Microsoft Power Automate – Types of Flows

                    

Introduction

Microsoft Power Automate is a Low-Code/No-Code based automation tool to automate tasks, business processes and repetitive work. There are different type of flows in Microsoft Power Automate, which is useful for different scenarios, information on the same is given below.

What are the different types of flows in Microsoft Power Automate ?

  • Automated Cloud Flows – This type of flows runs on the trigger event such as arrival of the email to mailbox or document upload to SharePoint location etc.

  • Instant Cloud Flows – Instant flow runs immediately on the trigger of the event such as click of a button etc.

  • Scheduled Cloud Flows – This type of flow runs on schedule date and time. We can also select the recurrence of the scheduled cloud flow.

  • Desktop Flows – Desktop flows are used to automate the tasks on web or desktop.

  • Business Process Flows – Business process flows are used to define the process and guide as to how a work, process or tasks needs to be performed or followed.

From where we can create the Microsoft Power Automate Flows ?

You can create the power automate flow from https://flow.microsoft.com/


Or from https://make.powerapps.com/


Where can we learn about types of flows ?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/flow-types

Where can I get the latest updates about the Microsoft Power Automate ?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/whats-new

Cheers!

Gaurav Thakur

Microsoft Power Automate Basics & Useful Information

What is Microsoft Power Automate ?

Microsoft Power Automate is an online workflow automation service, which helps in automation of the tasks, automation of processes and automation of the services. It comes with multiple built-in templates, connectors to connect multiple services and automate the tasks or processes. For example, if you want that any email received in your mailbox with attachment, the attachments should be automatically stored in your one drive, you can automate these entire flow or tasks easily. MS Power Automate can not only be used of simple tasks you can easily extend its functionality to automate any tasks or flow. You can even you even automate, voice command input to switching on/off your car!

Why to use Microsoft Power Automate?

To build any automation you need connect one or more systems and automate the process. If we start building connectors for all the different systems, it will take time and requires expert skills to build the same. With MS Power Automate you can as a novice person in the world of IT can easily build the automations and save time and money. With 500+ available connectors built-in to the Power Automate you can easily build any of the automations of you choice in less time and win quick on your work!

What are the alternatives of Microsoft Power Automate?

Zapier, IFTTT, Flow XO, Simplr, UiPath, Automate.io, CloudHQ, Skyvia are some of the alternatives of MS Power Automate and have their own pros and cons.

What are the limitations of Power Automate ?

Item Limit
Number of flows owned by a single user 600
Run Duration 30 Days
Actions per flow 500
Variables per flow 250
Character per expression 8192
Length of Description 256 Char
Name for action or trigger 80 Char
Switch scope case limits 25
Minimum Recurrence Interval 60 Seconds
Maximum Recurrence Interval 500 Days
Actions per 5 minutes 100, 000
Actions per 24 Hours 10,000 for Low, 100,000 for Medium and 500,000 for High
Concurrent outbound calls 500 for Low, 2,500 for all others
Concurrent inbound calls ~1,000
Content throughput per 5 minutes 600 MB for Low, 6 GB for all others
Content throughput per 24 hours 1 GB for Low, 10 GB for Medium, 50 GB for High
Message Size 100 MB
Message Size with chucking 1 GB
Expression evaluation limit 131,072 characters
Request URL character limit 16,384 characters
Retry Policy – Low Performance Profile This policy sends up to two retries at exponentially increasing intervals, which scale by 5 minutes up to an interval of approximately 10 minutes for the last retry.
Retry Policy – Medium & High Performance Profile This policy sends up to eight retries at exponentially increasing intervals, which scale by 7 seconds up to an interval of approximately 15 minutes for the last retry.
Number of custom connectors 50 per user
Number of requests per minute of a custom connector 500 requests per minute per connection

How much Microsoft Power Automate Costs?

License by User License by user License by Flow
Per user plan Per user plan with attended RPA Per flow plan
$15 $40 $100

What is the future of Microsoft Power Automate ?

