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.

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

Once CMK is applied, all the core Power Automate assets like flow definitions, flow run history etc are encrypted using the customer’s encryption keys. For such environments, Power Automate flows would be running on a dedicated infrastructure, ensuring isolation of customer assets at both rest and runtime. At preview, we support only environments that do not contain any flows for CMK. If the CMK operation is performed on an environment that already contain flows, the flows will continue to be encrypted with the default Microsoft-managed keys. You can read more details about Power Automate support for customer managed encryption keys here.

You can find the step-by step instructions on how to use Azure Key Vault to generate a key, and then apply an enterprise policy using that key to leverage CMK here.

If an admin chooses to “lock” an environment, then all the assets that were encrypted with customer’s encryption keys would be inaccessible to Microsoft services, ensuing total lockdown of your data, even when they are stored in the Microsoft cloud. You can find more about operations like Lock and Unlock environments here.

Please feel free to provide your questions and feedback in the Power Automate Community. Happy Automating!

The post Announcing public preview of customer managed encryption keys for Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Video 1. How to create an Automated Invoicing Process with Power Automate

Automating your invoice approval process

Ashvini’s demonstration, starts with a standard invoice and illustrates how to route approval requests from group email to stakeholders in Microsoft Teams using Power Automate. Teams is one of the hundreds of built in connectors that enable easy automation across the most common enterprise apps, as you build out your process steps. He then goes on to train AI Builder to extract relevant fields from incoming invoices to augment the detail in approval requests by infusing “Dynamic content” within process steps. Finally, he ends by showing you how to use UI Flows for Robotic Process Automation to minimize manual data entry into your legacy apps.

Importantly he shows you how you can build your confidence in building these types of automated Flows by testing along the way, with all steps completed within minutes. If this all sounds sophisticated to you, don’t worry, as Ashvini demonstrates, this is within your reach. Power Platform is emerging as one of the most powerful and prolific platforms in the industry today for automation, due to it’s low to zero code foundation. This means whether you are an experienced developer or someone with no coding experience you can quickly learn how to build custom automations around your data and business processes. Let’s now dig into a few recommended best practices to help you to get started.

Best Practices for Creating a Flow

1. Some Training Pays Dividends: Power Automate is built to serve professionals of all skill levels, from end users to more technically experienced developers. If you are an end user, we recommend you still put some time into understanding how Power Automate can be best utilized. Low-code, no-code services do not mean ‘no practice required’ services. However, the benefit from a low-code service like Power Automate is the incredible potential that can be achieved with some practice. A great example of what end users can accomplish with Power Automate was typified in our recent story of how Microsoft enhanced its payroll process enterprise-wide. A single end-user learned the basics of Power Automate from our online training modules (figure 1) and was able to create a sophisticated automation to handle payment of Microsoft’s off-cycle paychecks across the globe. We recommend that any Power Automate user puts some effort to train themselves on the basics. This will make the process of building flows much easier and effective.Figure 1. Microsoft Power Automate learning modules webpage
2. Ensure that your IT Has Visibility: while Power Automate and the Power Platform are designed to encourage and support end users to create their own solutions, it is still important to make sure IT has visibility into the work that is being done. IT can especially help a departmental service scale and become enterprise wide and ensure that the project meets the overall governance requirements of the organization. Always make sure that IT is part of the development process to provide insight and guidance when needed.
3. Have an outline for steps of the process: regardless of the process you are automating, having an outline of the process flow steps will make it simpler to design your flow. For example, with the invoicing process, we know that the steps almost always follow the process outlined in figure 2. With this outline, the maker understands that the flow will require the forms processing capabilities of AI Builder, an approvals process, and the new UI flows which enables robotic process automation to complete updating the non-api based invoicing application. You can use Visio to sketch your process (and even create a flow from your Visio diagram!).Figure 2. Invoicing process steps
4. Label/Name Your Flow and its Steps: much like coders leave comments in their code, makers should make a point to label their flows and the steps accurately (figure 3). This makes the process of troubleshoot much easier. Appropriate labeling also is good practice for flows which often are shared between stakeholders so that anyone can easily understand what each step of a flow does. The maker in our video does not label each step simply because the flow was built only for this video. In general, labeling/naming each step should be considered a best practice.Figure 3. Clearly labeling/naming the flow step should be done as a best practice when creating flows
5. Test Your flow as you Build: be sure to test your flow steps through the development process. Troubleshooting your flow is much easier when you test the flow at discrete steps of the process. Also, each subsequent step is impacted by the previous step, so it should always be a best practice to test your flow as you create the steps. As you see in the video, our maker checks the flow steps in the development process. Around 4:15, the maker checks the flow to see if the notification occurs on Teams. This notification is one discrete step on the invoicing automation process and serves as a good test point to ensure the flow is running properly up to this part in the process.

