What is the Process Map?

The Process Map is designed to enhance process-centric troubleshooting and monitoring in Power Automate by providing increased visibility and efficiency. It offers a detailed, end-to-end view of a process that’s managed by a parent orchestrating flow, showing all of the associated child and desktop flows. The map also recognizes structural flow elements, such as conditions, and displays flows that didn’t execute due to specific conditional logic or upstream errors. This is critical for understanding how a problem in one part of the process can affect other parts and assists in taking appropriate countermeasures to address issues.

Key benefits:

• Accelerated troubleshooting: Quickly identify and resolve issues with an end-to-end, process-centric view that includes contextual information on runs, connections, and design-time aspects.
• Comprehensive visibility: Gain full transparency into your automation processes, including flows that were skipped or missed due to conditional logic or upstream issues.
• Enhanced impact analysis: Understand and analyze how issues affect the entire process, facilitating faster recovery and implement effective countermeasures.
• Stronger collaboration: End-to-end process visibility enables faster, context-rich communication with impacted teams, accelerating recovery and driving continuous improvement.

Key features

• Runs view: Displays the main flow run that orchestrates the process and its child runs, enabling users to track execution, identify issues, and optimize processes.
• Overview view: Provides a design-time process hierarchy view with connected subprocesses, offering quick insights and serving as the future home for aggregated process data and configurations.
• Runs tab integration: We’ve enhanced the flow runs page with new run row hover options. New icons let you create or view process maps for the selected process run and its child runs.

How to get started

This feature is being rolled-out now and you can test it today in the US preview region. Further details are available in the Process Map documentation.

The post Announcing the Process map public preview in Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

New features and updates have been added, as described below.

Test cases have now been introduced

Test cases are now available in a new tab in the console of Power Automate for desktop, allowing you to validate if your desktop flows work as expected. Testing flows come with the ‘Testing’ module, including two new actions for testing purposes, ‘Assert’ and ‘Test a desktop flow’.

A new action is now available for SAP automation

A new action called ‘Select SAP navigation item’ is now available in the SAP automation module, allowing you to interact with menu items in the application toolbar of the SAP window.

Azure key vault credentials are now supported out of the box

The ‘Get credential (preview)’ action now also supports retrieving Azure key vault credentials, in addition to CyberArk ones.

Get started

Hoping that you will find the above updates useful, please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. If you want to learn more about Power Automate Desktop, get started with the below resources:

• Learn more about Power Automate for desktop in our documentation
• Sign up for a free Power Automate trial
• Download Power Automate for desktop

The post March 2025 update of Power Automate for desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We’ve heard from customers the importance of clearly understanding the health of their enterprise automations through detailed analytics and proactive recommendations. To support this need, there are updates to monitoring and analytics tools in Automation Center and Power Platform Admin Center:

• Monitor cross environments the health of automations in Power Platform Admin Center
• Operate and troubleshoot automations in Automation Center with the hierarchical run history view and copilot generally available
• Increased action log capacity and near-real-time logging for Desktop flows with logs V2
• New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Unveiling Public preview of monitoring Power Automate in Power Platform Admin Center 

Following up on the announcement made at Ignite for Power Apps monitoring in PPAC, we are excited to announce that Power Automate resources are now available in the Monitoring Hub in Public Preview.

The Monitoring Hub is an innovative experience that enables admins to observe and maintain optimal operations by managing changes to production environments, detecting and remediating incidents, and maintaining business continuity.

The Monitoring page brings attention to resources with degraded operational health and highlights which resources have opportunities for improvement.

Thanks to the new Power Automate view in Monitoring Hub, you can now track the success rate of your cloud and desktop flows, the machine wait time in queue of your desktop flows to monitor the scalability of the allocated machines, across environments. There are many more resource types and associated metrics to come in the future.

For automations running in a Managed Environment, contextual recommendations help you enhancing their health and efficiency. The recommendation can be shared in Teams with stakeholders who can then deep dive in Automation center to troubleshoot.

Run history in Automation Center is now generally available

Automation center is a central hub for efficient monitoring and troubleshooting experiences for automation processes across Power Automate at scale. The automation center provides comprehensive visualizations to monitor the health of the automations, quickly detect issues or trends, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently. 

Whether you’re a developer, operator, Center of Excellence team member, or business analyst, the automation center provides a centralized view of the activity of your automations within an environment. It features a user-friendly interface with dashboards that show the health status of flows and work queues, desktop flow activity and for Managed Environment recommendations.

