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.

Power Platform is excited to announce over 60 new connector releases for Ignite 2023, along with more than 50 updates to the existing connectors. These connectors are available in Power Automate, Power Apps, and Azure Logic Apps & cover the breadth & depth of solutions and tools for IT Operations, AI, Business Intelligence, Productivity and much more. Power Platform has an existing fleet of 1000+ connectors in the catalog to help creators and learners of all ages and backgrounds connect with the tools and information they need to build a more intuitive & productive solutions.

We are extremely honored to have a great partnership with all our Partners, and we look forward to partnering with many more Enterprises & community developers for providing wonderful solutions in the future.

New Connectors released by Verified Publishers include:

Interested in submitting your connector? Visit our documentation and our GitHub repository to learn how to get started.

1. 3E Events
2. DocuMotor
3. Dokobit Universal API
4. Microsoft Translator V3
5. The IT Tipster
6. HTML to PDF by Pascalcase
7. Monday
8. Eden AI
9. ServiceDesk Plus Cloud
10. ReversingLabs A1000
11. Azure Text to speech
12. StarRez REST v1
13. iManage Insight Plus
14. Adobe Acrobat Sign Government
15. Peakboard
16. Calendly
17. Adobe Acrobat Sign Sandbox
18. BlueInk
19. D7Messaging
20. Event Tickets
21. Tesseron Asset
22. The Events Calendar
23. Navisphere
24. Microsoft Teams Virtual Events

Below are the major releases for you in Ignite 2023:

1Me Corporate

1Me is your next-gen digital contact card. It provides the easiest & fastest way to share your contact information with anyone worldwide. 1-QR Code or 1-Tap is all what you need to share your contacts information.

1Me Corporate Edition, you will be able to manage your entire company’s contact cards, empowered by many powerful tools, such as digital card branding and administration corporate contracts.

Visit www.1me.live to learn more about 1Me.

Now with Power Automate adapter integration, onboarding your team is now a seamless experience, where you will be able to build automation processes that send onboarding invitations automatically to your team members.

Ramy Mostafa, CEO

Visit the 1Me Corporate connector documentation to learn more.

3E Events

3E is Elite Technology’s market leading law firm management, productivity, and financial solution. With the recent availability of the 3E Events Connector Configuration capability, 3E Cloud customers now have the ability to develop event-based integrations using Microsoft Power Platform. This new integration development option combines 3E APIs and 3E Events Hub, in conjunction with the Power Platform 3E Events connector. This combination enables customers to extend 3E’s capabilities using Microsoft’s low code/no code Power Platform to create more interactive, immersive, responsive integrated solutions.

Visit 3E Events connector documentation to learn more.

DocuMotor

The DocuMotor connector allows you to convert data from any system into professional Word documents, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets, or accessible PDFs (PDF/UA). Simplify your document creation process with our intuitive yet flexible document automation platform tailored for businesses and the documents that matter.

With DocuMotor, you can effortlessly generate on-brand and compliant documents, saving valuable time and ensuring consistency across your organization. Experience seamless integration and unleash the full potential of document automation for your business.

Easily insert and preview text, conditional sections, images, charts, and tables all within our browser-based template builder. Once you are satisfied, go live with a single click.

Learn more about our user-friendly platform and its capabilities in our documentation.

Visit the DocuMotor connector documentation to learn more.

Dokobit Universal API

Dokobit Universal API is a versatile tool that enables signing documents internally, within your system, and collecting signatures from 3rd parties, outside your system. Document signing occurs in an accountless Dokobit signing (where invited participants can sign documents without registering on the Dokobit portal) interface with your organisation’s branding. Actions also include access to an eIDAS-certified service for qualified e-signature and e-seal validation.

Visit the Dokobit Universal API documentation to learn more.

Microsoft Translator V3

The Microsoft Translator V3 connector now allows you to translate documents and text. Using this connector, you can create automated workflows to translate single/multiple documents that are stored in SharePoint, OneDrive, local folder, or any other storage location. You can also create automated workflows to translate text from any source such as incoming emails via Outlook provider. This connector leverages Azure AI Translator which supports 125+ languages. For more details, check out the following resources:

• Documentation on connector actions.
• Tutorial on how to use the connector to translate documents.
• Video walkthrough on how to create an automated flow to translate a document in SharePoint.
• Tutorial on how to use the connector to translate text.
• Video walkthrough on how to create an automated flow to translate text.

Visit the Microsoft Translator V3 connector documentation to learn more.

The IT Tipster

IT Tipster connector allows the end user to generate code128 barcodes and QR codes by passing in a simple text string to the connector. The barcode and QR code are returned to the user in base64 format.

For more information head over to https://www.theittipster.com and here.

For the person to attribute the connector please use Shane Cosgrove, Solution Architect

Visit the The IT Tipster connector documentation to learn more.

HTML to PDF by Pascalcase

The “HTML to PDF by Pascalcase” connector allows transformation of HTML files into high-quality PDF documents. It allows conversion of web pages, reports, or other HTML content to PDF documents. The connector has the ability to handle heavy-duty PDF generation without any size limitations making it perfect for both small-scale and large-scale projects.

Visit HTML To PDF Converter Help Document for more details.

Visit the HTML to PDF by Pascalcase connector documentation to learn more. 
monday

The monday connector seamlessly integrates Power Automate with monday.com. Create monday items, notifications, subitems, boards, groups, updates and more. Trigger Power Automate flows based on a variety of monday events, such as when an item is created or updated.

Get started by installing the Microsoft Power Automate app in the monday.com marketplace.

Visit monday connector documentation to learn more.

Eden AI

Eden AI makes AI accessible to everyone by providing a unique API connected to the best engines for more than 50 AI technologies.

With the Eden AI connector for Power Automate, you can integrate advanced AI features such as natural language processing, image recognition, document parsing, audio processing, generative AI, and more. Eden AI allows you to enhance your apps and workflows with all the best AI engines (more than 30 different AI providers).

Visit the Eden AI connector documentation to learn more. 
ServiceDesk Plus Cloud (powerautomate.com)

ServiceDesk Plus is the unified service management platform from ManageEngine (a division of Zoho Corporation). ServiceDesk Plus offers a short runway to value with its out-of-the-box industry best practices and helps tackle complex service scenarios with its no-code visual automation.

Packed with contextual integrations with both IT and business apps, ServiceDesk Plus connector is now available in the Power Automate platform. IT admins can now include ServiceDesk Plus in their Power Automate workflows, to more efficiently manage their requests, and changes.

Visit ServiceDesk Help Document to learn more.

Visit the ServiceDesk Plus Cloud documentation to learn more.

ReversingLabs A1000

The ReversingLabs A1000 connector enables Microsoft Azure users to add advanced threat hunting and malware analysis capabilities to their toolbox. Based on the TitaniumCore static analysis engine, security teams using the A1000 can gain rich context and threat classifications across thousands of file types based on a comprehensive history of goodware and malware. Additionally, security teams can also utilize YARA rule matching for further file-based threat detection.

