{"id":4735,"date":"2021-02-22T08:00:00","date_gmt":"2021-02-22T16:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/looking-back-on-power-automates-2020\/"},"modified":"2021-02-22T08:00:00","modified_gmt":"2021-02-22T16:00:00","slug":"looking-back-on-power-automates-2020","status":"publish","type":"power-automate","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/looking-back-on-power-automates-2020\/","title":{"rendered":"Looking Back on Power Automate\u2019s 2020"},"content":{"rendered":"
Microsoft will be virtually delivering its first ever spring season Ignite conference between March 2-4<\/a>.\u00a0 It will be an exciting event where you\u2019ll be able to view some of the latest updates to Microsoft\u2019s myriad of services, including Power Automate.\u00a0 These virtual conferences have now almost become standard due to the unprecedented pandemic of 2020 which forced most of us to adjust many aspects of our lives, including the way we work.\u00a0 Remote work has become the norm for many, including meetings, conferences such as Ignite, and many regular day-to-day activities.\u00a0 Remote work requires greater reliance on software and digital technology.\u00a0 To this end, Power Automate made significant advances in 2020 to ensure automation capabilities are more robust and powerful to facilitate the growing remote working needs.\u00a0 In this blog, we want to recap some of these updates and then look ahead to 2021 as we continue adding features to Power Automate and developing the most effective low-code automation service in the industry.<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n Launching Robotic Process Automation for Power Automate<\/strong><\/p>\n Near the beginning of 2020, we announced the general availability<\/a> of Robotic Process Automation (RPA) for Power Automate.\u00a0 We launched RPA in the form of UI flows<\/a> to automate tasks on Win32 applications and Google Chrome or Microsoft Edge web-based applications.\u00a0 The UI flows, which we now call Desktop flows, were offered in both attended and unattended<\/a> modes (figure 1).\u00a0 With attended RPA, users can automate task for legacy applications on their local machines.\u00a0 In unattended mode, users can automate tasks without the need for any human intervention. Running RPA in unattended mode enables automation across single or multiple desktops or virtual machines.\u00a0 With unattended RPA (figure 1), an automation bot logs in to a designated Windows device, executes the desired automation, and then logouts.\u00a0 Key features for unattended mode include:<\/p>\n \u00a0<\/p>\n\n