We are excited to announce that the hierarchical flow runs view and copilot are now available in general availability. 

Hierarchical Flow runs view

The runs tab presents a consolidated view of cloud and desktop flow run data displayed in a hierarchical list view. You can easily see at a glance the status of all dependent runs whether they succeeded or failed.

Copilot automation insights

When you are looking for more detailed insights, you can use Copilot to analyze your automation activity. Copilot in Automation Center is able to answer questions about your cloud and desktop flow runs, work queue data and documentation (preview).

Desktop flow logs V2 with near-real-time logging is now generally available

Building on the strong foundations of Desktop flow logs V2, we are pleased to announce the general availability of near real-time logging of desktop flow action logs for logs V2 together with drastically increased action log capacity. This feature provides near-real-time log updates of cloud-initiated desktop flows, which is essential for monitoring long-running flows.

New advanced desktop flow recommendations

Orchestration-based recommendations for desktop flow runs (preview)

You can now receive orchestration-based recommendations when an unattended desktop flow run is queued but can’t start due to a locked or disconnected user session of the same user on the machine. 

The “Desktop flows not running” recommendation shows up in the Automation Center recommendation section. The recommendation provide the details of all the affected desktop flow runs, allowing you to take corrective actions within a 10-minute timeout window.

Repair with Copilot for unattended desktop flow runs (preview)

End of last year we’ve launched the public preview of Repair with Copilot that provides attended and unattended selector repair suggestions through Copilot. If you enabled repair at runtime for unattended runs in the Power Platform admin center, you receive repair requests directly under Recommendations within the Automation Center experience.

Once enabled at both the environment and flow level, you’ll receive recommendations when an unattended cloud flow-initiated desktop flow is at risk of failing due to an error with UI or browser automation actions. This could occur when the intended UI element for interaction cannot be located using one or more preconfigured selectors.

The post Enhanced enterprise automation observability appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Protect Identities and Secrets with credential management

1. Desktop flow connection credentials with Azure key vault and CyberArk secrets: Power Automate now supports storing connection credentials securely in Azure Key Vault (AKV) or CyberArk. This ensures that passwords are encrypted and managed securely, reducing the risk of unauthorized access. This feature includes support for automatic connection updates at runtime (like when a password rotation occurs).
2. Certificate-Based Authentication with MFA (Public preview): To further enhance security, Power Automate now supports certificate-based authentication in desktop flow connections. This passwordless solution adds an extra layer of security, meeting multi-factor authentication (MFA) requirements for attended as well as unattended scenarios. This feature is available from Power Automate for Desktop Build 2410.
3. Credentials for Desktop flow actions (Public preview): For desktop flows, Power Automate allows the use of credentials directly within flow actions. This ensures sensitive information is handled securely, not stored in scripts or logs, and accessible only to authorized users. This feature is available from Power Automate for Desktop Build 2411.

Protect Networks

• VNet support for Hosted machine groups (Public preview): the Power Automate hosted RPA solution provides a streamlined approach for setting up and scaling robotic process automation (RPA) to run RPA workloads running on virtual machines managed by Microsoft and hosted on Azure infrastructure. You can now connect your own Azure virtual network (VNet) to your hosted machine groups (Public preview) enabling:
  • Network isolated, private environments with customized network security measures, such as Network Security Groups and firewalls, to control and monitor traffic.
  • Integration with on-premises networks through VPN or ExpressRoute where access to on-premises resources is necessary for RPA workloads.

Please note that connecting your own Azure VNet with individual hosted machines is already a generally available (GA) capability.

• Network Level Authentication support on Microsoft Entra joined or hybrid devices (Public Preview)
  • Network Level Authentication (NLA) is a security measure that mandates user authentication prior to the establishment of a remote desktop connection. This feature assists organizations in mitigating the risk of unauthorized access by ensuring that only authenticated users can initiate a remote session, thereby protecting against vulnerabilities associated with the authentication process.
  • This feature is now supported when running unattended workload using a MS Entra ID account on a Microsoft Entra joined or hybrid device.

These new security features make Power Automate an even more robust tool for automating intelligent processes while maintaining a high level of security. By protecting identities and secrets, safeguarding networks, and monitoring for threats, organizations can confidently leverage Power Automate to drive efficiency with hypermation.

The post New Security Features for Desktop flows: Enhancing protection of identities, secrets and desktop infrastructure appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

New features and updates have been added, as described below.