For more information on the ReversingLabs A1000 platform, see the following: ReversingLabs

Visit the ReversingLabs A1000 connector documentation to learn more.

Azure Text to speech

Azure AI Text-to-Speech allows you to build apps and services that speak naturally with more than 400 voices across 140 languages and dialects.

Visit the Azure Text to speech connector documentation to learn more.

StarRez REST v1

The StarRez resident and property management platform is the perfect tool to help your community thrive. With the StarRez REST API, you can automate regular tasks, import and export data and streamline your business processes.

Visit the StarRez REST v1 connector documentation to learn more.

BlueInk

The Blueink connector allows you to incorporate Blueink’s eSignature platform into your automated workflows. The connector allows you to send documents for eSignature, store signed documents, and check the status of your signature requests. Streamline your document management processes by adding Blueink to your existing workflows.

Learn more about Blueink at www.blueink.com.

Visit the BlueInk connector documentation to learn more.

D7Messaging

Direct7 Networks offers a messaging API platform that enables you to establish global connections with your customers. Now, streamlining your Microsoft workflows is more convenient with the D7 messaging connector. Easily dispatch verification messages using the D7 Verifier and gain insights into phone numbers through the D7 Number Look-Up.

Additionally, this connector is highly efficient for sending SMS, OTP SMS, and Viber messages to your customer base. The integration process is straightforward, making it easier to engage with your customers for messaging and verification needs.

For further information, please visit D7Messaging

Visit the D7Messaging connector documentation to learn more.

Updates released for Connectors by Verified Publishers include:

1. AADInvitationManager
2. Adobe Acrobat Sign
3. Centrical
4. Encodian
5. Microsoft Bookings
6. Snowflake
7. Talkdesk
8. The Bot Platform
9. Zoho Sign Team Forms
10. Yeeflow
11. ReversingLabs TitaniumCloud
12. RegexFlow ExecutePython
13. ArcGIS
14. Encodian
15. Survey123
16. LCP – iCordis
17. SmartCOMM DocGen
18. Bitskout
19. ModuleQ
20. Seismic Library
21. AvePoint Cloud Governance
22. Apptigent PowerTools PRO
23. allGeo
24. Adobe PDF Services
25. CobbleStone – Contract Insight
26. Vocean
27. Jupyrest
28. Blackbaud SKY Add-ins
29. Advanced Data Operations
30. FactSet
31. U.S. Bank Treasury Management
32. Maximizer
33. DocuSign Demo
34. Dokobit Portal
35. Meisterplan
36. Power Textor
37. Converter by Power2Apps
38. SMSAPI
39. CivicPlus Transform
40. OneBlink
41. iManage Work for Admins
42. DocuSign
43. Data Activator Early Access
44. InEight
45. Tesseron Invoice
46. Plumsail HelpDesk
47. ArcGIS
48. ArcGIS Enterprise
49. GMO Sign
50. OpenText Extended ECM
51. OpenText eDOCS
52. OpenText Core Share
53. Plumsail HelpDesk
54. ArcGIS
55. ArcGIS Enterprise
56. GMO Sign
57. OpenText Extended ECM
58. OpenText eDOCS
59. OpenText Core Share

Below are few of the most significant updates.

Microsoft Bookings

With this change, customers can select a booking page from the drop-down menu instead of entering the SMTP address for creating a Bookings trigger. We have also powered the connector with newer APIs for the experience to be better. If you run into any connection related issues, please delete and recreate Bookings connection from Data->Connections tab as we have updated our APIs as well for this new change.

Visit the Microsoft Bookings connector documentation to learn more.

Snowflake

Build low-code data applications in just a few clicks with Microsoft Power Platform and Snowflake. The Snowflake Connector for Microsoft Power Platform provides instant access to up-to-date data within your Snowflake environment without manually integrating against API endpoints. Now anyone can easily build low-code applications or workflows on Power Platform that leverage Snowflake data without any previous technical or app development experience.

The Snowflake Connector for Power Platform provides a wide range of benefits:

• Seamless data connectivity: You can easily connect to your Snowflake account from within the Power Apps environment.
• Advanced analytics:  Snowflake’s advanced analytics capabilities allow you to extract deeper insights from your data, including predictive analytics, machine learning, and data science workflows.
• Automation capabilities: Automate processes, trigger workflows, stay informed about data updates, and execute actions based on events in Snowflake.
• Secure data access: The Snowflake Connector for Power Platform provides secure data access, helping to protect from unauthorized access.

Get the Snowflake Connector for Microsoft Power Platform by installing it from the Power Platform Connectors listing. Explore our detailed Snowflake Quickstart guide or read the documentation and start building your data applications today.

Zoho Sign

The Zoho Sign platform enables organizations to digitally sign, send, and manage business paperwork from anywhere. This connector allows you to set up automated workflows to collect signatures on documents from your everyday apps and business tools such as CRM, HRMS, cloud storage, and other communication and collaboration platforms.  With this update, you’ll be able to connect your apps to the Zoho Sign service across all of our regional datacenters to initiate workflows for signing and processing document data within geographical boundaries that are best suited to your business operations.

Visit the Zoho Sign connector documentation to learn more.

Team Forms (powerautomate.com)

Teams Forms brings digital forms into Microsoft Teams and empowers your teams to build and deliver forms from within the productivity tools they already know and trust. Unlike many other forms solutions on the market, Team Forms works offline and communicates directly with your Teams SharePoint, ensuring that data captured by forms remains under your control and never leaves your trusted Microsoft 365 environment.

You can use the Team Forms connector to trigger automated workflows, access response fields, attachments, and generated PDFs.

Visit the Team Forms connector documentation to learn more.

Yeeflow

The Yeeflow connector bridges the gap between Yeeflow and Microsoft Power Automate, offering users an intuitive way to trigger workflows when data is added or updated in Yeeflow Data Lists. By eliminating the need for manual interventions, businesses can now automate their operations and ensure smooth data flow across platforms.

With the Yeeflow connector, Microsoft 365 users can seamlessly integrate Yeeflow with Microsoft Products and Third-party systems without writing a single line of code. This powerful integration empowers organizations to streamline their business processes and enhance collaboration effortlessly.

Highlights of the Yeeflow Connector:

• Effortless Integration: Microsoft 365 users can integrate Yeeflow with their existing Microsoft Products and Third-party systems seamlessly, simplifying the management of business processes.
• Code-Free Automation: With the Yeeflow connector, you don’t need to write any code. The user-friendly interface allows you to set up and customize workflows quickly, saving valuable time and resources.
• Streamlined Collaboration: Collaborate effortlessly between Yeeflow and Microsoft Power Automate users, enhancing cross-platform communication and optimizing productivity.

Visit the Yeeflow connector documentation to learn more.

RegexFlow ExecutePython

RegexFlow’s ExecutePython service allows users to execute Python scripts remotely.  All standard Python libraries are supported along with  openpyxl and pillow.  Additional libraries can be added by request.  The ExecutePython connector for Power Automate allows users to easily extend their Flows’ functionality with the flexibility of the Python programming language.

