Today, we are pleased to announce a special series around managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows at scale throughout your organization. This has been designed for Automation CoE’s (Center of Excellence)/ admins looking to enable and govern the roll out of Power Automate Desktop throughout the organization.

This series includes 8 episodes that introduces you to the concept of managing lifecycle for Power Automate Desktop, leveraging Microsoft Endpoint Manager tools such as Intune, SCCM and ring deployment techniques to deploy, monitor and audit Power Automate Desktop.

Watch the video series on YouTube and get your copy of the playbook today.

Highlights from the video series and playbook.

Managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows

In this debut episode, we will give an overview of the challenges with managing a desktop application and how can you solve them using Microsoft Endpoint Manager and Power Automate.

Create Intune Package for Power Automate Desktop

In this episode, we will show you how to deploy Power Automate Desktop through Intune. We will be creating groups in Azure Active directory and also creating an Intune package to deploy Power Automate Desktop app.

Configure Intune for Deploying Power Automate Desktop Package

In this episode, we will show you how to configure Intune to deploy Power Automate Desktop app. We will look at various options an admin can use to install the applications.

Deploy Power Automate Desktop and lifecycle management

In this episode, we will show you how you can use the Ring deployment methodology to roll out Power Automate Desktop across the organization

Manage Power Automate Desktop through System Center Configuration Manager (SCCM)

In this episode, we will show you how you can use SCCM to package Power Automate Desktop and manage it’s lifecycle (e.g. upgrade, uninstall etc.)

Silent registration for Power Automate Desktop machines with Power Automate

In this episode, we will show you how you can use register the machine deployed through Intune with Power Automate service. We will be using a Service principal in Azure to register the machine with Power Automate.

Analytics for Power Automate Desktop app in Intune

In this episode, we will show you how you can monitor the Power Automate Desktop deployments in Intune. Intune provides out of the box reporting for device health, application version and more across the organization.

Audit/ Compliance for Power Automate Desktop app in Intune

In this episode, we will show you how you create compliance policies to monitor the Power Automate Desktop deployments in Intune. You can also integrate with Azure conditional access which gives administrators a centralized place to manage policies and compliance status across the organization.

We would like to thank Thomas Barcenas (KMicro Tech, Inc.) for his contribution to this playbook and the video series.
We hope you find this useful and are excited to see what you will be automating!

Call to action!

1. Watch the video series on Automate It YouTube channel
2. Get your copy of the playbook
3. Get started with Power Automate Desktop

Resources

• HEAT – Holistic Enterprise Automation Techniques: https://aka.ms/rpapnp
• Automate It video series on YouTube: https://aka.ms/automateit
• Power Automate Desktop on Windows Whitepaper https://aka.ms/padonwindowspnpdoc
• Microsoft Endpoint Manager documentation
• Microsoft Intune documentation
• Microsoft Endpoint Configuration Manager documentation
• Manage and protect mobile and desktop applications with Microsoft Endpoint Manager
• Governance in Power Automate Desktop
• Silent registration for machines
• Microsoft Intune reports
• Device compliance policies in Microsoft Intune
• What is Conditional Access in Azure Active Directory

The post HEAT special: Automate It video series and playbook for managing Power Automate Desktop on Windows 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.