As the trends towards low-code/no-code solutions are increasing, the future will be very much focused on deliver fast with better return on investments. Microsoft Power Automate is one of the leading automation tool now in market and new capabilities and connectors are keep on getting added, so future is exciting for customers, citizen developers, core developers & architects to build automations using Microsoft Power Automate.

Where can I learn more about Power Automate ?

You can learn more about Microsoft Power Automate from Microsoft Documentations, Community Blogs and online available course and YouTube videos.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/modules/get-started-flows/

Is there any certification of Microsoft Power Automate ?

PL-900: Microsoft Power Platform Fundamentals

PL-500: Microsoft Power Automate RPA Developer

What are the prerequisites to learn Microsoft Power Automate ?
To learn Microsoft Power Automate, you need to basics of computers and awareness of online services and you are good to go. For advanced automations you may need to learn Power FX code, which is similar to excel like macros and easy to learn and implement.

Desktop flow prerequisites

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-automate/desktop-flows/setup

Where to get latest updates of Microsoft Power Automate features?

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform-release-plan/2021wave1/power-automate/planned-features

Microsoft PowerApps AI Builder: Leveraging AI for Customer Success

Microsoft has released the new capability for PowerApps platform, called AI Builder. Enabling the citizen developers and AI developer to build the applications accurate, fast and easy to use without much hassle of going into the complex technicalities and going for a learning curve.

Today we are going to explore the AI builder capabilities in PowerApps. In addition, how to utilize the capabilities of AI builder in PowerApps with different scenarios.

AI builder is currently a preview feature and will be available soon.

Introduction

AI builder is a new capability for Power Platform that provides intelligence to the apps by automating the processes and predicting the outcomes to help the users and businesses to take prompt and intelligent decisions to achieve more. AI builder provides easy to use and simple configurations to build AI models train them and utilize in applications.

The necessity of PowerApps AI Builder

As AI is solving most of the critical real-life problems with intelligence, it is a necessity in the current scenarios to give the power to citizen developer and a business user who usually rely on the skilled developer to build AI models that usually takes times. Also for Skilled developers, starting to build AI model from scratch to work on actual business scenarios also is time-consuming. Therefore, using AI builder citizen developer and business users can easily gain the outcome with their own use cases and for the skilled developers, it is a booster to cut the time of initial development and focus on advanced scenarios.

As PowerApps platform provides capabilities of canvas apps, for Mobiles and Tablets and extensible for model-driven apps, it is a good mix to provide AI when it is most required during the performance of the business operations.

Together Canvas Apps, MS Flows and AI builder can be utilized with CDS to make the seamless AI Capabilities for different scenarios.

Power Apps AI Builder Basics

Model Types in AI Builder are of four types.


Get Started with AI Builder

To start with, the AI builder, go the site https://make.powerapps.com and login with the credentials.

AI builder option is present in the left navigation.

AI Builder Scenario

There can be many scenarios for utilizing the AI capability; here we will take one scenario to see that in action.

Object Detection

Scenario: Identify the objects in the grocery store

Step 1: Select object detection and give the name of the Model and click create.

Step 2: Select object name

Step 3: Select entity and field

Step 4: Select Objects

Step 5: Add Images

Step 6: Tag Images

Step 7: Train the model.

Step 8: Publish the App

Utilize the object detection in Canvas Apps

Step 1: In the Apps, sections in Power Apps (make.powerapps.com) create the new canvas app.

Step 2: Insert the AI builder model, Inset -> AI Builder -> Object Detector

Step 3: Select the model

Step 4: Add gallery control

Set the items property to ObjectDetector1.VisionObjects

Step 5: Change the layout and edit columns.

Step 6: Add the header label to name the App, save the app.

Step 7: Play the app or press F5 to play the app and test,

Step 8: See the results and verify. Count of the object is displayed in the gallery.

References-

Try different scenarios of AI builder using the below link.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/ai-builder/overview

Cheers!

Gaurav Thakur

Dynamics 365 Solution Architect, Evangelist & Enthusiast

Microsoft PowerApps Portals: An Introduction

Microsoft has released a new and exciting capability to its power platform that is PowerApps portal. We will explore what it is all about, how to use it and what is the benefit of it.

