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.

With so much communication going on, it’s no wonder that many people struggle to find uninterrupted focus time during the workday. In fact, 68% of people say they don’t have enough time to concentrate on their most important tasks.

If you are one of them, then you will love the three new Power Automate templates that we have created. These templates are designed to help you streamline your calendar and reduce email distractions by using the power of Microsoft Teams, Outlook, and To Do. They are easy to set up and customize, and they will run in the background to help you focus on your critical tasks and save time.

Let’s take a look at each of these templates and see how they can benefit you.

Be notified of key emails

Tired of jumping to Outlook to check if an email has come through? “Be notified of key emails” will alert you in Teams when you receive key emails that match the criteria you have defined. You can set your keywords, add any key contacts you would like to track emails from. The automation will run every 30 minutes and notify you in Teams if any emails have been received that meet your set criteria.

Get this flow

Flag important emails

This template will flag your important emails automatically as they arrive in your inbox. You can set your desired keywords that would appear in the subject line and or key contacts you would like to flag emails from. Once set, emails that match your criteria will be flagged for your attention automatically. This way, you can easily sort your inbox by flagged emails and see your most important emails first.

Get this flow

Turn emails into to-do items

Do you ever lose track of action items that come through the constant barrage of emails? Well, this template will convert your emails into to-do items automatically and add them to your To Do list. You can set your keywords and any key contact you would like emails to be converted to to-dos. Say goodbye to lost action items within your inbox and hello to peace of mind with up-to-date To Do items.

Get this flow

We hope you find these Power Automate templates useful and that they help you streamline your calendar and reduce email distractions. As always we’d love to hear from you, so comment below and visit our Power Automate ideas forum to upvote or ideas for templates that you would find useful.

The post How to Streamline Your Calendar and Reduce Email Distractions with Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today, we’re excited to announce a preview of a dedicated plugin for ChatGPT that lets users leverage the automation capabilities of Power Automate, directly from the ChatGPT experience!

What is the Power Automate plugin for ChatGPT?

Power Automate plugin for ChatGPT enables users to create, list and run flows from ChatGPT. It leverages Power Automate’s natural language to flow authoring experience to help users create flows directly from ChatGPT. In addition, we’re excited to announce the brand new “Skills Connector” and “Run a flow from Copilot trigger” that lets you discover and invoke flows from the ChatGPT interface.

The plugin always ensures that you can review the created flow, or which flow was selected to be run before it is executed. This human-in-the-loop oversight is critical to help users benefit from the power of generative AI responsibly.

Enabling makers to author no-code skills for ChatGPT

With the new Copilot trigger, makers can create custom flows that can then be invoked directly from within ChatGPT, effectively enabling them to increase ChatGPT’s capabilities without writing any code. Now any maker can write flows that use the power of 1000+ connectors, together with desktop automation, and AI-based intelligent automation, and invoke them from the familiar ChatGPT experience. Or they can combine this plugin with other plugins to build even more transformative experiences.

ChatGPT is the first chat-based Large Language Model (LLM) experience that uses this new integration, and we look forward to hearing your feedback for other such integrations that could help you and your organizations combine the value of automation with power of chat-based experiences as well.

Getting Started with the Power Automate plugin for ChatGPT

The Power Automate plugin for ChatGPT is available for all ChatGPT Plus users. Once you have a Power Automate account and a ChatGPT Plus account, follow these steps:

1. Log in to your ChatGPT account and go to the Plugins section
   
2. Find and install the Power Automate plugin
3. Log in to your Power Automate account and authorize the plugin

That’s it, you’re all set!

Now you can start conversing with ChatGPT, using a prompt such as “Create a flow to post a notification to a Teams channel when a new file is added to a SharePoint folder”.

You can also use prompts such as “Show my flows” or “What are all my flows” to see a list of flows ChatGPT knows about. Only flows that use the new trigger are exposed to ChatGPT.

