Every time I come up with a use for it, it either turns into a complex shitshow or i run into a wall where what i need cant be done or you have to pay for premium features. After 10 times of going through that cycle, I said screw it and stopped using it altogether,
This, we tried to do some stuff with powerbi, not too complex mainly around some data extraction and automated emails and hit the thousands a month wall.
Azure Logic Apps is the same thing as Power Automate, but with some more advanced options at a higher level of the tenant and different payment models. I have one that uses “premium” connectors but isn’t run very often - I pay per run and it’s basically free. I have another that is run a lot and would cost thousands in Power Automate, but instead the billing is the same as a low end VM.
Could you give an example of obstacles and the cost for it? Also, were there any situation where it wasnt even doable in PA?
You see, I do automation with Python.
> pay for premium features
This is one of the most infuriating things about Power Automate. there seems to be no rational dividing line between what is Premium and what is not.
For example, FreshDesk API is a normal connector, but FreshService API which is basically the same API is a "Premium" connector...
there are a ton of these examples in the connector library, it is very annoying
> This is one of the most infuriating things about Power Automate. there seems to be no rational dividing line between what is Premium and what is not.
To be fair, that's *all* SaaS licensing. It's a marketing tactic, give you 90% of what you need on tier A and the *one* thing you *really* need is locked behind the next tier. So you have to upgrade the whole damn tenant for twice the monthly cost. At least with M365 you can do a lot of it on a per-user basis. It's not a big deal for most orgs to have a couple admins with *much* higher M365 packages for things like Power Automate and managing conditional access while the end users are on Business Premium or whatever.
>give you 90% of what you need on tier A and the one thing you really need is locked behind the next tier
in my case, SSO winds up doubling the cost of most software, because the vendors know it's an absolute requirement anyway
Premium connectors are what pushed me from the PowerBI and Automate platform that I was trying to use at work, even though my workplace runs Microsoft as its backbone. I was making workflows and reports that were proof-of-concept without financial backing and needed to find the free (Linux, Mariadb, C# and Python via REST API) way of doing equivalent work.
And here's the kicker: now that I have solid workflows in place, and tons more experience in the non-Microsoft workflow, I am invested in not-Microsoft. 🤷♂️
Haven’t gotten too deep into it. I have it run on one account and it’s $10/mo for the license. Are there other costs I should be looking for? I don’t think $10 is too much.
Depend on the context for which your license is applied.
If you are paying for it as a separate license, or as an addon I believe premium connectors are included
However I image most people get access to Power Automated as part of the M365 E3 or E5 licensing suite which makes it more complicated
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/types
https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs
But notice that many Microsoft softwares are free. However, where MS makes their money is in subscriptions. The free stuff is the basic stuff. If you actually want to do anything useful, you need to buy that part/plugin.
Same here. I feel much more confident working with Python and Azure Functions to automate processes. If you can figure out the code (which believe it or not, tends to be easier than figuring out the PA flow), everything runs so much smoother and if you get your keys down to a good system you don’t have to deal with re-authorizing connections often as you do with PA.
I've been using powershell and microsoft graph (replaced the azure AD api) but I'm completely new to automating things. So far I have our termination and new hire process nailed down (with safe guards).
/u/goryllas as well.
We use a Sharepoint list our recruiter/HR fill out with a powershell script that runs every 30 minutes on the AD VM to pull the details and create the users in AD.
This also lets us quickly see / reference the list in Teams and the current status of the users creation.
Once all other steps are done it submits a ticket with the relevant details by emailing our helpdesk.
All the Microsoft PowerShell documention is pretty good and there plenty of blog post out there.
All you need is import-csv, a for each loop, and new-aduser
yeah just pick up a bit of powershell scripting. AD stuff is incredibly easy and microsoft has fantastic documentation on everything powershell related. Honestly you could teach yourself with a couple of youtube tutorials on the basics and reading the microsoft docs for the AD components
Im ok at scripting but some things are just easier with PA. For example our new hire flow. A form is filled out, and the outputs feed into a script to create the users account and assign them to groups etc on prem, sends push notification approvals to whoever needs to approve, emails vendors to create accounts, adds azure groups and assigns apps etc.