Summarizing actions and subflows with Copilot is now available (in preview)

Copilot can now be used to help you quickly understand desktop flows by summarizing the selected actions and/or subflows.

This functionality is currently only available in US-based environments for work or school accounts.

One child desktop flow can now run in parallel with its parent flow

In the Run desktop flow action, a new toggle property is now available that allows the concurrent run of a child desktop flow, in parallel with its parent flow that invoked it, on the same machine. This configuration is useful for scenarios, where unexpected popups in the target application may block certain actions of the parent flow.

New dedicated Access actions have now been introduced

A new group of dedicated Access actions is now available out of the box, permitting the use of direct Access operations.

Some instance variable types are now supported as input/output variables

Excel, Word and Outlook instance variables are now supported as input/output variables in desktop flows, accommodating the respective variable types when passing information from one desktop flow to another.

A retry policy can now be applied to the ‘On block error’ action

The action On block error now supports retry policies, as is already the case for individual actions’ error handling. If a retry policy is set and an error occurs, retrying will take place from the beginning of the block.

Get started

Hoping that you will find the above updates useful, please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. If you want to learn more about Power Automate Desktop, get started with the below resources:

• Learn more about Power Automate for desktop in our documentation
• Sign up for a free Power Automate trial
• Download Power Automate for desktop

The post January 2025 update of Power Automate for desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Next generation document and image processing with GPT

One of the most game-changing updates in AI Builder is the new multi-modal content processing capability, which allows businesses to handle various data types —including text, document, and images—within a single natural language instruction. This integration greatly simplifies the process of crafting AI actions for intelligent document processing. Unlike traditional machine learning models that require extensive training and expertise, AI Builder’s multi-modal processing can be set up using natural language, and without training data.

Structured JSON outputs now generally available

With AI Builder’s new structured JSON output feature, businesses gain a more deterministic and reliable way to handle generated content. Unlike traditional outputs that might vary in format and structure, JSON outputs are now generated with a consistent predefined schema that you define at design time, ensuring that every result aligns precisely with expected data formats. This determinism in content generation means your automated workflows will produce predictable, structured data every time, and those results will be readily integrated as variables in your Power Automate workflow for downstream processing. This feature is especially beneficial when integrating AI Builder outputs into other systems, as it reduces the need for additional data cleaning or transformation. Whether feeding data into a CRM, database, or custom application, you can ensure that data is generated in a structured and predictable way. 

Dataverse grounding is now generally available

The new Dataverse grounding capability empowers Generative AI models with up-to-date, contextually relevant information from your organization’s own data. By employing Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), AI Builder integrates directly with Dataverse to pull in real-time, business-specific knowledge, giving models a deeper understanding of your unique context.

This RAG-enhanced approach allows AI models to dynamically retrieve and incorporate relevant data from Dataverse during processing, enabling Q&A scenarios with accurate responses that are also highly contextualized to your organization. For instance, models can instantly access customer histories, product information, and up-to-the-minute operational data, enriching outputs with knowledge directly grounded in your business reality.

As part of this feature becoming generally available, the capability has been enhanced to support multiple tables, including tables with large amounts of data records.

Model selection: GPT-4o and GPT-4o Mini

AI Builder offers flexibility in model selection, allowing users to choose between the powerful GPT-4o and the cost-effective GPT-4o Mini. This adaptability enables customization based on specific project requirements and resource considerations. 

Prompt library

The prompt library feature provides a collection of pre-designed prompts, serving as templates to expedite the creation of AI models. This resource accelerates development and ensures best practices are followed in prompt engineering. Users can modify templates to suit specific needs, adjusting language, tone, and detail to match organizational standards and requirements. The templates cover key areas like document extraction, data transformation, and content generation, making it easy for users to find the right starting point for their intelligent automation goals. 

Use cases to get started

With AI Builder, you don’t need to be a coding expert to leverage the power of AI in your daily operations. By creating prompts that can extract information from documents, classify emails, and even analyze images, you can empower your team to work smarter, not harder. AI Builder works hand-in-hand with other Power Platform tools like Power Automate, Copilot Studio and Power Apps, enabling users to create intelligent workflows and applications that are customized to meet the needs of any business.

For example, let’s say your team frequently processes customer inquiries. Using AI Builder and Power Automate, you can design a workflow that analyzes the content of incoming emails, categorizes them by urgency or topic, and even suggests responses. This not only saves time but also keeps communication consistent and efficient. By setting up this automated flow, businesses can stay on top of customer interactions and ensure timely responses.