Create and run your first Flow from ChatGPT

The Power Automate Plugin for ChatGPT can also be used to run flows. Any flow that has the “Run a flow from Copilot” trigger can be invoked from within ChatGPT. We also refer to these Flows as “Skills”. Follow the steps below to author your first Flow-based skill:

1. Login to the Power Automate portal, and use the Default environment
2. Select Create on the left side menu
3. Choose “Instant cloud flow”
4. Choose “Run a flow from Copilot” as the trigger
5. Add any inputs to the trigger that you want to collect as part of the run. For example, if your flow will perform an approval, what’s the Title, Description, etc.
6. Add any actions to the flow, based on what you want the flow to do. All the power of Power Automate is at your disposal! For example, to just create an approval, just add that action to the flow
   
7. Save the flow with a name that signifies what the flow does Ex: “Create an approval”
8. Test the flow to ensure it does what you’ve intended using the Test or Run Flow option

You can run this flow from ChatGPT with prompts relevant to the title and description of your flows, for example “Create an approval” or “Start an approval”. ChatGPT will reply with a link to run the flow where you’ll be able to enter and review any inputs to the flow before submitting the flow run.

You can learn more about the Power Automate plugin and the Skills connector in our documentation page. We look forward to getting your feedback at powerautomateplugin@microsoft.com and to seeing what you build!

Happy Automating!

The post Introducing the Power Automate plugin for ChatGPT appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this series of posts, we wanted to highlight some popular templates that can supercharge your productivity by helping you stay on top of things like messages, emails, and meetings. To begin with we wanted to focus on some of our favorite calendar management templates.

Calendar management is an essential skill for anyone who wants to stay organized and productive. However, it can also be a source of stress and frustration if you have to deal with multiple calendars, conflicting appointments, or unclear agendas. Fortunately, Power Automate has some templates that can help you with these challenges. Here are some examples of how you can use Power Automate templates to manage your calendar more effectively:

Use a flow to find a meeting time with a message sender in Teams

Want to find a time to quickly meet up with a colleague or setup a 1 hour brainstorm? Well with this template you can kick off a flow directly from the person’s Teams message, the flow finds the best available time for you to meet based on your respective calendars and schedules a meeting.

Get this flow

Auto-remove cancelled meetings and notify me in Teams

This template automatically removes cancelled meetings from your calendar and notifies you in teams when it removes cancelled meetings. The flow runs every thirty minutes and ensures that your calendar is always up to date and clean by removing cancelled meetings and notifying you in Teams.

Get this flow

Automatically prompt users to set an agenda for a meeting

Have you ever attended a meeting without knowing what it was about? Or have you ever hosted a meeting without having a clear agenda?

With this template, you can ensure that every meeting has a purpose and a plan by automatically prompting for an agenda before the meeting starts. This template will send an email reminder to the organizer of any Outlook event that does not have an agenda in the body.

Get this flow

Notify your next meeting that you’re running late

Caught up in the Monday (or Wednesday the new Monday) traffic? Or have your earlier meeting running long and want to notify your next meeting? This flow sends you a Teams message ahead of meeting and checks if you want to send a running late message to that meeting chat. You can either directly use the message that’s prepopulated or edit it inline in the teams card.

Get this flow

These are just a few amazing templates that you can use to be more productive. As always we’d love to hear from you, so comment below and visit our Power Automate ideas forum to upvote or ideas for templates that you would find useful.

The post Maximizing Your Productivity with Power Automate: Automating your calendar. appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• Update adaptive card messages in Teams
• Trigger a flow when an adaptive card action is submitted

Update Adaptive card in a chat or channel message

This action allows makers to update a Flow bot message which contains an adaptive card . Allowing you to make updates to reflect the latest changes in near real time to Microsoft Teams. For instance, if you’re using a flow to notify you when a task changes status, you could now simply update an existing message with the latest status instead of sending a new message each time.  Or if you’re using an adaptive card to collect information from a user, you can choose to customize and update the card based on their response. 

The message ID is the ID of the original message that posted the adaptive card. You can only update messages sent by the Flow bot on your behalf and cannot update other Flow bot messages.

Trigger a flow when an adaptive card response is submitted

Until today, you could only use Power Automate to collect a single response from one user when posting an adaptive card using the “Post an adaptive card and wait action”. We’re now introducing a new trigger that takes this a step further and lets you collect inputs from multiple users across a group chat or channel. This is achieved using a new property we’ve added to the “Post a card in chat or channel” action that tracks the card id and can be used in conjunction with a new trigger “When someone responds to an adaptive card” to collect information from any user who acts on the card.