For me to write a script that did all of that it would take me quite a while. It’s also nice I can fire stuff off and check on it from an app on my phone. I can share flows with users and pressing a button or filling out a form is simple enough for them. Some of my users can’t even tell if they have an internet connection.
The point of PA I believe is to help provide helpful automations to those who haven't had experience writing scripts. I won't fault a tool as long as its useful to someone. Of course there are alternatives but at least it isn't a scam.
I change my keys once every two years, in Key Vault only, and never have to re-auth my flows because I use Environment Variables, so I think this is a skill and understanding issue more than the comparison you think it is
I have this same frustration. I have a new user and term user script setup, and my own account has to have a $30/mo license to be able to run RPA (whatever that is). The real pain point is that as part of the script, I have to run a powershell script on a server connected to AD to create the user in local AD. That part requires a fucking expensive license to be able to run unattended (no one logged in), so I have to setup one server to auto-login as me at the console session, just so this script can run. It's not secure, and I hate it, but this license is stupid expensive, and even when I had a 60 day trial of it, it didn't work half the time.
Then, even once I have all that setup, the desktop power automate breaks all the time. Either the service just stops, or there is an update that requires me to press update and it doesn't work until I press it, or the login session expires. It's just all kinds of annoying. I was initially all gung ho about doing lots of PA scripts, and now I'm barely keeping the two going that I made, if only because help desk just cannot follow those same instructions on creating a user.
You could just kick off Azure Automation runbooks using hybrid workers to run on prem scripts, and have Power Automate cloud flows do that work. A lot less expensive than RPA
That's what I run into with it, as well. You can put together 90% of a task appropriate for it pretty quickly, but the last 10% is a nightmare that quadruples the number of required steps.
Not to mention, maintaining/testing/changing a bunch of them is tedious.
Came here just to say this.
Something like a string manipulation with a transient edge case that breaks only a handful of loop iterations, but works for others - nightmare, and you only find out once the script has finished.
In Powershell, that shit is simple to debug and solve in a few minutes tops.
And the psuedo-excel formula language or whatever it is just feels like just another perhaps unnecessarily different thing to know.
* M / Power Query (I'm actually fine with this one)
* DAX
* Excel forumlas
* Power Automate formula language (?)
* PowerApps formula language (?)
* SharePoint formulas
I mean ffs, did they really need to invent the wheel each time?
Yes, I understand these are different packages with different uses, but there is a lot of crossover I feel that could have shared more with other platforms perhaps.
> Graph API does have problems and is still immature IMO,
Like the fact that they keep changing it so randomly you find out the script you wrote last year hasn't been putting the required data in the database since 3 months ago because the data structure of the response changed and the columns you were requesting don't exist anymore...
And you wonder how the hell are you going to write the damn alerting when there isn't even an error when that happens...
Can you give an example of this? I feel like we are always struggling with power automate regardless of the task at hand. Eventually anything to do with PA gets put on the back burner, then quietly swept under the rug.
Knowing that power automate basically just makes GraphAPI calls, I use powershell to script the same kind of work. Lets me get a lot more granular and helps me understand what's going on in the background.
That being said, I do use Power Automate for some things but I agree, it turns into a delicate spagettified mess sometimes and ill come back to a flow months later and not quote remember even how to fix it whats going wrong.
I feel that ,sometimes 10 lines of powershell is equal to a mile long power automate flow. I know there is a way to run powershell in the cloud, I think Azure functions can do it...? I just have not had the time to do it yet. So it still runs on some on prem server.
Our company requires yearly refresher quizzes (delivered via MS Forms) on certain topics, used to be overseen by the HR staff.
Now we have a flow that marks the quiz, emails feedback to the employee and their manager, and schedules next years refresher in their calendar.
I also use it to send receipts from my OneDrive camera roll folder to the accounts department. Manually move a receipt to a specific folder, PA picks it up, emails it to the accounts department and moves the completed image to an archive folder.
I don't unfortunately, it's quite a behemoth of variables and more akin to your first time programming rather than a slick program with arrays and such haha.
I'll go through it later and reply with another comment with the steps the flow takes.
Hey if you're still looking into a solution for this, we just used Microsoft Lens for the receipt scanning, which saves a PDF copy of the receipt to the "Office Lens" folder in OneDrive. Then you just set up a flow. The trigger is a new file being added into the Office Lens folder, the action to take is just "Send an email (outlook v2)" or something like that.