Let us get started!

The Basics

PowerApps portal is a low-code, responsive websites which allow external users to interact with the data stored in the Common Data Service. PowerApps portal makes it easy to develop the design, pages, and layouts and configurations with ease. It will be very helpful for native citizen developer or business users to put creativity in action. Also for core developers saving the time and efforts to focus on developing complex features and functionalities.

Need for PowerApps portal

While in the journey of digital transformation for any organization, it is very much required to connect with customers or external users with ease and provides seamless operations and communications it is essential to be connected with many modes and one of the modes can be portals. Therefore, the PowerApps portal comes into the play to have quick starting the process of implementations with ease and fast to develop and launch.

PowerApps portal scenarios

Utilize the portal in many scenarios such for external users such as vendors or dealers, customers, communities or partners. Out of the box, PowerApps provides four starter portals:

  1. Community
  2. Customer self-service
  3. Partner
  4. Employee self-service

Configure the PowerApps Portal

Steps to configure the PowerApps portal is as below-

Step 1: Login to the site https://make.powerapps.com. You can use a free trial for 30 days https://trials.dynamics.com/.

Step 2: Click on the option Portal from blank. Currently in preview, releasing shortly.

Step 3: Provide the portal name and URL.

Step 4: Wait for the portal to set up; it may take 15 to 30 minutes.

Step 5: Once the portal set up is complete, it will be available in the Apps area.

Step 6: Modify the portal.

Step 7: Modify the portal as needed.

Step 8: Browse website.

Step 9: Verify the changes.

PowerApps Portal Admin Center

Access the PowerApps portals by following the below steps.

Step 1: In the Apps section in the PowerApps portal, select the app and click on settings.

Step 2: In the portal settings, click on Administrations.

Step 3: Modify the settings as required.

PowerApps Portal Modifications for Dynamics 365

For advanced capabilities, modify or configure the setting from Dynamics 365 using Dynamics 365 Portals app.

PowerApps Portal Licensing and Pricing

User Type Licensing Name Unit Capacity Price/Month
External User – Authenticated Per log in PowerApps Portal Login capacity add-on 100 logins $200
External User – Unauthenticated Per page view PowerApps Portals page view capacity add-on 100K page views $100
Internal user Via USL
  • Various Dynamics 365 SKU’s
  • Power Apps per App Plan
  • PowerApps per user plan
 NA NA

Dynamics Portals to PowerApps Portals

  • Dynamics Portals will automatically be transitions to PowerApps Portals.
  • Until October 2019, any existing portal and any additional portal will be based on the old licensing model, until grandfathering ends.
  • Creating or provisions of new PowerApps Portals instance will use the new licensing model.

Important Points

  • Check out the supported browsers.
Browser Operating
Google Chrome (latest version)
(recommended)
  • Windows 7 SP1, 8.1, and 10
  • macOS
Microsoft Edge (latest version)
(recommended)		 Windows 10

References-

Try the configurations and modifications using the below link.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/powerapps/maker/portals/overview

Cheers!!

Gaurav Thakur

Dynamics 365 Solution Architect, Evangelist & Enthusiast

Solution History in Dynamics 365 Customer Engagement

Often times we see issues with deployment and changes done in instances using solutions. It is also difficult to track what all the solutions are deployed in the instance and by whom to check and identify the issues or changes done by solution import. To get this details it was always a pain, and to do that it was required to create custom reports to get the data.

Now Microsoft has released a new feature called solutions history to overcome the pain point.

Where to find the Solution History?

To see the solution history, Go to Dynamics 365 instance, then settings. In the customization area, you can check the solution history option.

What all has been tracked?

  1. Imports of the Solutions
  2. Export of the Solutions

Details of the Solution History


Cheers!!

Gaurav Thakur

Dynamics 365 Solution Architect, Evangelist & Enthusiast

New Features in Dynamics 365 Version 9.1 – October 2018 Release

October release of Dynamics 365 has upgraded the version for Dynamics 365 from 9.0 to 9.1. Below are the listed updates which have come with the upgrade.