Of course there are more steps that can be taken to facilitate the creation of flows, but all makers should try to follow the steps we outline here in order to unlock the full potential of the automation capabilities offered with Power Automate.

Enhance Your Digital Transformation with Power Automate

We hope that you benefit from this step-by-step guide  with Ashvini and our best practices for creating enterprise flows.  Please keep following our  to see how you and your organization can start benefiting from powerful and secure automation.  Additionally, be sure to join our growing Power Automate community and participate in discussions, provide insights, and even influence product roadmap. If you’re not already, be sure to follow the Power Automate blog to get news on the latest Flow updates, learn how Power Automate is a secure service, and read our whitepaper on best practices for deploying Power Automate in your organization.  Also, be sure to check out the Power Automate tutorials page and our video channels hosted by Power Automate engineers who will demonstrate how to create sophisticated flows  within a matter of minutes. Go to powerautomate.com, to get started with Power Automate today!

• Power Platform Mechanics Series
• A guide to building enterprise-ready flows
• Power Automate Community
• Power Automate Blog
• Power Automate Tutorials with Jon Levesque
• Power Automate Tutorials with Audrie Gordon
• Administering a PowerApps Enterprise Deployment Technical Whitepaper

The post Our Best Practices and Step-By-Step Guide for creating an enterprise scale automated invoicing process with Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

With Kerem Yuceturk, Program Manager on the SharePoint team, I’m Merwan Hade, Program Manager on the Microsoft Flow team, and it gives us great pleasure to announce the integration of Microsoft Flow into SharePoint Online lists and libraries. Microsoft Flow is a new workflow tool that enables business users to create automation to receive notifications, synchronize files, and get data between your favorite apps and services, be it on premise or in the cloud. Be sure to check out this and other announcements from the Future of SharePoint conference in San Francisco.

In this post, using a premade flow template, we’re going to walk you through how you can quickly copy new members from a MailChimp member list to a SharePoint Online custom list based on approval via email. We will also be showing you how we are integrating Flow directly into SharePoint lists and libraries and the future of our integration work.

MailChimp to SharePoint Online in a few easy clicks

Let’s imagine that you work for an office supply company called Fabrikam. Your marketing team manages email campaigns using MailChimp but you want to track your largest accounts in a list in SharePoint Online so that you can have a column for assigning the accounts to specific members of the team, and store additional metadata to add that personal touch to customer outreach.

Let’s create a flow such that whenever a new member is added to a subscriber list in MailChimp, you receive an approval email asking if you want to add this member to the VIP SharePoint Online list. To make things easier, you can just start from this premade template.  Once you open the page, click “Use this template”.

Enter your credentials and click Continue.

Now select a MailChimp member list and configure the Send Approval email step.

Then select your SharePoint Site Url and the list you want to add these members to. In the example below, we use a list named “VIP Customers”, with columns “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Email Address”, and “Account Lead”.

Configure the Create item step for SharePoint such that for every new member in MailChimp, if the approval condition is met, the First Name from MailChimp maps to the First Name column in SharePoint. Map the other values from MailChimp to the columns in SharePoint as appropriate.

Click Create flow and you’re ready to go! Learn more about how to see your flow in action in this post or documentation. 

Integrating Flow into SharePoint

We firmly believe that all of our SharePoint customers can benefit greatly by connecting their data in SharePoint to other data sources. While Flow templates are a great start, we want to make the flow even easier (pun very much intended). In an upcoming release to SharePoint, we will be integrating Microsoft Flow directly into your SharePoint lists and libraries. With this update, users will be able to simply click Add flow and select a flow template from a panel. We will automatically carry forward the context of the site and list you’re on into the Flow template that was selected.

Future of the integration

We will continue to invest in our integration efforts with more templates for more services and a more complete experience within SharePoint itself. In addition, we also plan to enhance the flow authoring experience for SharePoint by:

• Adding read/write support for Person and Taxonomy column types (currently we have read only support)

• Enabling look up of multi-value properties such as Single-choice, Multiple-choice, and Lookup columns

• Adding ways to leverage your existing SharePoint workflows in Microsoft Flow.

We hope you enjoy the interconnectedness of Flow and SharePoint. Stay tuned for more updates and check out https://flow.microsoft.com/search/?q=SharePoint for all SharePoint focused Flow templates. 

The post SharePoint and Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.