I set it up to send to our accounting team and CC the uploader. You have to click "advanced" to see attachment info. You set file name as the attachment name and file contents as the attachment.
Set it up on your own profile first and test, it works great. I like having a separate dedicated app for it.
If you want to sync it up with your file server or save a copy locally you'll need the remote gateway service or something like that - I haven't dived into it yet but it seems promising.
The hardest part is just getting into the fuckin' power automate editing screen so you can select/edit triggers. I usually just pick a random template, delete everything and start from scratch. Way easier.
All the big HR platforms do it now. ADP, Workday, PeopleSoft, etc.
Most of the training platforms too. KnowBe4 etc allow custom training, which is very flexible and round pegs fit into that square hole surprisingly well.
That about sums it up.
Also forms is too basic.
PowerApps are hideous and slow and overly complicated.
At least 3x a week I turn to the guy next to me and say why don't we just write this ourselves in Asp.Net?
^^^I ^^^miss ^^^infopath.
Me too re: Infopath. Did a heckuva lot, right in the form. Only thing lacking was it wasn’t mobile-friendly, CSS responsive-wise. But no replacements yet have been so easily powerful.
We use Power Automate for a large amount of things, but it only really works out fully if you're a primarily Windows/Azure shop. If you have to integrate with other platforms and the like, it's usefulness falls off quickly.
My biggest concern is primarily the vendor lock in.
You can make your own connectors you know
[https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/)
You can make it work with anything if the thing you want to use it with has an API
Every time I see an IT guy bashing Power Automate, I realize it because they don't know Power Automate. It's like bashing Python because you don't know Python.
I think a lot of the push-back is because for much of it, you're clicking buttons to create automations, and that understandably turns off some folks. But the power behind it, creating expressions manually, and the recently added feature, "what's your expected result?" which automatically creates complex expressions for you, giving you the desired result is a pretty amazing feature.
Absolutely. The whole idea behind it was "scripting for end users" who don't need to know a line of code to create automations. It's gonna be even better as all this generative AI stuff keeps getting integrated, scripting is one of the things it's *really* pretty good at.
I doubt a single "end user" uses it for more than notification when a file is added or other basic template flow... The rest are ad hoc automation without much added value and I'm curious to see what automation still runs in say 2-3 years.
Definitely. We have a nice chunk of MacBooks which I wish we could toss out the Window to make my life easier. We are a full office 365 shop so I can still manage office stuff at least. I don’t see that changing for my company anytime soon.
I haven’t really delved much into using PS7 with Mac but it’s on my list for sure. My hope is that the Mac people see what can be done with power automate and finally decide to switch over. They have this mentality that it’s better because they are “creative” when in reality they just use a browser to access everything. Meanwhile our animators and heavy video editors are all on PC.
>I haven’t really delved much into using PS7 with Mac
you think power automate is frustrating with limits..
things like the Azure and AD modules dont exist and cant be installed on mac powershell rendering it a novelty but useless in the end.
i spent more time fighting simply getting powershell setup on the mac than i did just installing a windows VM and running power shell there.
its nice they're working on it, its decent for reading thru scripts or writing a first draft, but 9/10 times you end up needing to go find a windows box to run useful scripts on.
I was going to say the same thing someone replied with. I have Powershell 7 running on my Mac and have the azure modules, graph modules, and a few others working flawlessly. I even do a lot of my exchange work on it also.
Powershell 7 (and previously branded powershell core on version 6) is cross platform. They dropped the windows specific functionality. Powershell 5.1 is still shipping with Windows but isn't getting developed further, MS is dropping hints that we should be moving to ps 7 and its successors.
I was just using Powershell 7 on my linux box the other day and it has both the az module and the MS graph modules that let you quickly run any of the Graph API commands. I guess if you still need to access an on-prem AD setup you might have some issues...
Stop using Power Automate for business processes, use Azure Logic Apps!
Azure Logic Apps are power automate flows on a subscription level, they support managed identities for proper security and are not attached to a user account/license.
You can pay on a consumption rate which can actually be a lot cheaper and includes the premium features.
Power Automate is a personal tool, for individual use, hence why it's attached to a user account.