Are you ready to bring AI to your organization?

The AI Builder Documentation provides a comprehensive guide on setting up AI Builder, configuring models, and integrating it with tools like Power Automate and Power Apps.

For step-by-step tutorials, the Microsoft Learn AI Builder Learning Path is an excellent place to start. It covers everything from foundational concepts to advanced use cases, helping users of all levels become proficient in leveraging AI Builder to automate and optimize workflows.

For guidance and samples on using the multi-modal content processing and other prompts with Power Apps, you can use the Creative AI Kit in App Source or GitHub. The new samples that use multi-modal prompts include AI Image Diff, AI Describe Image, AI Fields from Image and AI Generate QnA.

Join our Ignite sessions and read about other exciting announcements for Microsoft Power Platform:

• Automate e-mail, doc, and image processing with GPT in Power Automate with Gwenael Bego and Maria Gutierrez
• Revolutionize the way you work with Power Automate and AI with Joe Fernandez and Heather Orta-Olmo
• Unlock innovation with practical strategies in Power Automate with Jonathan Kendall
• See our Dataverse Ignite session (virtual and in person): Explore Ignite 2024: Unlock enterprise knowledge with Dataverse – Microsoft Power Platform Blog

The post Boost productivity: Automate emails, documents, and images with Microsoft AI Builder appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Build advanced, reliable automations faster with AI 

Developers are key to business process innovation. In Power Automate, it is now possible to build automations that utilize AI within cloud flows using generative actions, easily use natural language to create expressions for flows with Copilot for expressions, and incorporate document processing into workflows with next-generation document processing. These features enhance developers’ ability to deliver solutions efficiently and effectively. 

Introducing next-generation document processing with GPT 

Efficient document management is vital for smooth operations and timely decisions, but traditional AI models require lengthy training and frequent updates. With GPT-4-powered document processing, now available in public preview, you can use natural language to extract and process unstructured data from documents like invoices, medical results, or emails. This next-gen tool handles multi-modal content, automating email, document, and image processing for improved productivity. For makers who want to blend in pro-code or gain greater control, we’ve added the ability to structure outputs using JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) directly inline. Makers can combine multi-modal content with enterprise knowledge from Microsoft Dataverse in their prompts. This feature enables makers to quickly deploy document and image processing directly into existing workflows using natural language instructions.  

Learn more in our detailed blog Boost productivity: Automate emails, documents, and images with Microsoft AI Builder.
Visit our Use AI Builder in Power Automate documentation
Join our Power Automate session for a deep dive. 

Transform your automation processes with generative actions 

Generative actions allow you to add AI-powered steps to your cloud flows, letting AI reason over enterprise guardrails provided in unstructured content format such as documents and PDFs, and decide the best course of action for complex tasks. For example, with generative actions you can automate conditional approvals based on the content of incoming emails and company policies. This feature, currently in the Early Access Program, is coming soon to public preview, when you will be able to create, edit, test, and run generative actions all from within the cloud flow designer. 

Create and edit expressions faster with Copilot 

Copilot for expressions, now in public preview, is designed to assist developers and makers in creating or editing complex expressions using natural language. By simply describing what you want to build and referencing the dynamic data in the flow, Copilot translates your prompts into specific expressions in your Power Automate flow, speeding up development and reducing manual coding time. 

To learn more about this feature and how to get started, read our Create and edit expressions with Copilot documentation.

Streamline automation and operations  

Monitor and manage at scale with new automation center 

Automation center, now generally available, is a central hub for efficient monitoring and troubleshooting experiences for automation processes across Power Automate at scale. The automation center provides comprehensive visualizations that enable you to monitor the health of your automations, quickly detect issues or trends, and troubleshoot problems more efficiently. 

Whether you’re a developer, operator, Center of Excellence team member, or business analyst, the automation center provides a centralized view of all automation activities. Now generally available, it features a user-friendly interface with dashboards that show recommendations, the health status of work queues, and desktop flow activity. Additionally, new views for execution logs, performance metrics, and integrated agents are now available in public preview. 

To learn more and to get started, read our Automation center documentation.

Improve robotic process automation (RPA) reliability using repair with Copilot 

Repair with Copilot, now in public preview, simplifies resolving user interface (UI) control issues in both attended and unattended RPA with Power Automate for desktop. By proactively providing solutions to common automation issues, such as notifying the right person in the automation center, repair with Copilot reduces downtime for RPA scenarios.  