Visit the RegexFlow ExecutePython connector to learn more.

ArcGIS Survey123

ArcGIS Survey123 is a powerful solution for creating smart forms and surveys that accelerate data collection on web and mobile devices. Benefit from dynamic form builders that make designing simple to complex, engaging forms enriched with location data easy. Visualize and analyze survey results with a geographic lens to better understand where and why things occur. Share data to other critical business apps and services staff uses daily with the Survey123 Power Platform Connector. Provide instant access to real-time information to better support decision-making and improve business processes.

Visit the Survey123 connector documentation to learn more.

Vocean

Vocean, where co-creation meets next-level innovation, offers a powerful platform for open innovation and idea generation. Vocean enables effortless collaboration and use of the collective intelligence to drive innovation and achieve your organization’s full potential, further increased by the seamless Teams integration. With Vocean Copilot, our advanced AI-powered assistant, ideas can be refined, hidden patterns uncovered, and valuable suggestions for improvements revealed – leading to groundbreaking solutions. The Vocean connector for Power Automate empowers seamless connectivity between the Vocean platform and other apps, further enhancing the innovation process.

Visit the Vocean connector documentation to learn more.

Meisterplan

Meisterplan is a portfolio-level resource management tool that helps portfolio and resource managers manage people across teams and initiatives whether your work is traditional, agile or hybrid.

With the update to the Microsoft Power Automate Connector for Meisterplan, you can now read and update data of Financial Actuals. Additionally, we have added actions to read Meisterplan user data.

Visit the Meisterplan connector documentation to learn more. 
Power Textor

Power Textor is the ultimate game-changer for businesses looking to elevate their SMS game within Power Automate. The powerful SaaS tool helps businesses integrate SMS functionality to trigger flows relating to sending SMS and MMS to customers and receiving push notifications when a text message is received. This enables businesses engage with their audience through one-to-one conversation, tapping into the heart of their customer base.

Power Textor supports various text messaging options, including on-demand SMS, scheduled SMS, event reminders, and Google Review requests. All of it helps businesses build long-term brand loyalty with their customers.

Power Textor connector is currently available in the USA, Sweden, UK, and Canada and can be integrated with Power Automate, Logic Apps, and Power Apps to automate messaging.

Visit the Power Textor connector documentation to learn more.

Converter by Power2Apps

The Converter by Power2Apps allows you to easily convert common data formats to others (JSON to CSV, CSV to XLSX, File to PDF and many more). The focus here is on user-friendliness, in which the data structure is automatically detected.

In addition to better integration with Power Apps, many new actions have been added. These new actions cover 4 topics:

• Image conversions (Format conversions, Rotation, Compress).
• QR and barcodes (Create/read)
• PDF editing ((Un)-Protect, Merge, get Metadata)
• Add content to DOCX (Images, Text and Tables)

Visit the Converter by Power2Apps connector to learn more.

SMSAPI

SMSAPI is a global professional SMS provider and a part of the mobile industry-leading LINK Mobility Group. We excel at providing easy and powerful SMS gateway, API, ready-to-use integrations, and Microsoft Power-Up has become one of them. This connector enables adding SMS as a channel to your Microsoft workflows. It automates sending messages like SMS reminders, marketing, notifications, and one-time passwords.

To use the official SMSAPI Connector, register first at www.smsapi.com. Create a free test account, and we will add extra points to kickstart your journey with SMS communications.

Visit the SMSAPI connector documentation to learn more.

Data Activator Early Access

Data Activator is a no-code experience in Microsoft Fabric for automatically taking actions when patterns or conditions are detected in changing data. It monitors data in Power BI reports and EventStreams items, for when the data hits certain thresholds or matches other patterns. It then automatically takes appropriate action such as alerting users.

Using the Data Activator Power Automate connector, you can generate actions in external systems when your Data Activator triggers activate. This can be useful for sending notifications, creating action items in ticketing systems, or calling line-of-business apps from within Data Activator.

Click here to learn more about Data Activator.

(** Please note that Data Activator is currently in private preview, so you will need to be signed up for the private preview in order to use the Data Activator Power Automate connector.)

Visit the Data Activator Early Access connector documentation to learn more.

InEight

“Allowing for the seamless exchange of data between your existing back-office applications and InEight’s integrated project controls platform, InEight Connector brings proven project certainty to your business without all the hassle. Eliminating manual data entry and providing robust real-time analytics across your applications, the connector gets you one step closer to realizing complete project visibility and confidence. With over $1 trillion worth of construction projects around the world relying on InEight’s integrated project controls, you have full confidence in InEight on your projects. “

Author: Catie Williams, Vice President Product

Visit the InEight connector documentation to learn more.

Plumsail HelpDesk

Plumsail HelpDesk helps you to turn your SharePoint site into an efficient and user-friendly HelpDesk. In this update, we have added a new region. Now you can select a region while installing HelpDesk. It allows you to achieve better compliance with regional and industrial regulations.

Visit Plumsail HelpDesk to learn more.

ArcGIS

ArcGIS connects your automated workflows to resources from your ArcGIS organization. Access geoenrichment, geocoding, and routing services to add demographics and location information to your data. You can also use the ArcGIS connector to create feature layers and fetch data from existing feature layers in your ArcGIS organization. The ArcGIS connector works seamlessly with all the connectors in the Power Automate library. Further, it enables you to create automated flows leveraging triggers and webhooks based on record or attachment changes in your feature layer. The ArcGIS connector helps you easily maintain records and attachments through CRUD-based actions (insert, update, delete) in near real-time allowing you to fetch changes when you need them most.

Visit ArcGIS to learn more.

ArcGIS Enterprise

ArcGIS Enterprise connects your automated workflows to resources from your ArcGIS organization. Access geoenrichment, geocoding, and routing services to add demographics and location information to your data. You can also use the ArcGIS Enterprise connector to create feature layers and fetch data from existing feature layers in your ArcGIS organization. The ArcGIS Enterprise connector works seamlessly with all the connectors in the Power Automate library. Further, it enables you to create automated flows leveraging triggers and webhooks based on record or attachment changes in your feature layer (currently in Preview). The ArcGIS Enterprise connector helps you easily maintain records and attachments through CRUD-based actions (insert, update, delete) in near real-time allowing you to fetch changes when you need them most.

Visit ArcGIS Enterprise to learn more.

New Connectors released by Independent Publishers include:

Interested in submitting an Independent Publisher connector? Visit our documentation and our GitHub repository to learn how to get started.
Calendarific by Andras Fordos

Calendarific is a developer-friendly, worldwide service giving you access to public, local & bank holidays and observances; and spanning over 230 countries, 3,300+ states and 100+ languages.

View this connector in GitHub.
Leap-Ai by Chandra Sekhar

LeapAi image recognition service.