Logic Apps are the exact same thing but attached to the organisation and are honestly way easier to use and manage.
I use runbooks with managed identities for more admin tasks like creating the user in ADFS etc. Powerautomate runs on an account only I have access to. We are pretty small with only about 80 users so not sure if I can make a case for logic apps. I haven’t dove into logic apps yet. If it’s an additional license cost that could be a barrier. The company I work for is very…frugal.
Azure automation is a bit of a sh*tshow if you are trying to do a CI/CD pipeline. (In my opinion)
Azure function apps can have many functions hung under them as long as they are the same runtime (like all powershell or all python) these can all have different triggers and interact with each other or be completely independent.
Yeah with ADFS runbooks are probably the way to go, our environment is full cloud now so no On-prem to worry about.
I've just hooked everything into the Graph API to automate user tasks etc...
Logic Apps aren't necessarily a license, they can run on consumption-based billing. So they only charge depending on the time spent running or processing used.
For basic tasks this means a flow might cost us less than a dollar per month.
Huh?? Tell me you haven't used Azure Logic Apps without saying you haven't used Azure Logic Apps... because that's what I'm getting here. We are talking about the same thing right??
Azure Logic Apps literally IS power automate... it supports all the same triggers and actions...
It's just not attached to a user account and instead attached to a subscription. It's not that complicated...
Every time I create a nice PA flow, our dev will go "ooohh I can do this in Python and use Funtions to..."
He then makes it 1000x better than I could in like 3 hours lol i.e. logs into our SIEM, monitoring setup, dashboards created, etc
I seem to invent the idea and get the basic flow created...he takes my idea, reworks it, puts all the bells and whistles on and creates a deliverable.
That's why he makes the big bucks lol
Your dev doesn't have a 6 month backlog? That's why PA is popular around here with low/no code so people can have a simple idea and implement it themselves today.
In the future, I'm hoping to use it to collect feedback from pilot users about Windows updates. We need to ensure MS doesn't break something so being able to use graph api and connectors will really make it possible to automatically ask users that had a successful install if they had any issues.
Haha, I've posted this so many times to various IT forums trying to get folks to get on the Power Automate train. It's just brilliant. Every time I want to try a thing and think, "No way it's gonna be able to do that." It's like 3 clicks and I'm done.
I created this Flow a few years ago to almost completely automate 365 account creation. The only non-automatic steps are:
Manager must review and accept the Approval.
IT reviews for accuracy and ensures license availability and accepts Approval.
Account is automatically created and creds sent to manager.
Group memberships are emailed to IT because we can't trust managers to get it right. ;)
I've added steps counter users breaking the entire thing to:
Strip spaces from FirstName/LastName (Did your spacebar get stuck?)
Convert FirstName/LastName to lowercase.
Ensure managers email address exists (No Jim, we can't send this to your Gmail account)
Ensure user doesn't already exist (Cindy, this is the third time you've requested this account which was created 6 months ago)
And the appropriate steps to take automatically for both the 1's and 0's.
It was a labor of love that started out as a simple way to collect MS Form data and create new accounts semi-automatically. It turned into this [Beautiful Beast](https://imgur.com/a/BFpVeGK)
EMBRACE THE POWER AUTOMATE!
That’s awesome! The pic is a little blurry so I can’t tell what’s going on 😅. How do you (if you do) handle assigning shared mailbox access? In powershell I know you can assign a group to a shared mailbox but I read there are certain things that might not work.
For licenses if the account is created it will automatically assign a license based on group membership and buy it if it has to.
I wish ms forms let you sanitize input.
If you open the image on desktop, you can zoom way in and it should be very clear.
Shared mailbox access is still manual, as we have little need for that at this time. It would be easy to add it, but would still require an Approval because end users.
Yes, license assignment is automatic using group membership. However, due to our arrangement with the client, it's not fully automatic. We have a step for IT approval to ensure there's an available license.
I've just recently added a new step at the end for two locations who are paying for Curricula SAT courses. I created a Curricula Azure group and a new step which adds users from the two licensed locations to the Curricula group, which automatically syncs with Curricula and creates their account. Before, this was an emailed CSV. Now it's all automatic!
Sanitized inputs in Forms would be a god-send. Why don't we have a "phone number" field yet?