Dynamics 365 for Marketing –

  1. Account Based Marketing 2. Reusable Content Blocks 3. Social Listening for Campaigns 4. Marketing Calendar 5. Deep LinkedIn Integration 6. Richer Segmentations 7. Custom Analytics 8. Additional Languages and Geographies 9. Videos in Marketing Content (Preview)

Dynamics 365 for Sales –

  1. Play Books 2. LinkedIn Insights 3. Microsoft Teams Integration (Preview) 4. Who knows whom (Preview) 5. Talking Points (Preview) 6. Quick Actions (Preview) 7. Predictive Lead Scoring (Preview) 8. Relationship Analytics with LinkedIn InMail (Preview) 9. Dynamics 365 AI for Sales App (Preview) 10. Microsoft Call Intelligence (Preview)

Dynamic 365 for Service –

  1. Service Scheduling Powered By Universal Resource Scheduling 2. Customer Service Admin Settings 3. Suggest Similar Cases 4. Knowledge Article Recommendation 5. Relevance Search for Knowledge Management 6. Customer Service Health in One Admin Center (Preview)

Dynamics 365 Omni-Channel Engagement Hub-

  1. Agent and Supervisor Experiences (Preview) 2. Unified Routing and Work Distribution (Preview) 3. Live Chat Channel (Preview) 4. SMS Channel (Preview) 5. Channel Integration Framework (Preview) 6. Enable Customers to Bring Their Bots (Preview)

Unified Service Desk –

  1. Unified Service Desk Admin Experience on Unified Interface 2. Using edge process for hosting web applications in Unified Service Desk (Preview)

Dynamics 365 Portals-

  1. Configuration Migration (Schema Files for Exports) 2. Embed Power BI Visualization 3. Restrict Portal Access By IP 4. Manage SharePoint Documents 5. Self-Service Portal Diagnostics 6. Simplified customization (Preview)

Dynamics 365 for Field Service –

  1. Integration with Finance & Operations 2. Entitle Management 3. Multi-Resource Scheduling (for work Orders) 4. SLA Management 5. Integration with Microsoft Bot Framework (Mobile) 6. Background Location Sharing (Preview – Mobile) 7. Push Notifications (Preview – Mobile)

Dynamics 365 for Project Service-

  1. Adjustments to approved time, expense, and journal lines 2.Unit-aware expense category pricing for setup, estimation, and actuals 3. Use transaction filters to review invoicing backlog when creating invoices 4. Date effectivity validation on price lists 5. Resourcing unit currency on role price lines for cost 6. Support for multiple time units on a single price list 7. Ability to make copies of price list by adding a markup percentage 8. Resolution of multi-currency cost price list on projects

Microsoft Social Engagement –

  1. Quick setup and instant insights 2. Social Insights in Dynamics 365 for Marketing 3. Additional Languages

Technical Updates –

  1. Changes in the cloud updates – All the users and instances will be in the same versions going forward and skipping of any major versions will not be allowed. Any instance running on Version 8.2 much be updated to latest version by 31, January 2019.
  2. Unified Interface – Going forward more focus will be on the Unified Interface. New features will be exclusive for Unified Interface. New instances will by default use Unified Interfaces. From this release, UI will be the only option for building new Apps or Modules.
  3. Dependent Option Sets – New features for built-in native dependent options sets.

There are many more updates in this version for Microsoft Flows, Power Apps, Power BI, Outlook that can be referred in the Microsoft’s release notes for October 2018 release. Link

Cheers!!

Gaurav Thakur

Dynamics 365 Solution Architect, Evangelist & Enthusiast

Project Service Automation in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Introduction

Project Service Automation is a new addition in Microsoft Dynamics 365 offerings. Often times organizations not only wants taking and running projects, but also to manage full lifecycles of the projects such as project planning during sales or presales, offering quotes and taking final orders, getting required resources on time and as required, keep the timelines and costs in check, managing time and expenses, and finally sending invoices and getting money for the work done.