View this connector in GitHub.
MessageBird SMS  by Troy Taylor

Messagebird’s SMS service allows you to send and receive SMS messages to and from any country in the world.

View this connector in GitHub.
Microsoft Partner Center by Oleksii Skirko, Innoware Ukraine LLC

This connector allows you to connect to MPC API and collect some information including customer details, orders and subscriptions.

View this connector in GitHub.
Monster API  by Troy Taylor

With Monster API, you can effortlessly access powerful generative AI models such as Stable Diffusion for text to image and image to image.

View this connector in GitHub.
ScreenshotOne by Troy Taylor

ScreenshotOne is a scalable and straightforward screenshot service to cover all your needs by making screenshots. It converts any given URL or HTML to PNG, PDF, etc.

View this connector in GitHub.
SolarEdge by Richard Wierenga

The SolarEdge connector gives you the opportunity to display system data in other applications.

View this connector in GitHub.
Threads by Troy Taylor

Threads is a Slack replacement designed for makers. Threads provide a simple, focused canvas for sharing your work and getting rich feedback in return.

View this connector in GitHub.
io by Troy Taylor

Improve operational efficiency with the world’s leading enterprise-grade weather service. Use our hyper-accurate weather data for endless use cases across all industries.

View this connector in GitHub.
dev  by Troy Taylor

Create a short, temporary, self-destructing link to a website or message.

View this connector in GitHub.
WhatIsMyBrowser by Troy Taylor

The WhatIsMyBrowser.com service provides an easy way for your website or system to get detailed information about the technology that your visitors are using to browse your website. There are lots of uses for it, but some of the most popular ones include using this information to personalize the content and advertising on your site for each visitor, help identify “strange” or risky activity on your site, and to gather general demographic information about the visitors to your site.

View this connector in GitHub.
io by Troys Taylor

APlace is a service that allows you to simply integrate powerful geolocation tools into your application, including address autocomplete and reverse geocoding.

View this connector in GitHub
ApyHub by Troys Taylor

ApyHub is the a service utility belt that helps developers save time and boost efficiency. Included are actions for archiving and unarchive files.

View this connector in GitHub.
Daffy by Troys Taylor

Daffy is a not-for-profit community of members who have the commitment to put money aside for those less fortunate than themselves. Find organizations and causes you care about and recommend donations to over 1.5 million charities in the US.

View this connector in GitHub.
Dandelion by Troys Taylor

Dandelion is semantic text analytics as a service. They provide actions for entity extraction, sentiment analysis, keyword extraction, semantic similarity, and Wikisearch results.

View this connector in GitHub.
Fun Translations by Troy Taylor

Have some fun with our language translations.

View this connector in GitHub.
Hashtag API by Troy Taylor

The Hashtag Generator service allows you to generate relevant hashtags for your content based on a given keyword or image.

View this connector in GitHub.
Pixela by Troy Taylor

Pixela is the pixelation service. With this service, you can get a GitHub-like graph that expresses the degree of your various activities on a basis with a vivid gradation.

View this connector in GitHub.
Supportivekoala by Troy Taylor

Supportivekoala allows you to autogenerate images using templates.

View this connector in GitHub.
BKK Futar by Andras Fordos

Get and search planned and real-time information from the BKK FUTAR system – public transportation of Budapest – regarding journeys, vehicles, stops and many more!

View this connector in GitHub.
IP2LOCATION  by Andras Fordos

IP2Location returns geolocation information like country, region, city, latitude & longitude, ZIP code, time zone, ASN, ISP and so on for an IP.

View this connector in GitHub.
IP2WHOIS by Andras Fordos

Obtain domain information and WHOIS record by using a domain name, such as creation date, updated date, expiration date, etc.

View this connector in GitHub.
Sunrise-Sunset by Andras Fordos

Sunrise-Sunset provides sunset and sunrise times for a given latitude and longitude, including twilight informations. Attribution required.

View this connector in GitHub.
Updown by Andras Fordos

Updown is an online service that checks your website’s status by periodically sending an HTTP request to the URL of your choice. It then notifies you by email, sms or even a webhook, when your website is not responding correctly.

View this connector in GitHub.
Wayback Machine by Andras Fordos

The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and it allows the user to go \”back in time\” and see how websites looked in the past.

View this connector in GitHub.
Airlabs by Andras Fordos

Airlabs collects extensive real-time aviation and flight data from thousands of sources to cleanse, aggregate and organize it into comprehensive collections.

View this connector in GitHub.
Anthropic by Troy Taylor

Claude is a large language model (LLM) built by Anthropic. It’s trained to be a helpful assistant in a conversational tone.

View this connector in GitHub.
Mailinator by Troy Taylor

The Mailinator service provides programmatic access to the Mailinator system. This includes fetching and injecting messages into the Mailinator system and creating routing rules for specific message domains within the system.

View this connector in GitHub.
Mime Automation by Andreas Cieslik

Mime Automation provides a way to extract data from a TNEF (winmail.dat) encoded file

View this connector in GitHub.
Reflect by Troy Taylor

Reflect is a beautiful note-taking tool designed to help you think. Mirror the way your mind works by associating notes through backlinks. Reflect builds you a second brain that you can reference anytime.

View this connector in GitHub.
Kroki by Troy Taylor

Kroki provides a service to create diagrams from textual descriptions.

View this connector in GitHub.
Abbreviations by Troy Taylor

The Abbreviations service from STANDS4 enables you to get classified acronyms and abbreviations content for a given term.

View this connector in GitHub.
ai by Troy Taylor

Meet your brainstorming buddy, blank page remover, research assistant, and expert copywriter: Chat by Copy.ai. Use our generative AI platform to work faster, smarter, and anything but harder.

View this connector in GitHub.
Diffchecker by Andras Fordos

Diffchecker will compare your inputs to find the difference between two text files, images, PDFs and many other.

View this connector in GitHub.
Feathery by Troy Taylor

Feathery is transforming the way user interfaces for collecting information are built. We help users build customizable and developer-friendly forms.

View this connector in GitHub.
Hash Generator by Troy Taylor

This hash generator allows you to generate hashes from your input string. You can choose between SHA1, SHA256, SHA512 and MD5.

View this connector in GitHub.
Letterdrop by Troy Taylor

Letterdrop is the only SEO tool that optimizes for people-first content. Beyond SEO, it’s actually a complete content marketing suite designed to help you go from idea to publish as quickly as possible while following best practices. This includes project management, social distribution, and repurposing content.

View this connector in GitHub.
LoginLlama by Troy Taylor

LoginLlama adds an extra layer of customer security without the extra work. LoginLlama uses a number of ranking factors to decide if a login is deemed suspicious. We determine a score for each login based on how ‘suspicious’ it is. We then use Bollinger Bands to determine if the login is suspicious or not.

View this connector in GitHub.
NameAPI by Andras Fordos

NameAPI is a web API to handle people’s names in your software.