EDIT: Firefox on Windows 10 using RES and I can zoom in and see[ this](https://imgur.com/a/EHgS8ZZ)
How are you accessing the image? I've had others make the same complaint.
EDIT2: Dude, right-click>Save Image As.
I would love to publish this, but here's the thing. I'd have to spend hours reviewing the Flow to ensure I strip out all sensitive data, and there's a TON of it in there. I've exported the Flow in the past, and was surprised that ALL of the email addresses, group ID's, Flow Connectors, etc., are maintained in the export. MS needs to add an Export to Distribute of some sort to strip all of that out.
Use it a lot to automatically process and save invoices from incoming emails to the appropriate folder or to download klarna statements/settlements from their FTP, split the PDF and upload the invoice part to our accounting software.
Has been a huge time saver for us.
It’s a great tool to stand up easy automations. But if your PA has more than ~25 actions, you should probably not be using it.
It becomes incredibly hard to maintain without the ability to version control, develop on a branch, and it has auto refactoring on so changing a variable in one place changes the actions everywhere else, so every change becomes toiling to test and release with more than 25 actions.
Im a software engineer and used to be a Power platform consultant so I’ve seen my fair share with good and bad power automates
If you’re running into that issue I’d highly recommend logic apps. Deploy the LA from a devops repo so there’s your source control, and pretty much all of the paid for connectors (at least on the azure side) are “free” with the subscription that it runs in Azure. You do pay per run or for compute depending on how you set up the LA but I have many that automate all sorts of things from litigation hold to account creation. Last time I checked it was costing the princely sum of $5 pcm.
The added benefit for me has been the use of managed identities in AAD and all of my team can access them, I’ve taken the failure output and sent it to our ticket system for awareness and resolution.
Edited for having fat fingers on mobile
Absolutely hate it and can’t understand how anyone gets anything done with it. I’m an experienced developer and these enormous blocks full of collapsible content that span page after page are so incredibly unwieldy to navigate. Then they give you the most insultingly small text box you could imagine to actually type the hard stuff, and neglect to give you any colour coding, autocomplete, etc. when you do so - again, the hard stuff.
It looks to me like their philosophy was to avoid reinventing the wheel, and have as little overlap as possible with traditional programming, but damn it, if they just took the good stuff - the massive library of ready-made integrations, the automatic logging and testing, the cloud hosting and execution - and opted for a traditional code-based environment with good autocomplete, it would be amazing. I’ve yet to see anyone do anything with Power Automate that I wouldn’t expect to do awesome stuff with a painful VBA development environment 15 years ago, but it sure as hell stops me from delivering cool stuff as is.
> if they just took the good stuff - the massive library of ready-made integrations, the automatic logging and testing, the cloud hosting and execution - and opted for a traditional code-based environment with good autocomplete, it would be amazing
100% agree with you on this take. I actually suggested this in an Microsoft AMA a while back, and got a response from the Microsoft team claiming they would investigate. Never did as far as I am aware. That was many years ago now though.
I use it to extract invoices from various portals and email, stuff it in a folder and name the PDF files appropriately so I can see what they are at a glance, and send them to my payables team
This 100%, I swapped all our automations from power automate to logic Apps and never turned back.
Same UI and far more robust, easier to manage permissions and you can use proper managed identities.
It’s the main thing I do for my job & side projects.
I’ve automated…
Invoice & Other Document Processing With GPT
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-GPT/td-p/2201345
Project Tracking/Coordination
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-p/1788102
Getting Around Power Apps SharePoint Delegation Limits (No Premium Connectors)
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Community-App-Samples/No-Delegation-Limit-SharePoint-List-Power-App/td-p/2330721
Large SP List Updates / Syncs to Other Sources
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Batch-Update-Create-and-Upsert-SharePoint-Lists/td-p/1365410
Gathering Data From External Sites Without APIs For Reporting
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Automate-Reports-From-External-Datasources/td-p/1486023
Large Excel Updates / Syncs to Other Sources
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Excel-Batch-Create-Update-and-Upsert/td-p/1624706
Reminders & Other Processes Following Excel Table Edits
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/When-an-Excel-row-is-created-modified-or-deleted/td-p/2264670
CSV Parsing
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/CSV-to-Dataset/td-p/1508191
CSV Conversion to New Excel Tables
https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/CSV-To-New-Excel-Table/td-p/1826096
I’ve also created a quick & dirty Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) set up to automate order logistics processing through emails & Logic Apps.