Note that this requires the use of two flows to achieve this scenario, a listener flow that uses the new trigger and a sender flow that sends the message in the chat or channel. The listener flow should ideally be created first to avoid missing responses that come in after sending the card using the sender flow.

Example: Using Power Automate and Teams to check which of your colleagues are in the office

In today’s Hybrid work environment, it can be hard to tell who is in office or working remotely from day to day. These set of flows send an adaptive card daily to get details on who is in office, so team members can meet up for a quick lunch or discussion.

It uses two flows one to post a card in a channel that can be either triggered manually or daily using a scheduled trigger. This posts a poll in the channel to get information from users in the office and stores it in a specific tag in Teams that the user created ahead of time. It also updates the card with the results after an hour. Below is an overall structure of the flow and the specific post a card action with the card type id set

The other flow listens to this card type id and updates the tag with the users in the office. The general flow structure and trigger are shown below. Note that the card id is the same as the one used in the sender flow.

At the end of the hour the sender flow uses the new “Update a card action” to update the flow with the details on the users who are in office on the given day.

Check out the Microsoft Teams connector page for more details on the new trigger and actions. The above example just a glimpse of what’s possible checkout other Power Automate Teams templates and learn to build your own flows to achieve even more. We’re excited to hear about what you build.

The post Create advanced bot scenarios with Power Automate and Microsoft teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Find and create flows directly within Teams Store

This new experience provides a category in the Teams Store from where you can browse and acquire workflows that automate your daily routine. Acquiring workflows is quite easy with Teams, connecting easily to many of the services you use on a daily basis. Workflows can be manually triggered via message extensions, message actions or automated to start off of an event trigger.

Manage or modify your flows in the Power Automate App

All of these workflows are built using Power Automate which means it’s also possible for you to modify them to fit your organization’s needs all in one place. You can edit the workflow, control its permissions, or share workflows directly from within the Power Automate App in Teams or from the Power Automate portal.

Here are a few sample workflows to show you what’s possible with Teams, Office and Power Automate.

Sample Workflow: Create a planner task when a message has the keyword TODO

With hybrid work and people choosing to work remotely at times that work for them, it can get very easy to lose track of work sent across as channel messages. There is a pre-configured workflow template under the productivity tab that helps address this issue with ease. This workflow sets up a keyword trigger on a channel that looks for a keyword “TODO” and auto adds a task with a link to that message thread directly in Planner. This allows you to stay on top of tasks mentioned over messages like sharing a draft of a new contract or setting up time to meet with the sales team.

Sample Workflow: Forward emails to a channel

With more users spending their time across Teams it can get easy to lose track of critical emails. This workflow automatically forwards emails sent to a specified address to a channel so that you’re always in the know no matter where the message comes in.

Sample workflow: Schedule a message

As we keep transitioning into finding a balance within the hybrid work environment and normal work routines, one prominent issue a lot of people face in the workplace is being able to adhere to different work schedules and stay on track of following up on time sensitive messages. Remote team, different time zones and personal obligations means everyone’s work and focus times might not align. Now with this new workflow feature it is easy to solve this problem. This workflow allows you to schedule a message to be sent at a particular date and time so we can all be mindful of our colleagues’ work hours. It can also be used as a reminder to send or reply to a message that we meant to follow up on.

These are only some of the many workflows that you can now enable from within the Teams store. We will be continuing to add more workflow templates based on your feedback and input from sources all across the industry.

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

• How to use Workflows in Microsoft Teams – YouTube
• Create flows in Microsoft Teams
• Workflows in Teams Tech Community Blog

The post Automate your work day with workflows in Teams appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’re happy to announce a new way in which you can combine Power BI data and flows by allowing users to manually trigger a flow from any Power BI report. This new capability uses the Power Automate visual in Power BI and a new “Power BI button clicked” trigger on the Power BI connector.

