This capability is currently in preview for free. When this feature becomes generally available in 2022, it will be available for environments with premium accounts only.

Note

This feature will be rolling out to all cloud regions base on following schedule. Please check the table below to see when the feature will be fully enabled in your region.

Data loss prevention for desktop flows is only available for versions of Power Automate Desktop 2.14.173.21294 or newer. If you are using an older version, please uninstall and update to the latest

If the users are not using the latest PAD, the local DLP enforcement will not be supported, but we will still run background jobs to validate all desktop flows once they were saved to the cloud.

Admin scenario: admin can create a DLP policy with desktop flows restrictions

Maker scenario – Maker with the latest PAD will not be able to debug, run or save desktop flows that violate the company DLP policies, neither could use it from a cloud flow.

To learn more details about DLP for desktop flows, please check https://aka.ms/DLP-Preview 

Please let us know your feedback so we can continue to improve this Preview feature.

The post Admins can now manage RPA automations with ease using Data Loss Prevention for desktop flows (Preview) appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

First let us clarify a bit on the self-assisted premium trial that we are referring here.

As we know, Power Automate premium trials allow individual users to get hands-on experience on all the Power Automate premium features, including analyzing their processes and creating unlimited cloud flows, plus automating legacy applications through robotic process automation (RPA) and AI. However, some people might not know is that, Power Automate offers 2 separate channels to start premium trials.

1. The first channel to obtain RPA trials is centrally managed by organization admins from Microsoft 365 admin center.  Admins could obtain 25 seats of the free  Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA trial, as well as the Power Automate unattended RPA add-on trial. The admins then could assign those attended RPA trials to 25 individual makers, and assign the unattended add-ons to targeted environments in order to get thing fully setup for the makers to use. Click here to learn more. The admin managed trials will start with 30 days, and could be extended once to a total 60 days, before doing actual purchasing.
2. There is also a 2nd channel to start RPA trials, which is the 90-days self-assisted premium trial that we are referring to for today’s enhancement. Everyone in the organization should be able to obtain these trials for themselves and start building automations (unless admins have disabled any trials to get started within the whole organization).

For an individual user to get started with the self-assisted premium trial, you can click the Start free trial links from one of the following user interfaces:

1) From the pricing page  click the Try free link under Per-user plan with attended RPA

2) Or, from the Power Automate portal desktop flow page, click start a free trial link.

You are all set! It may take some minutes to get all license information synced up, but you should be ready to go and run both attended and unattended scenarios on your machine without additional cost for 90 days!

After your trial expired, you will have a few options: either ask your admin to purchase a paid attended RPA plan and assign to you, or directly purchase an attended RPA plan using your own credit card. Read more about direct purchase here. (Note: currently we don’t support direct purchase on unattended RPA add-on yet. Therefore in order to purchase unattended RPA add-on, you will still need to go through your admin channel.)

Hope this article helps you get started with Power Automate premium trials, and we are excited to learn what you build!

The post Use Power Automate self-assisted premium trials to run both attended and unattended RPA appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Good news is that this is changing today! Now you can now directly purchase the Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA for yourself, or even for all members in your team without need to be an M365 tenant/org admin! Anyone who has a valid organization email account is now able to purchase RPA directly from our pricing page.

— Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA is the most complete offer that you can use to take full advantage of the landscape of Power Automate premium capabilities, including hundreds of premium cloud-based API connectors, as well as to orchestrate and connect to any desktop/web based application that do not have existing API connection built-in. You can also use Process Advisor to easily get insights on your daily manual process and identify the highest ROI areas to automate, or to use various of AI builder intelligent models to recognize and understand unstructured such as image, data, forms, text sentiments etc.

After you click the “Buy now” button under the plan, you will be guided through to login, confirm the plan/price to purchase, enter your credit card to setup an individual subscription, and finish the purchase process.

After completed purchasing, as the “mini admin” for your subscription, you will be able to go to M365 admin center to manage everything about this subscription including renewal, cancel, assign to user or unassign plans etc.

Here are some notes that you should be aware of:

1. The direct purchasing experience is for commercial or non-profit clouds only. It is not available for governance sovereign or education clouds.