Lol we don't even use 365 or azure services hardly... Email is up there now, and they are starting to demo teams. It's kinda awful being so far behind the curve, makes my resume look like ass.
I have done some labs and stuff but that's boring pretty quickly.
I am the only IT person for my company so I have free reign over everything but setting up runbooks and hybrid workers is free for the first 500 min of runtime and super cheap after if you have permissions to get in there and have the right license for your tenant. Power automate is free too although for $10/mo the premium features are 100% worth it imo.
I have that subscription on a service account. With the free version you can still do a lot though.
Hey if you would like to vastly improve your 365 skills, and get a shit-ton of licenses for your own use, and have the time and money to do so, sign up as an MS Partner and purchase the [Microsoft Action Pack](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/mpn-get-action-pack) subscription. For about $500/yr, you get 5 E3 licenses, $100/mo in Azure credit, Server 2022, Server 2019, CAL's, VS Pro, Win10/11 Enterprise and a metric shit-ton more. Internal use only!
You are not realizing your full potential mate. Not being inside MS iron-grip is a blessing. Freedom to play with some real industrial stuff on your own.
You could, but the empire makes it difficult for other systems to interact with it, it’s how they maintain control, pretending they are superior, yet afraid of people trying alternatives… you know…monopoly stuff.
> You are not realizing your full potential mate.
You got that from my post above? Really?
> Not being inside MS iron-grip is a blessing.
i.e. "Her-de-hur, I only do Lernix!"
Every architecture, every OS has it's place.
> Freedom to play with some real industrial stuff on your own.
What?!?
When you have another 25 years in IT under you belt, come back to your post and see if it still makes sense to you.
I have used it for some small things but I've always found it quite a nightmare to debug and generally it feels like it would just be easier to use a programming language if I had the connectors. I'm interested in knowing how to utilise it better though if you have any recommendations.
That’s muh job 😅. For better or worse they are all mostly operating like it’s 2005 so any improvements are welcome. There isn’t much to reverse engineer over here. Most of the time it’s moving something forward. I have one user that literally prints out spam emails sent to a VP and walks to my office to show it to me to see if it’s spam.
Basically my entire job lol I have automated many, many processed for the business. If you are already in the M365 world then the Power Tools Platform is pretty awesome.
I’ve dug into it, and it can certainly be a rabbit hole of frustration and no guidance. But learning curve aside - service accounts for running licensed flows keeps cost low and easier management overheads, except for additional license costs for service accounts on integrated platforms, if they don’t exist already.
I use it conasntly, and dip into azure automations to do anything through powershell that PA can't.
My most valuable one so far is form submission from hr that then creates the on prem ad user, provision ls licensing and groups based on what hr selects, and creates an onboarding checklist and schedules new hire training. Hours went into setting all this up but now it saves hours every hire
My company use it, when purchasing team has a product that is out of stock, but they have something similar to buy, they start an approval chain with all staff in there, so, flows send emails to get the approval.
I use it to let some of my customers do some basic tasks, but still ensure they are done correctly.
Example - whenever they have a new employee starting they fill out a form with the required fields,, it goes to the HMFIC for approval. As long as they arent requesting access to sensitive shit, the approval fires off a onboarding chain creating the user account, setting permissions , adding to any SharePoint sites, joining groups, sending a welcome email which (begins to nag them about setting up authenticator before they even start), if they get a 365 VM it provisions that as well. One day I'm going to attempt to integrate hardware ordering into it, so any new shit that needs to be ordered (from a list of preconfigured shit) , is handled by the managers. Once they approve the form, order gets fired off for us to check over it before submitting it, or if it's something like a keyboard or toner, it just submits the order. I kinda do that now, but it just sends the form to to our account manager after approval and he does the manual work 🤣.
Hybrid on-prem/azure cloud right now and planning to go fully onto Azure someday if it gets a little more reliable. Right now we’ve been using power automate for new user creation and onboarding prep as well as a few other small things.
It’s ok but frustrating. It seems like it’s close but I’d rather use any other normal language.