View this connector in GitHub.
Pinecone by Troy Taylor

Pinecone makes it easy to provide long-term memory for high-performance AI applications. Pinecone is a managed, cloud-native vector database with no infrastructure hassles. Pinecone serves fresh, filtered query results with low latency at the scale of billions of vectors.

View this connector in GitHub.
PixelMe by Troy Taylor

PixelMe links allow you to track customers across platforms and increase the likelihood of turning clicks into conversions. Deep links direct users straight to a particular website or app page, eliminating the need for them to navigate or re-enter billing details. PixelMe\u2019s deep links open directly in the Amazon app, allowing you to drive customers directly to the Amazon app for better UX, enhanced retention, and higher likelihood of conversion.

View this connector in GitHub.
TLDR by Troy Taylor

TLDR helps you summarize any piece of text into concise, easy to digest content so you can free yourself from information overload. Summarize any URL or text using state-of-the-art abstractive and extractive summarization models.

View this connector in GitHub.
vatcheckapi by Andras Fordos

vatcheckapi is a free and easy-to-use VAT lookup & validation service.

View this connector in GitHub.
VoiceRSS by Andras Fordos

Voice RSS Text-to-Speech (TTS) allows conversion of textual content to speech easier than ever.

View this connector in GitHub.

Learn more about Power Platform Connectors at the following links:

• Connectors overview: Power Platform connectors overview | Microsoft Learn
• Custom connectors overview: Custom connectors overview | Microsoft Learn
• Certification overview: Get your connector certified | Microsoft Learn
• Submit connector for certification: Submit your connector to Microsoft for certification | Microsoft Learn
• Connector auth types: Specifying connection parameters | Microsoft Learn
• Paconn tool: Microsoft Power Platform Connectors CLI | Microsoft Learn

The post ArcGIS, Meisterplan and Microsoft Translator among 60+ new connectors, 50+ connector updates launched to accelerate value from low code appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

In this article, we learn about how an employee on their Digital Demand Engineering team took the initiative to use Power Automate for automating an enterprise-wide approvals process after being inspired by a colleague’s automation solution. From there, his passion for automation grew and more solutions were developed. The three Power Automate enterprise use case described in this article include:

1. Management of access extensions approvals for an internal application
2. User requests for provisioning of a new SharePoint site
3. Migration of user’s network files to OneDrive for Business

Meet Alexander

Alexander Nikulin has been with Mars since December 2009. Alexander initially worked in the maintenance stock room and was responsible for spare parts and had business user experience with an enterprise application. This eventually led to his next roles in IT projects such as working on an SAP project.

In 2018 Alexander moved into a more technical hands-on role as a Collaboration Area Lead in the Enterprise Collaboration team where they primarily work on the Microsoft collaboration services offered by SharePoint, OneDrive for Business and Yammer. It was in this role where Alexander was introduced to the Power Platform by a colleague who was building automation solutions with Power Automate cloud flows. This inspired Alexander to start learning Power Automate and building his own cloud flows. An example was automating the weekly matches of their football team by sending email reminders and saving the responses in SharePoint. After gaining experience, Alexander built several automation solutions to improve enterprise processes such as managing access of users for an internal application and enabling users to request for new SharePoint sites to be provisioned. He also started to nurture others in becoming automation experts in their line of work.

In 2021, he was promoted to Collaboration Architect in the Digital Demand Engineering team as a result of his Power Automate experience and improvements made to several enterprise processes. He is now responsible for the solutions his team develops using Power Automate, Power Apps and SharePoint.

Power Automate solution – Automating access extension approvals

The first enterprise automation solution Alexander developed was for automating user access extension approvals for an internal application used as a collaborative platform at Mars. Certain users have a set period in accessing the internal application which can occasionally be extended. Prior to automating this process, it was manual and time consuming. Several users overseeing the user access process had to monitor the termination date of user access and continuously follow up with line managers on whether their access should be extended.

Alexander developed two cloud flows in Power Automate to automate the user access extensions. The first flow is a scheduled daily cloud flow that checks a SharePoint list where user data is stored to evaluate whether a user’s access termination date is near and generates the approval and reminders. If the termination date is within 28 days, a second cloud flow is triggered that sends the required information and generates an approval which is sent to the line manager to remind them that the user’s access to the internal application is ending and confirm if the user’s access should be extended.

Second cloud flow triggered when it is 28 days prior to the user’s access termination date and waits for an approval or rejection, followed by updates based on the approver’s decision.

Secondary reminders are sent 14 days and 7 days prior to the user’s access termination date if the line manager does not respond to the initial reminders. If no response is received or the senior line manager rejects the extension, the user is removed from the Azure Active Directory group. Otherwise, if the line manager approves, the cloud flow performs the necessary actions to extend the user’s access to the internal application.

Automated access extension approval for the internal application.

“My managers and my peers were impressed that such a solution can be built using Power Automate.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Summary of benefits and impact

The automated access extension solution processed over 500 approvals in the first two years of going live and has improved the management of users who need their access extended.

• Line managers are automatically notified based on reminders which reduces management overhead
• Minimal disruption for users as their user access is extended through automated line manager approvals
• Automation minimizes the possibilities of human error in missing extension requests for users

Additional Power Platform solutions

Request for provisioning a new SharePoint Site

Alexander automated two aspects of SharePoint site provisioning at Mars by using Power Automate and Power Apps:

1. Automating the creation of new SharePoint sites using Power Automate.
2. Improving the user experience for submitting new requests. This was achieved using Power Apps.

Alexander’s colleague who originally developed the legacy code for site provisioning recognized that it was outdated and complicated. Since Power Automate supports hundreds of connectors, Alexander’s colleague suggested that he use Power Automate cloud flows to improve the site provisioning process.

Alexander developed a cloud flow that runs every hour to identify the new requests submitted that are stored in a SharePoint List. The cloud flow then calls the SharePoint REST API to create the new SharePoint sites. Finally, the business user is notified that their requested SharePoint site has been created.

The Power Platform solution that automatically creates a new SharePoint site from the requests submitted via the canvas app.

Next, they looked into improving the user experience for submitting requests. Previously, user requests were submitted through a legacy Azure web application. The user interface was developed at a time when user experience was not valued and therefore was sub-optimal. The legacy application could not be modified for enhancements, failed to load for users at times and required manual monitoring of the sites created.

Alexander turned to Power Apps to modernize the process and user experience. Power Apps was ideal due to its feature rich user interface capabilities using low code and its integration with Power Automate. A canvas app was created which became the front-end interface for user requests and it modernized the end user experience completely.

For quick access, the app is launched from an intranet SharePoint page to submit their request. Users then proceed to provide details of their request in the app: justify the business reason for a new SharePoint site, who the backup owner will be, internal or external access for the site, the template to be used for the SharePoint site, and the site details such as Title, Description, Region etc.

Users launch the canvas app from their intranet to request for a new SharePoint Site to be created for their business.