2. MSA account is not supported to do direct purchasing at this time.

3. Your M365 tenant/org admin still can choose to block the direct purchase channel from the whole org. In that case, you will be shown an messaging stating that. However you will still be able to submit a request to your admin directly within the same UI. When the admin receives your request, they can approve by assigning a corresponding license, or deny this request.

4. Your M365 tenant/org admin will have limited visibility on your specific subscription (they will not be able to manage your user assignment, view or use your credit card information etc.) However, they will still have the option to cancel your subscription, or to move this subscription into the centralized managed org subscription if they choose to.

5. Direct purchasing does not support the unattended add-on because that is a tenant wide capacity, which will still require tenant/org admin to purchase. Here is the details steps need to be followed regarding how to purchase unattended capacity or start an unattended trial.

Hope you enjoy this new unlocked purchase path and we are excited to learn what you build!

The post Direct purchase on Power Automate RPA attended is now available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

So today we are happy to announce that now you have two different options to monitor the analytics for RPA UI flows — from PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center) or using CoE Starter Kit.

Power Platform Admin Center

The easiest option for admin/CoE to view analytics is simply to visit PPAC (Power Platform Admin Center). This gives you out of box reports with no installation needed. It is accessible to anyone who has environment admin privilege. To access PPAC reports, you just need to click the Admin Center from the Power Automate portal settings menu.

4 new analytic reports for UI flows are available today, they are Runs, Usage, Created and Errors. More reports will be added in a later time.

After you select the report, you can switch the views between Cloud flows and Desktop flows
You can switch to view analytics for specific environment that you are admin with. You can also change the time period (up to 28 days) to view. Data will be refreshed on a daily base. (Note, tenant level rollup report across multiple environments is not available today, but will be coming later)

After you switch to Desktop flows view, you can apply detail filters to see data for specific types of desktop flows, e.g. Power Automate Desktop, Selenium IDE or Windows recorder (V1) type, as well as to filter by attended or unattended run mode.

The 1st report is Runs which gives you an overview of daily, weekly and monthly desktop flows run statics, with trending lines and run results breakdown (e.g. success/failure/cancel) This report gives insights on how actively desktop flows are used in each environment.

The 2nd report is Usage which shows you the desktop flows that being used most so you can get a good idea about your automation inventory.

The 3rd report is Created which shows you analytics against recent created new desktop flows, so you understand how active your desktop flows makers and who they are. (Note, you must upgrade the Power Automate Desktop app to the GA version, released 12/09/2020 or later, in order to generate correct data for this report)

The 4th report is Errors which shows the top error types that have been caused failures in your desktop flows. (Note, you must upgrade the Power Automate Desktop app to the GA version, released 12/09/2020 or later, in order to generate correct data for this report)

Center of Excellence starter kit

Above is the introduction for analytics through PPAC. The other option to view analytics is to use the powerful CoE Starter Kit (Microsoft Power Platform Center of Excellence)  The CoE Starter Kit will be useful if you need more and richer governance and monitoring capabilities which cannot be met yet using the built-in PPAC reports. Or in some situations, you wish to build your own customized reports or setup some configurable alerts. You will find CoE Starter Kit to be a handy tool for those needs. It does require addtional setup and configurations but many admins/CoEs found it is really worth the efforts. To learn more about CoE Starter Kit and get started, please check out here.

Hope you enjoy those new analytics features of desktop flows. Please start using them and welcome to provide your feedbacks through Power Platform forum.

The post Introduction to Power Automate RPA desktop flows analytics appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

CoE Starter Kit is a complementary collection of components and tools built on the Power Platform that help you build and customize your adoption strategy for the platform.

The CoE Starter Kit has already supported Power Apps and Power Automate flows, and today, we are pleased to announce support for UI flows in it.

As an admin/ CoE, you can get a holistic view across different business units, makers, and processes across all environments inside your organization. For example, finance group can understand how many of their processes have been automated and operation group can understand who their top makers are. Plus, you will also be able to get insights for all the automations regardless if they are triggered from a Power App, Power Virtual Agent, cloud-based API automation or UI based RPA automation.

Here is a quick overview of the CoE Starter Kit

Introduce the new dashboards for UI flows

CoE Starter Kit’s core is a rich set of templates and dashboards. You can view analytics reports related to environments, apps, flows, chatbots, makers, all in one place.