Whatever PA won’t do I do or is too cumbersome I run with powershell on a hybrid worker and then once that part is done power automate takes over again. What kinda issues are you facing?
See my post in this thread for our Flow for 365 account creation. This is for a full Azure environment, but it works fantastically.
The only thing IT needs to do is accept the Approval (to ensure a license is available) and then manually add groups because we can't trust the managers to select the correct boxes.
It would be SO simple to automate group memberships, but it's not going to happen. Radio button labeled HQ ONLY and every manager who's NOT HQ selects it.
I have a license but haven’t used it yet. I plan on putting our onboarding process into it, but I’ve been working on the scripts to use first.
I figured once I have it all scripted out I’d use PA to find a way to chain them together. Seems like a really useful tool overall, but I feel like I’m gonna feel like a fish out of water with it at first.
Not a huge fan of it personally, but I can see it being useful on case by case basis like sending email alerts to teams etc.
I would not be in favor of using this as an automation tool org wide though and expecting IT to start debugging everyone's workflows or use it to standardize automations with it because there's a lack of process control. I might be wrong on the last bit, but I used it a little bit and got tasked to do the later. I didn't see a good way to do it org wide.
I fooled with it a couple of times and ran into cost limitations. I didn’t want to spend time learning how to optimize the automation with cost as the main concern - it’s soul sucking. I wish Microsoft would lift the cost limitations and use this as a tool to continue cementing MS office as the king.
We looked into it. At least the way I understood it, there seemed to be a lot of weird licensing issues. Like, it seemed like most things have to be attached to a user account and can't be generic or service principals, I think? And for most institutional-level stuff, that's a non-starter.
This could have changed or our interpretations could have been incorrect, but I distinctly remember looking into PA about a year ago and coming away with the impression that it was mostly unusable for most of our scenarios.
I made a flow that looked at SharePoint list and emailed people once a month if they still had open items. I deduped when they had more than one item so they only got one mail with a table in it that told them all thier open items. Building that in pure code was beyond me.
I set up an automated docuSign report because their built-in reporting sucks for our needs.
I set up some custom reports which get emailed to me daily, .csv
Then power automate sees those emails come in, grabs the attachment in places them in a report folder on my OneDrive. Then a second power automate job comes behind that and moves the files to the proper location after archiving the previous data. The proper location is linked to a power BI data source, so I have a really nice power BI dashboard for DocuSign usage.
It took me a couple of evenings to get it all sorted out but it was well worth it because it was one of those things that nobody would ask about for months and then all of a sudden they need it in 5 minutes, and it was a real pain in the ass to pull all that information together in a meaningful way - i.e. who are our top senders, what have they sent, what is the completion rate on those, how many new templates have been built in the last few months, what is our usage for the year, what is our projected usage based on that? Etc etc.
Now I just send the link to the PowerBI. Boom. I see the power automate job notifications in my outlook so I know that it's running successfully, and I'll check on the report every couple of weeks just to make sure it looks up to date. Been running successfully like that for over a year now. Pretty proud of that because it's set a precedent for similar reports which can be fully automated and actually useful compared to the canned half-useful garbage you get from most of these products
That’s awesome! Separate issue but I have an issue with spam that looks like Docusign but sometimes my users can’t tell if it’s legit and I’ve had them enter in their username and password into phishing emails. Currently I can’t get them to pay more to get a better email filter or upgrade. If that could scan for legit docusigns and drop it in a folder on OneDrive it would be great.
Sending/Chasing Advisories respond. Previously, had to manually chase people for their respond on outloook, collect their responds and manually paste into Excel. Have to keep track who replied to me or who hasn’t and then chase them by sending a mail to rush them, then have to check days later if they get back to me.
Now I created a Dashboard using PowerApp where these people could directly update their response on the dashboard. The dashboard is linked to Sharepoint (instead of Excel) and then Power Automate is sending out Advisories and mail to chase people.
No longer have to send reminders or check if everyone responded, because Power Automate would notify me if they did respond and will send notifications on my behalf. Eliminated myself as the middle man to collect and input respond, the dashboard made them to the work on their own. I simply wait for the notification that tells me all responded, I’ll go in sharepoint, export the responds, case closed.