Example of using repair with Copilot for unattended RPA:

Example of using repair with Copilot for attended RPA: 

To learn more and get started with repair with Copilot, read our UI and browser automation actions documentation.

Start your journey into a new era of automation and AI 

Are you ready to bring your organization into the future with the latest AI capabilities in Power Automate? Get started with a free trial or compare plans, join our sessions below at Microsoft Ignite 2024, and read about other exciting announcements for Microsoft Power Platform.  

Power Automate

Find the right low-code automation plan for your business.

Learn more

• Revolutionize the way you work with Power Automate and AI with Joe Fernandez and Heather Orta-Olmo  
• Automate e-mail, doc, and image processing with GPT in Power Automate with Gwenael Bego and Maria Gutierrez 
• Unlock innovation with practical strategies in Power Automate with Jonathan Kendall 

The post The next frontier in enterprise intelligent automations with Microsoft Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In April this year, we enabled the support for CMK for new environments sans flows. Any new flows created in these new environments were protected with CMK. Going forward, there will be no need to start with a new environment without flows to protect cloud flows.

As customers move more workloads from on-premises to the cloud, some need greater control over their data. With customer managed encryption keys, customers can bring their own encryption keys to secure all their cloud data at rest, to provide them with added control. While all customer data is encrypted using Microsoft-managed encryption keys by default, CMK provides added protection, especially for highly regulated industries such as Healthcare and Financial Services, to protect their cloud assets using their own key.

With CMK, customers leverage an encryption key from their own Azure key vault, which Microsoft does not have access to. Customers can configure an enterprise policy with that encryption key and apply it to any new Power Platform environment. Once this policy is applied, all the services that have support for CMK will be protected using customer’s key. This operation is purely an admin-led operation and is invisible to low code developers and other makers who continue to use the service exactly the way they do today.

The experience to apply CMK enterprise policy will now automatically protect any cloud flows in the environment by migrating the flows to CMK protected infrastructure. You can learn more about this capability and tools to help you assess readiness here. Once CMK is applied, flow definitions, flow actions and their inputs and outputs, and flow run history are protected using the customer’s encryption keys.

Read more about Power Automate managed key support in our documentation here. Please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community.  

Happy automating! 

The post Microsoft Power Automate customer managed key support now generally available appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

New features and updates have been added, as described below.

All Power Automate connectors are now generally available for desktop flows

Cloud connectors in Power Automate for desktop are now generally available through the Connectors tab in the Assets library. Premium users can now add and use all non-custom Power Automate connectors and their operations in desktop flows, enjoying direct integration with multiple Microsoft and third-party services.

Direct integration with CyberArk credentials is now available (in preview)

The action ‘Get credential’ has now been introduced under the new module ‘Power Automate secret variables’ in preview, offering direct integration with CyberArk credentials, which can be retrieved and used in desktop flow actions out of the box.

Power Fx has now become generally available for desktop flows

Power Fx enabled flows are now generally available in Power Automate for desktop.

Get started

Hoping that you will find the above updates useful, please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. If you want to learn more about Power Automate Desktop, get started with the below resources:

• Learn more about Power Automate for desktop in our documentation
• Sign up for a free Power Automate trial
• Download Power Automate for desktop

The post November 2024 update of Power Automate for desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Key features

New features and updates have been added, as described below.

More connectors are now available for desktop flows (in preview)

The Assets library now comes with a new Connectors tab (in preview), which allows premium users to add and use out of the box even more cloud connectors and their operations in desktop flows, offering direct integration with multiple Microsoft and third-party services.

This is another important step towards the alignment between desktop and cloud flows, their available content and the offered user experience!

Web automation is now supported in Citrix and RDP sessions

In addition to desktop automation, web automation is now also supported in RDP and Citrix sessions, allowing for more robust flows in remote machine scenarios. This functionality is available for both web recording and manual authoring.

A new action to extract tables from desktop apps in now available

A new action is now available for data extraction in desktop automation, called Extract data from table, to enable the proper extraction of tables and data grids from target applications.

Two new actions for work queues have been introduced

Two new actions have now been added for work queue processing, Add multiple work queue items and Get work queue items by filter. Furthermore, variables of work queue item type now support more properties out of the box.

Get started

Hoping that you will find the above updates useful, please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. If you want to learn more about Power Automate Desktop, get started with the below resources:

• Learn more about Power Automate for desktop in our documentation
• Sign up for a free Power Automate trial
• Download Power Automate for desktop

The post October 2024 update of Power Automate for desktop appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.