With the new support for Power Automate flows and UI flows, you can now navigate to Flows and UI flows tabs to view in depth analytics, including historical trends, environments, departments, even with the details on connectors used by flows, the last run date, errors, run statics etc. for a given UI flow.

You can use drill downs, sorting, and filtering features to dive into a specific area to get more insights. You can also monitor runs and errors to identify the problematic areas that need improvements:

There are more advanced features ready for your do customize your governance strategy, including the ability to identify orphaned flows (the ones with no owner) or suspended flows that conflict with your Data Loss Prevention (DLP) policies; search for flows/UI flows using a variety of filters through Flow Risk Assessment mechanism, as well as flows/UI flows that should be archived according to the Archive score to prevent resource sprawl.

How to get started

1. Get familiar with the documentation
2. Download the CoE Starter Kit solution and follow the setup instructions
3. Configure the Power BI dashboard and familiarize yourself with resources and makers existing in your environments

How to use advanced features to customize governance strategy

1. Identify orphaned flows and use the set flow permission power app to assign them to new owners. Note, this app is not yet available for UI flows.
2. Define your own audit compliance strategy for flows through compliance center. Note, the feature is not yet available for UI flows but will be coming soon.
3. Embrace your maker community and develop a nurture and adoption strategy by customizing new user welcome email

Disclaimer

Although the underlying features and components used to build the Center of Excellence (CoE) Starter Kit (such as Common Data Service, admin APIs, and connectors) are fully supported, the kit itself represents sample implementations of these features. Our customers and community can use and customize these features to implement admin and governance capabilities in their organizations.

If you face issues with:

• Using the kit: Report your issue here: aka.ms/coe-starter-kit-issues. (Microsoft Support won’t help you with issues related to this kit, but they will help with related, underlying platform and feature issues.)
• The core features in Power Platform: Use your standard channel to contact Support.

Acknowledgment

Thanks for the great team effort across Yan Qu (PM Intern), Manuela Pichler (Customer Advisory Team), Jose Kovacevich (Developer) and the rest of the UI flows team.

The post Power Automate UI Flows are available in CoE Starter Kit appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This beginner-level training is designed to on-board and train everyone. No matter if you are a business expert or IT developer, you will learn to develop RPA automation in a single day using UI flow.

The hands-on, step-by-step lab exercises guide you through building a modern end to end business RPA scenario to process incoming invoices. Inside the labs, you will use Power Automate capabilities such as UI flows and API connectors to automate a business process. In addition, you will also take advantage of form processing models developed in AI Builder.

RPA in a Day Agenda
Module 1: Overview and Prerequisites

Module 2: Build your first UI flow

Module 3: Use inputs and outputs

Module 4: Trigger your UI flow from a flow through gateway

Module 5: Integration with Outlook connector

Module 6: Use AI builder to process invoice forms

Module 7: Use Teams connector and adaptive card

Module 8: Build automations using WinAutomation and run it from Power Automate (this is the newest addition to Power Automate family with our recent acquisition)

Module 9: Create a Web UI flow using Selenium IDE

Module 10: Run UI flow in unattended mode

Download the training content from https://aka.ms/RPAinaDayPackage to get started today! Happy automating!

The post Announcing the availability of Microsoft RPA (UI flows) in a Day appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

• UI flows are now available in Government Community Cloud (GCC) and GCC High. In order to use gateway in GCC/H (which is a requirement for running UI Flows triggered from the cloud) the tenant needs to be whitelisted as described here.
• Retry and timeout policy configuration from the portal. This feature provides the ability to configure timeout and retry policy for an individual step within UI flows. This can be used within an automation that contains certain steps that are likely to fail or may take longer duration to complete.

  

  For more details, please see here

• New WinAutomation connector in UI flows. Now you can have a cloud orchestration experience on WinAutomation Process from Power Automate.

  

  For more information, please check out here.

• We also fixed an issue where the GetText action in UI flows within (If-Else) Condition block fails when more than one Get Output actions were added in a nested scope

To try out the new features in June release, please upgrade your UI flow by following instructions here.

We are looking forward to hearing your feedback and continue to improve your experience with us.

