explained, power automate business process flows, power automate tutorial, power automate tutorial for beginners, power automate instant flow, power automate scheduled flow, power automate automated flow, power automate automated vs instant, power automate automated cloud flow, power automate desktop, power automate for selected item, power automate for selected message

Id: VulRVuC_Cgc

Length: 13min 4sec (784 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 18 2021