The following are some key capabilities of the solution that made it a more modern and guided user experience:

• A progress bar visualization at the top of the app to guide the users in each step.
• Users can select their template preference for the SharePoint site.
• Site URL validation is implemented using a second cloud flow that calls the Graph API to check if the site URL provided by the user in their request already exists. If it exists, a warning is displayed to the user to prompt them to provide another value for the site URL. This eliminates duplication errors that lead to site provisioning failures prior to the actual creation of a SharePoint site.
• Users can also provide feedback after they submitted their request, allowing Alexander and his team to continuously improve the end user experience and functionality of the app towards the user requirements.

User confirms details and provides a new site URL if it already exists prior to submitting their new SharePoint Site request from the canvas app.

A summary of the benefits and impact of the solution is as follows:

• Low code design which provides flexibility in updating the processes for SharePoint provisioning and the end user experience for submitting requests.
• Modern user experience in submitting requests for provisioning of new SharePoint sites.
• 100-150 SharePoint sites are now provisioned monthly.

File Share Migration

Like any long-standing company, Mars operated with servers where enterprise applications and file management were on-premises. As technology advanced, on-premises applications evolved into cloud applications and likewise with file management – cloud services became the standard. Mars adopted Microsoft 365 a few years ago and saw the potential of moving files to the cloud to reduce maintenance and server costs. Storing files in the cloud also proved to be valuable as employees could easily access their files from any location and any device and provided greater storage capacity than their file management on-premises.

To transition to cloud file management, Mars initiated a project to migrate employee files from their personal network folder to their OneDrive for Business folder. A tool known as ShareGate was used for the actual file migration using PowerShell scripts. These PowerShell scripts were manually created for each migration which was time consuming since over 25,000 folders needed to be migrated. To speed up the migration process, Alexander and the team developed an automation solution using Power Automate cloud flows to help generate the PowerShell scripts.

This solution includes six cloud flows connected to four SharePoint Lists (Batches, Users, Sessions, Errors) and two document library folders (one for PowerShell scripts that process CSV files and another for migration reports for each user). Multiple iterative versions of the automation solution were developed over time to improve the technicalities of the process.

The cloud flow utilizes Microsoft Graph API and intelligently creates PowerShell scripts where relevant for the migration of files to OneDrive for Business.

The automation process is as follows:

• • The cloud flow uses the Microsoft Graph API to validate whether the users already have OneDrive for Business provisioned.
  • If the OneDrive for Business has not been provisioned for the users, the cloud flow is paused and sends an email to the analysts. It also provides them with a list of users who do not have OneDrive for Business yet.
  • The analysts are then required to run the PowerShell script automatically generated by the Power Automate cloud flow to provision OneDrive for Business for the users.
  • Once the analyst has executed the PowerShell script, the Power Automate cloud flow continues with processing the necessary actions.
  • Using Microsoft Graph API, a default folder is automatically created for each user which is the target destination of the migrated files from their personal network folder.
  • A SharePoint list has been utilized for audit purposes to keep track of the migration of user files, the size of their files, the OneDrive for Business URLs of the folders created, and any errors encountered.

• Another PowerShell script is automatically generated which is sent to the analysts to execute on the network server to migrate the files from user’s personal folder to their default folder in OneDrive for Business.
• Best practice of error handling was also implemented in the PowerShell script using the Try, Catch, Finally method. Whenever an error occurs a Power Automate cloud flow is triggered which saves the error details into the SharePoint List.

The Power Automate cloud flow checks if a user has OneDrive for Business and if not, performs the required actions to provision OneDrive for Business for the user.

The automation solution enabled Mars to successfully migrate files for over 25,000 users from the network folders to OneDrive for Business, reducing the time spent on manual work and with less errors.

The file share migration initiative will also expand to moving department files to SharePoint online as Mars continues to see the value in online file management. This will be a future project to continue with their progress to operating in the cloud to transition away from on-premises.

“Finally, we have this version – it has worked brilliantly, no issues. It was quite a long journey, but from my perspective that is the most complicated automation I have ever created so far because it is really long and there’s a lot of dependencies.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Accelerating Power Platform adoption at Mars

In 2021 a companywide Power Platform hackathon took place with many teams around the world participating. These teams gained firsthand experience in designing and building business solutions with the Power Platform. Many saw the value of developing low code solutions rapidly which later led to an increase of automation and apps. Today Mars has approximately 10,000 cloud flows and 4,000 apps.

Alexander has been instrumental in enabling others at Mars to develop Power Platform solutions. Not only was he a coach for the Power Platform hackathon, but he also regularly participates in sessions to demonstrate automation solutions to inspire others at Mars to think about how processes within their line of work can be automated. Other colleagues in the collaboration related teams have since followed in his footsteps by developing Power Platform solutions for unified services, desktop devices etc.

To help govern and administer the increase of solutions being developed across the company, a Centre of Excellence is currently operating which Alexander, and his current team are involved with. They recognize that it is important to manage the growth to ensure company policies are followed but also harnessing the value of employees developing their own processes that fit their requirements.

“Once you give them the tools, they will be able to build great solutions for their departments, businesses, areas, countries because they know their business much better. They know exactly how they are supposed to work and combine technical knowledge and eagerness to learn and build something with business knowledge. It can produce a great result, but at the same time it is important to control when you have over 10,000 cloud flows and over 4,000 apps in your tenant.”

– Alexander Nikulin, Collaboration Architect, Mars

Looking ahead

To continue supporting the growth of Power Platform solutions at Mars, Alexander and his Digital Demand Engineering team are working on materials which will be accessible from their internal hub site. Several types of materials will be made available such as learning and training resources, FAQs and much more. Alexander is planning to run monthly webinars to help educate others on how to build effective Power Automate cloud flows. Alexander and his team also plan to explore other Power Platform services such as Power Pages to expand on digitizing their business processes at Mars.

“Anyone can (no-)code. Everyone should (no-)code.”

– Sandeep Dadlani, Chief Digital Officer, Mars

Related links

• Mars Petcare reimagines manufacturing operations and coaching using RealWear hands-free headsets with Microsoft Teams
• Power Automate customer stories
• Power Platform stories curated by the Power CAT team

The post Mars automates enterprise IT processes using Power Automate appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

The Excel Online (Business) connector has been a valuable part of the Power Automate ecosystem for some time now. It has a wide variety of applications—most of which are, however, relatively basic. Until now, the connector could only do things like reading rows from a table or writing data to a specific cell.

We are pleased to announce that support for running Office Scripts is available for public preview starting today. Office Scripts allow you to accomplish a vast array of tasks and complex sequences of actions. Effectively any operation possible in Excel for the Web is now achievable programmatically. This is exciting even for those without programming experience; just like UI Flows, the script recorder in Excel allows you to record your actions and play them back—all without manually writing a single line of code. For those looking to achieve more complex scenarios, scripts can also be written and edited via the Code Editor.

To learn more about Office Scripts and the new “Run script” action, visit the documentation here.

