Streamlining security access requests

Microsoft Customer Experience & Success (CE&S) is one of the largest customer support teams in the world. With over 17,000 employees worldwide, CE&S is responsible for shaping the strategy, design, and implementation of Microsoft’s end-to-end customer experience.

For one of their projects, CE&S focused on their Just in Time (JIT) security process used to grant access to resources.  “Leveraging the process mining capabilities in Power Automate, we wanted to explore ways to improve our responsiveness – without compromising on security,” says Kirk McNesby, Senior Business Process Manager at Microsoft. 

In just one week, CE&S successfully deployed process mining and began gathering insights. “With process mining in Power Automate, we were able to easily input data and immediately jump behind the wheel to do meaningful exploration,” says Kirk. “We had no prior knowledge or training. We were ingesting data and learning how to use the tool – all at the same time.”  

To begin using process mining, over 14GB of event log data (consisting of SR events and JIT security logs) was loaded into the tool. The team was particularly impressed with the easy-to-use interface. “We liked the out of the box presentations. Variances were presented in a clear, visual format and filtering worked really well with our data,” says Kirk.  

The team used the filtering capabilities within process mining to quickly segment access requests by type and looked for patterns that would contribute to optimization. This strategy revealed bottlenecks in a specific access request for users acting as backup support on cases when the main support engineer was unavailable.

By automating approvals for this scenario, the team estimated that they could automate up to 54,000 approval requests per year, saving users 13,200 hours of wait time. As Kirk adds, “The process mining capabilities in Power Automate were critical to achieving insights this quickly.”
 

Get started with process mining in Power Automate

• Review official product documentation
• Take the process mining in Power Automate learning path
• Start a free trial for Power Automate 
• Go even further with the Power Automate Process Mining add-on
  

Start a free trial today – and discover how easy it can be to optimize processes in your organization using process mining in Power Automate.

The post Elevating Efficiency: How Microsoft Customer Experience & Success streamlines operations with process mining in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Create an approval in Teams

You can access the approvals app from any chat or channel conversation or using the dedicated app entry point in the Teams left navigation bar. Simply fill in the details of the approval like the title, description, the users who need to approve it and hit ‘Send’. You can even add attachments or custom responses to tailor the request to your business needs.

These basic approvals created from Microsoft Teams do not require an underlying flow and act as a way to quickly manually send approvals to users within Teams.

Approve or reject a request

Once submitted the approvers are notified within Teams and can act on approval either from the chat directly using the Approvals card or from within the Personal app. They can quickly review the details of the approval right within Teams before making a decision to approve or reject the approval.

Manage your approvals

You view all your approvals in one place within the Approvals app in Teams. From here you can get an overview of key details such as the status, requestor and approvals. You can also drill into any approval to track its progress. Any approval you create using Power Automate will be available in this view, not just approvals created within Teams. This way you have a single place in Teams to manage approvals whether they were generated using a flow or manually using the Teams app.

Customizing approval processes

You can always create and customize your own approvals processes by linking it to an automated or scheduled trigger or even customize the steps taken before and after your approval by creating your own flow. We have numerous templates for you to get started from that work with the over 350 connectors on our platform. Any approval created with a flow will also be available in the Approvals app in Microsoft Teams for you to view or act upon.

Check out these additional resources to make the most out of Approvals in Microsoft Teams.

• • Training videos
  • Teams approvals app availability
  • Approvals documentation

The post Approvals app now available on Microsoft Teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.