Adding a Power Automate button to a Power BI report

Follow these steps in order to create a Power Automate button in your Power BI report:

1. To get started, simply download the visual from AppSource and import it to your Power BI report. When it’s successfully imported, you’ll see the Power Automate icon  appear in the Visualization pane. Select this new visual and it will automatically get added to your current report page
   
2. By default, the added visual will show you the steps necessary to associate a flow with the newly added visualization
   
   
3. Drag any data that you want to be passed into the flow in the Power Automate data field in the visualization pane
   
4. To setup a flow, choose “Edit” on the visual overflow which takes you into the edit mode which lets you create a flow for your report directly from within Power BI
   
5. From here you can choose a flow you already have or create a brand new one from the “New” button on the top left
6. From here you can author your flow and include any data that you may have chosen in the visual as part of the design experience
7. Once you have your flow click back to go to the details page and hit “Apply” to associate your flow with the Power BI button
   
8. Once you apply the flow the visual on the report changes to a button format and allows you to edit details like the button text and color etc.
   

Running the flow from the Power BI report

Once you’ve added the flow you can then trigger it at any point while viewing the report. Note that when triggering a flow Power BI passes the data based on the active filters that are set on the report. So ensure you’ve set the right filter parameters on the report before triggering the flow.

Also the user who is triggering the flow needs to have permissions to run the flow to successfully trigger it. You can share the flow in run only mode from the details page of the associated flow

Video walkthrough

Here’s a video that walks you through the process of adding a flow to a report in Power BI.

Check out our documentation which walks you through the steps to add a flow to a Power BI report. We’re excited to hear what you build!

The post Trigger flows from Power BI reports appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’ve been listening to your feedback and have added lots more capabilities to make creating, managing, and sharing Approvals even easier!

Create an Approval template for your organization

You can quickly create an Approval template by selecting our out of box templates or making your own from the Approvals app. Just go to the overflow menu which will be visible if you are a Teams Admin and/or Team Owner and click on Template management.

Follow the instructions to name your template, select the approvers, add in the necessary form fields, and final workflow settings and hit publish!

The very first organization template will create an AAD group to manage the templates, feel free to update this with more admins as you need for your organization. Support for template based approvals will be launching in April.

Create an Approval Request from a Template

With the addition of Approval templates, you now create approvals from templates your admin and/or team owner has enabled for you. Below is a quick overview of how to use it. Support for template based approvals will be launching in April.

New attachment capabilities

The Approvals hub is now even more integrated with Teams, you can now attach files directly from OneDrive and Sharepoint as well as attach a generic link for content if it isn’t already hosted in Teams. This will be rolling out in the coming weeks!

Markdown support

We heard your feedback and have now added markdown support in both adaptive cards and the details view! Now you can ensure all your approvals are formatted correctly for all your approval processes! This is rolling out in the coming weeks!

Resources

Get the most out of approvals in Microsoft Teams using these resources:

• • Training videos
  • Teams Approvals app availability
  • Extending Approvals
  • Installing the Approvals app manually

The post Approvals in Microsoft Teams updated with more features! 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.

New “When an item or file is modified” trigger.

With SharePoint lists and files, earlier you needed to rely on the “When an item is created or modified” trigger to get changes to an item. This meant that you had to add complex logic within your flow in order to get the exact event that took place within the list.

We’re now introducing a new dedicated “When an item or file is modified” trigger that lets you filter to just the list or file modifications, making it much simpler to create a flow that’s tuned to the right events.

New “Get changes to an item or file (properties only)” action.

The new trigger can be paired with the new “Get changes to an item or file (properties only) action” to get the exact set of changes that might have occurred to a list or file.

The action outputs helpful tokens such as “Has Colum Changed:<Column name>” that can be used to filter your flow to just the column(s) you care about

Prerequisites

Note that in order for the action to function you need to enable versioning for your list or library.

Tutorial video

Here’s a video that walks through the new action and trigger in detail along with a sample scenario where you can use modifications to a list to notify you in Teams and create a work item in Azure DevOps

Check out our SharePoint connector documentation or the SharePoint Business apps and process automation documentation for more information on these new triggers and actions and all the other great processes you can enable with SharePoint and Power Automate. We are excited to hear about what you build!

The post Run a flow when a SharePoint column is modified appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.