Example applications

Some example applications include:

• Sending an email status report to one’s broader team every Monday at 9am
• Processing data submitted to Microsoft Forms and visualizing it using Excel’s charting engine
• Storing information about tweets which include a particular hashtag in a spreadsheet, then alerting a Teams channel about the update
• Examining a team’s status tracking spreadsheet for completion and sending a both email and teams reminders to colleagues who have yet to complete their assigned sections
• Fetching issue data from a GitHub repository and summarizing and visualizing it for use in a report

Prerequisites

In order to run Office Scripts via Power Automate, the following must be true:

• Your organization must have enabled Office Scripts via the switch in the Office Admin Portal
• Your organization must have enabled Power Automate and the Excel Online (Business) connector

The addition of the new “Run script” action to the Excel connector dramatically expands its applications and capabilities, far beyond what was previously possible. It also makes previously achievable scenarios much easier. The team has been working diligently on this feature for some time now, and we’re excited to see what you, the community, can do with it.

Learn more about the “Run script” action and using Office Scripts with Power Automate

The post Announcing support for Office Scripts in the Excel Online (Business) connector appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

We are releasing the ability to pass files from a connector action to the Approvals action step, so that you can enjoy the peace of mind that comes with sharing just enough information that’s needed. All you need to do is –

1. Get an attachment from any of our connectors that support that
2. Use it via dynamic content in an action that starts / creates an approval
3. Run the flow (or simply test it)
4. Go to the Action center, or your Outlook inbox to see it come to life
5. Click to download the files and get going

From the Action Center in Power Automate portal

Lets take a closer look..

From your Outlook inbox

To learn more about how to use it, read our documentation page about it. And don’t forget to tell us if you liked the feature and would like to see more features like these. Do share your feedback on the Power Automate community forum.

Happy automating!

The post File attachments in Approval Flows 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.

The Benefit of Automated Invoicing

As we discussed in our previous blog, there are several factors that contribute to the costs associated with invoicing including:

• labor
• systems
• outsourcing
• overhead
• other general accounts payable processing costs.

A detailed study found average costs per invoice range from $2-$10 based on how efficiently an organization handles the invoicing process. Clearly, a five-fold affect on costs has direct impact on an organization’s bottom line. Additionally, this $2-$10 cost range per invoice assumes invoices are accurately handled. Earlier research by Sterling Commerce discovered that the cost associated with an invoicing error jumps above $53 per invoice. The organizations paying only $2 per invoice are most efficient with the process, reducing the typical invoicing cost components and reducing or eliminating invoicing errors. As the Sterling Commerce study found, automating the invoicing process can lead to a 90% reduction in invoicing costs. Let’s show you how Power Automate can provide end-to-end automation for your invoicing process and help you realize some of the benefits of automated invoicing.

Automated Invoicing with Power Automate

A typical invoicing process may look like figure 1.  An email arrives with the attached invoice. The email recipient must read over the invoice and look for the pertinent information and then depending on the amount of the invoice, the recipient must send it for further approval. Once the invoice is approved, someone must update the invoicing software being used with the information from the latest invoice. In many organizations, this invoicing software is often an older application that does not have an API. The entries to the software must be done manually. This multi-step process is of course time consuming and is not a high value task, yet fundamental for the business. Also, errors can occur in some of the steps, from simply mis-reading the invoice amount, to entering the wrong amount or customer information into the invoicing application. With Power Automate, this entire process can be done automatically, not only saving your employees time, but also reducing the potential for human error.

Figure 1. Typical invoicing process steps

Power Automate leverages over 300+ connectors including email services such as Microsoft Outlook . You can begin your automation by creating a flow that is triggered whenever an email arrives with an invoice attachment. You can narrow the specifics of an email that triggers the flow by choosing to trigger only when an email has an attachment and when the email subject includes the word ‘invoice’ as shown in figure 2.

Figure 2. Invoicing flow beginning with narrowed email trigger

The next step is to understand the contents of the attachment and extract pertinent information from the attachment. To do this, Power Automate uses the deep AI capabilities offered in AI Builder. To date, AI Builder comes with four pre-defined AI models including:

• Forms processing – enabling reading and saving information from standard documents
• Object detection – recognize and count objects in images
• Predict – predict if something will happen
• Text Classification – categorize text by its meaning so it is easier to analyze

For this invoicing example, the attachment can be read and understood by the AI Builder ‘Forms Processing’ model which extracts the pertinent information from the invoice form (figure 3).

Figure 3. Contoso Invoice form with AI Builder Forms Processing model extracting the pertinent information from the invoice

Based on the content of the invoice, you can decide which information is most important to extract. In our example of the Contoso invoice, we are extracting several values including the balance amount for the invoice.  Many invoicing processes require an approval before payment is made. With Power Automate, approvals are also streamlined. Power Automate is natively integrated with today’s most widely used collaboration application, Microsoft Teams, and in our example, we send an approvals request to the finance department via Teams (figure 4).

Figure 4. Invoice approval request arrives in Teams

Once the invoice has been approved, the final step is to ensure the transaction is documented in the organization’s invoicing software. In many instances, these invoice applications have been used for many years and pre-date APIs. Also, because of the importance of invoicing software to catalogue and maintain fundamental financial transaction data, organizations are hesitant to disrupt their business to replace the software with newer systems. While Power Automate has always empowered users to create custom APIs or connectors for these non-API systems, Robotic Process Automation offers an easy and fast method for less technical users to enable automation for applications without APIs. Power Automate’s new ‘UI flows’ feature empowers users to simply record their interaction with a UI and then embed that recording into a flow  (figure 5). With the addition of UI flows, Power Automate offers organizations one service which bridges automation across the enter digital estate, bringing modern efficiency to processes that were previously tedious.

Figure 5. UI flows recorder to record click-steps from user interaction with UI

Now, with Power Automate, a time-consuming invoicing  process, often prone to error, and costing organizations several dollars per invoice, can be fully automated, improving efficiency, and greatly reducing potential errors.

Some Great Examples of Power Automate and the Power Platform

There were several sessions at Microsoft Ignite which highlight many of the incredible possibilities with Power Automate and the broader Power Platform. In fact, one of our sessions goes in-depth on the invoicing automation example discussed in this blog. Check out some of these other sessions which demonstrate how Power Automate and the Power Platform can transform and modernize your organization to meet the demands of today’s rigorous business environment.

• Unleashing your organization’s creativity and innovation with a deep dive into the Microsoft Power Platform
• Inside the Microsoft Power Platform | Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI and more
• Intelligent automation with Microsoft Flow
• Introducing Robotic Process Automation (RPA) with Microsoft Power Automate: The End of swivel-chair automation
• Learn How Power Automate Is the perfect automation platform to streamline workflow processes across your entire IT ecosystem
• Empower everyone in your organization to drive digital transformation with the Microsoft Power Platform
• Power for ‘all’: How the Microsoft Power Platform is democratizing development

Enhance Your Digital Transformation with Power Automate

Let your organization start benefiting from powerful and secure automation.  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!