The post Power Automate UI Flows June 2020 update appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today we are happy to announce the availability of the very first WinAutomation connector inside UI flows. This is one step forward to bring Softmotive’s desktop automation together with the existing Microsoft Power Automate capabilities.

This new connector will allow you to:

1. Execute a WinAutomation Process through Power Automate
2. Pass in dynamic values from other Power Automation API actions that run in the cloud
3. View run results from cloud portal, etc.
4. Leverage existing UI flows Gateway connections
5. Leverage existing experience of running UI flows in both attended and unattended modes.

For how to get started, please see the documentation here.

As next steps, we are working on bringing more improvements to you as fast we can towards a deeper and more seamlessly integration experience. Those will include, but not limit to, storing WinAutomation Process scripts to the cloud, a better setup experience, accessibility as well as localization supports etc.  A lot of exciting capabilities are on the way. Please stay tuned!

The post New WinAutomation action in UI flows is now available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

What’s new in this release:

1. Add support for International Input Method Editors (IMEs) (learn more)
2. Improve reliability for international keyboard layouts and special key support (learn more) Here is the full list of supported keyboard layout and supported languages.
3. Enable user to opt in or out of coordinate-based playback fallback that expands the coverage of UI automation (learn more)
4. Improve user experience on the designer for UI flows
   • The domain name and username are automatically populated in the UI flows connection card.
5. Additionally, the quality continues to improve monthly. The February release includes a significant number of fixes including the following:
   • Some international users were seeing an error (“Newtonsoft.Json.JsonSerializationException”) when running UI flows on machines with international locale setting.
   • Latest Microsoft Edge releases caused errors automating browsers with UI flows.

How to get the new updates:

To take advantage of the new updates, you will need to have the latest UI flows app installed on your device. Do either of the following to get it:

1. If you have never installed the UI flows app, download and install the latest version when you are creating a UI flow. Here is the documentation and tutorials to help you get started with UI flows.
2. If you installed the UI flows app from one of our previous releases, manually upgrade by downloading the new installer from the download center and run it directly.

Note: you may have to manually enable the UI flows extension from the web browser.

We look forward to providing automatic notification about new software updates in a future update.

Please do not forget to share any feedback at the Power Automate Community Forums and use “UI flows” label.

Happy automating!

The post Power Automate UI Flows February 2020 update is now available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

What is new in this January release:

• Improved supports for controls that use ListItem, e.g. drop-down combo box, etc.

• Add supports for controls that are children of Desktop but are launched from the application, e.g. Context Menu, Menu Items, Window, etc.

• Add additional fallback strategies that help increase reliability and coverage of UI automation. In this month, UI flows will start using coordinates for previous unsupported scenarios, such as Duplicate items, In-accessible controls, Dynamic element with Automation ID, Names that will change, etc.
  • Duplicate elements found. The window below is a Font dialog box in Word. In this window the 2 highlighted Font combo boxes have the same Automation Name. In this scenario UI flow will use coordinates-based find and playback strategy.

• In-accessible elements or Empty elements. Many legacy applications don’t necessarily have accessible elements. In such situations coordinate fallback helps enable those scenarios.

We will continue improving reliability of existing strategies and add new ones in the future based on your feedback.

•  Fix false positive issues for a few instances where previous UI flow referenced wrong elements during playback.

In the example below,  the UI flow should click on the Close button of the “Find Printers” window. However it instead clicked on the Close button of the “Print” window while reporting run successful. In this new release, UI flow will make sure to click on the right Close button. In the case that UI flow was not able to identify the correct Close button, it will fall back to the next playback strategy.

How to get the new updates:

To take advantage of the new updates, you will need to have the latest UI flows agent installed on your desktop. You will need to do either of the following:

1. If you have never installed the UI flows agent before, you can download and install the latest installer when you are creating a UI flow. Here is the documentation and tutorials to help you get started with Power Automate.
2. If you have already installed the UI flows agent from our previous release, you will need to manually upgrade by downloading the new installer from download center and run it directly. Note: you may have to manually enable the UI flow extension from the web browser.

We look forward to providing automatic notification about new software updates in a future update.

Please do not forget to share any feedback at the Power Automate Community Forums under “Building Flows” discussion and use “UI Flows” label.

Happy automating!

The post Power Automate UI Flows January 2020 update is now available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.