What is the need for Project Service Automation?

Now as we know there are many individual tools and packaged software/applications present in the market to manage individual activities during the project lifecycle. Many times it becomes to see the whole picture and work items of the project as a single place. Even we can achieve integrating all these systems together, however, in a rapidly changing technological era, applications changes in one area may drastically impact the other and so does the whole ecosystem.

So to have a unified solution for all the silos operations, Project Service Automation helps in bridging those gaps and provides a powerful end-to-end solution for managing the projects.

What features does Project Service Automation Offers?


Cheers !!


How to enable Bing Maps for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service

When we create a new instance for Microsoft Dynamics 365 for Field Service, Bing maps usually is disable to be utilized in Schedule Board and other areas.

To enable the Bing Maps, follow the below steps to.

  1. Login to Dynamics 365 instance and go to Resource Scheduling area and then Administration.

  2. Click on Scheduling Parameters.

  3. Set the value connect to Maps to Yes.

  4. Once the setting is enabled, Bing map is available in Schedule Board.

    Cheer!!

    Gaurav Thakur

How to clear the server cache in Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals

Often time the update from Microsoft Dynamics 365 Instance does not get reflected in Dynamics 365 portal immediately. It that case we can wait for some time to get it refreshed or do manually.

Below are the ways we can do it manually.

  1. Login to the portal with the user which have the “Administrator” web role.
  2. Open a new tab in the browser and copy page the portal URL.
  3. Append the URL with “_services/about” and click enter.
  4. You will be presented with below screen.

  5. Click on Clear Cache button.

That’s it. You can then refresh your portal page and check the updates.

Cheers !!

XrmToolBox Tools for Microsoft Dynamics 365 Portals

If you happen to be a Dynamics 365 Developer and was doing Dynamics 365 Portal Development, you will be glad to know that there are some cool tools available for development and deployment of Portal components.

There are pretty good tools available for Dynamics 365 Portal Developer in XrmToolBox provided by Tanguy TOUZARD. XrmToolBox can be downloaded from here.

Tools Available –

a. Portal Code Editor

b. Portal Record Mover

Portal Record Mover

  • To move the Portal configurations from the environment to another, you might have used OOB “Configuration Migration Utility” tool but this tool has a limitation as listed below.

  • You cannot choose records (For example, only specific Web Templates) as it would export all records for chosen entities. With the ‘Portal Records Mover
    ‘tool, now you can pick the subset of records from Portal entities and you can apply Date filters and many more.

    Usage steps:

  • From your XrmToolBox, connect to Portal Records Mover tool to your Dynamics instance. Click on ‘Load Items’, which load all Portal related entities.
    From the “Options” tab, Apply Date filters, if you want to Pick the ‘Web Site’, if you have multiple Portals (Custom Portal/Dealer Portal/etc..) installed.

    Export Records:

  • Choose the Portal Entities from the left pane, you would like to migrate records from.
  • Click ‘Retrieve record’, to load the records from selected Portal entities.
  • Pick the records, you would like to migrate.


  • Once you completed the record selection, click on “Export Records”.
  • Choose the location to save the XML file.


  • XML file contains the records you selected.

    Import Records:

  • To import the portal configuration to a Dynamics instance, you must have the XML prepared as mentioned above.
  • Click ‘Import records’ button and provide the portal configurations XML file.


    Portal Code Editor:

    This tool provides an easy way to edit all your Portal configurations in one place.

    Note: This tool only works for Dynamics Portals and does not support ADX portals.

    Usage steps:

  • Connect to Portal Code Editor tool to your Dynamics instance.
  • Click on ‘Load Items’, which load all Portal related entities group by categories (i.e., Web Pages/Entity Forms/…).
  • Pick the record you want to update.
  • Modify the content and click ‘Save’ from ‘File’ menu.


  • ‘Save’ just saves the content in Editor
  • To apply changes to your Dynamics instance, click on ‘Apply change to portal’ button


    Note:

    Make sure you have the latest XrmToolBox downloaded if you don’t find these tools.

    Cheers!!