• 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 Digitally Transform Your Enterprise with Power Automate: Leveraging Robotic Process Automation to Modernize Legacy Processes appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

This weeks Flow of the week is written by April Dunnam. April is owner and lead consultant at ThriveFast, a Microsoft Partner focusing on building business solutions with SharePoint, PowerApps and Flow. She is an active blogger and speaker, blogging under the name SharePoint Siren. Check out her YouTube Channel and follow her on Twitter HERE. Also, be sure to leave some questions or comments below and she will be happy to answer them!

The Goal:

It’s Halloween and you still haven’t picked out a Halloween costume.  We want to find a way to make Flow do the work and pick out a Halloween costume for us!

Requirements:

1. A Flow subscription
2. A SharePoint list that contains a variety of possible costume options
3. A PowerApps subscription (optional) – For this article, I decided to create a PowerApp to kick off the Flow and return the costume.  This isn’t a requirement though as you could accomplish the same result with just a Flow button if you wanted to.

Setting up the Costume Database

The first step is to set up and configure the SharePoint list.  You’ll want to create a new SharePoint list called Costumes using the Custom list template.  In addition to the already included Title column add three other columns Single Line of Text Columns:  Gender, Category, Image.  Populate the list with some of your favorite Halloween costumes and tag what Gender and Category it falls under (Superhero, Time Period, Horror, etc).  You can also include an Image of the costume so we can see that in PowerApps.  

Creating the Flow

In Flow, create a Blank Flow and rename it to HalloweenHelper.

For your Trigger, Select PowerApps.  If you don’t want to use PowerApps then use Flow Button as your Trigger.

To retreive a random costume, we need to add a “SharePoint – Get List Items” Action.  We will point this action to the site where we created our Costumes list.  In the Filter Query of the Get List Items Action we will input the following formula so that we only return costumes that fit the selected gender and category:

Now that we have a list of the costumes that meet our requirements we need to get that down to one randomly selected item.  To do that, we will add a “Compose” action.  In the input for the compose action, we will utilize Flow’s rand function which let’s us get a random item.  The formula will look like this:

body(‘GetCostumes’)?[‘value’][rand(0,length(body(‘GetCostumes’)?[‘value’]))]

Now that we have a random item, we need to pass that item back to our PowerApp.  To do that, add a “Respond to PowerApps” action.  If you are using a Flow button instead of a PowerApp then you would insert a “Notify” action.  

In the Repond to PowerApps action, add two inputs:  SelectedCostume and SelectedImage.  

Set the value of the SelectedCostume output to the following expression:  outputs(‘GetRandom’)[‘Title’]

Set the value of the SelectedImage output to this expression: outputs(‘GetRandom’)[‘Column4’]

Rename your Flow and Save.

The PowerApp

For the PowerApp side of things, create a blank phone layout app.  On the landing page, insert two buttons that allow you to select the gender for the costume.  On click of each of those buttons,  use the Set function to set a variable which holds the selected gender. 

The next screen is a gallery of all of the categories to choose from.  Once a categoy is selected, we want that to call and execute the Flow to get a random costume. If you want to call a Flow from PowerApps, click on the OnSelect property of the button that you want to use to execute the Flow.  Select the “Action” bar in the ribbon then select “Flows”.  A list of all the Flow’s with PowerApps as a trigger will show up on the right hand side.  Select the Flow you just created and pass in the gender and category options.  

The last screen is the one that shows you the result.  We will just need to insert an image control and a label.  Set the Image property of the image control to varResult.selectedimage and set the Text property of the label to varResult.SelectedCostume.  

Conclusion

To see how it all comes together in action, check out the video below:

The post Intermediate | Flow of the Week: Halloween Costume Decisions Made Easy With Flow appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

Today I am excited to announce the FREE and ONLINE Microsoft Flow Conference, December 12, 2018 from 9am to 1:30PM MST

(Mark Your Calendar Now!)

There are Two ways for you to participate,

We would love for you to Attend and watch the sessions, and to do that, please register HERE

Also though, We would love for you to submit a session and join us as a Speaker! To submit your session, please follow the link HERE

If you have any questions, please dont hesitate to ask in the comments!

The post Join the Microsoft Flow Online Conference – Dec 12, 2018 appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.

For our scenario, I’ll have a set of approvers that need to acknowledge via Flow approval when files are added to a document library. After adding the “When a file is created (properties only)” trigger, I’ll add two “Initialize variable” actions. One will initialize a boolean approvalDone variable to false, and the other will set up my list of approvers. I’ll explain why I need these two variables in more detail a bit later in the post.

Next I’ll add the “Start an approval action” and hook up the inputs. I’ll take the list of approvers from my variable, and reference the link to the file that was just uploaded. 

Now that I have the approval action card configured, I need to set up the parallel branch — the actions I want to happen while the approval is in progress. I’ll hover the mouse ABOVE the “Start an approval card” and click the + sign, find “Add a parallel branch”, and select “Add an action”.

The Flow designer will now fork the execution arrow into two branches, placing the approval card on the left and bringing up the connector/action dialog on the right. This is to help us visualize that both forks will execute simultaneously. 

Before we can start adding the reminder logic on the right side of the fork, I need to add one more action on the left after the approval. Remember that we initialized a boolean approvalDone variable? After the “Start an approval” action, I’ll add a “Set variable” to update this variable to true — this will be used to “signal” to the other branch that the approval is completed, and no more notification reminders need to be sent. (Without doing this, we might continue to send mails indefinitely!)

Now we can focus on the reminder aspect. I don’t want to remind the approvers as soon as the approval is created (they have the Flow actionable approval email for that), so I’ll add a “Delay” action to give them a whole day to approve. Once the day is up, I now want to loop until the approval is complete. I’ll use “Do Until”, where the exit condition is the approvalDone variable becoming true. The variable will be checked at the start of every loop iteration, and once the approval is complete and variable set to true, it won’t execute another iteration. (Note that based on how long you expect the approval to be active, and how often you want to send reminders, you may need to adjust the limits on the “Do Until” to make sure it gives you enough retries). 

The first action we’ll do in the loop is to send the email, so I’ve set up a basic “Send an email” using Office 365 that includes the link to the file and a friendly reminder message. I can use the approversList variable to make sure that the email is sent to the same set of people to which the approval is assigned. After the email is sent, I want to wait again before sending it again. I’ll Delay for another day, but you could just as easily do something custom — send more frequent reminders after a while, cc their manager after some number of reminders, check if the day is a holiday/weekend, etc.)

Because the loop will check the condition before executing, if the approvers respond during any of the “Delay” actions, the condition will be checked again before sending either the first or subsequent reminder emails. This avoids sending reminders for approvals that are already complete.

If you wish to play around with this technique, I exported the sample flow so you can import it into your environment. It can be downloaded here. 

Parallel branches are a powerful approach to extend a single Flow with business logic/behavior that needs to run concurrently, without splitting logic across multiple Flows. 

The post Intermediate | Flow of the week: Approval reminders using parallel branches appeared first on Microsoft Power Platform Blog.