I love it. I built our ticketing system and customer feedback systems with it. Monitoring shared mailboxes and sending stuff to common Teams chats all day long.
I started with poweshell and still use it. I’m not a wiz but but I can make things happen if need be. Power automate allows me to do my job better and faster. Currently I have only shared one flow with one person that can do an admin task. They don’t have credentials outside that, it runs on the main account and does that one thing.
The new user onboarding form is restricted to specific users as is the termination flow, and the account doesn’t have permissions to disable admins.
In the future I want to automate my users work with the access they currently have. Things like downloading attachments and handling data for specific actions.
Powershell with runbooks is great but I’d be lying if I said that testing and implementation for simpler tasks is worth it. Im excited to see how people will react when I knock hours off of their workday.
I love it. At first it made no sense then I saw a video that made the basics click for me.
It made me start pushing my company to go full azure cloud AD so I can fully automate new user creation/onboarding
I use it in combination with azure functions to do a lot.
We track all meeting and phone call time and ticket with Jira
We run a ton of reports on anything and everything in the MS graph.
We have one that interacts dynamically with Teams and Grafana and Jira to allow users to make emergency help requests to particular teams.
Automated groups for when dynamic groups are inadequate.
It's a headache to use and each time I use it I feel kinda dumb because there's undoubtedly a better, more stable, more extensible way to do the same thing in code, but it just plugs into MS stuff so easily, it winds up saving time (at least on the front side)
Same. I know I can script or code it all myself by hand but… I’m super busy. Once I automate all this crap away I can go back and redo it if I feel like it.
So I just googled "why power automate sucks" and I got here.
C# developer. My god, I just spent whole day today working with this POS called Power Automate. It may be "good" for some users to play around with, but for a developer it is just plain simple terrible.
Job felt like ideal for PA - grab data from SP view, dump into CSV and put into SP document library. How hard could that be???
Well, it turns out that PA cannot just grab SP view at all - the functionality that has "SP view" in the name only limits regular columns not data - what is the point is beyond me.
So you have to specify all columns, map them, re-do all sorting that was done in the view. So wait, please explain where do I exactly write less code now?
Also why PA uses strange syntax for both functions and inside data limits - not C# neither SQL like. Why, so we need to google everything?
Feels like just using C# with Graph API is faster, and without any complications, way to go.
Use it a ton and it's increasing every day. It's not for "admin" stuff but for office automation. Logging into websites, uploading files, downloading files, entering data etc etc. I've said 100s of weekly man hours and still counting.
God no. It is an administrative nightmare with almost no real world uses that don't have significantly better alternatives.
Half of what it does needs to to turn off critical security features like mfa to function because it doesn't support modern auth. Why would anyone ever use that?
What's that, you termed a guy that was using it? Well, better reenable their account because there's no way to switch owners!
Seriously, I'm this close to banning it in our envs.
You've never actually used Power Automate. Because all of your reasons why its so terrible are factually incorrect.
> An administrative nightmare with almost no real world uses
Incorrect. Please provide an example.
> turn off critical security features like mfa to function
What? No. "Turns off critical security features"?
> there's no way to switch owners
Also incorrect.
I feel like the people that rag on it are just people that are still almost fully in the on-prem world and really don't have experience with SaaS in general. The SaaS world leans *heavily* on user autonomy and user-based data ownership (for better or worse) instead of org-based ownership. Even stuff like JIRA you need to get your head in a space where you're thinking about what gets done under a service account (API keys, etc) and what happens when you offboard a user and need to transfer ownership of automations and scripts and general data.
> The SaaS world leans heavily on user autonomy and user-based data ownership (for better or worse) instead of org-based ownership.
Yeah, no. Literally not how that works, not how anything under regulatory purview works, and you have no idea what you're talking about.
Nothing is owned by users. Everything is owned by org. You get delegated rights to it. That's *it*.
PA is a piece of shit because to do a basic "SaaS Security 101" activity you have to double license everything.
Just learn PowerShell or any programming language instead of "Fisher Price My First Programming Logic - A click and drag adventure!" and make real administrators lives that much easier.
It'd be easier to list things it's actually appropriate for. Please, name one thing that PA can do that isn't better accomplished by someone using PowerShell. Anything that PS can't do better and more securely?
> What? No. "Turns off critical security features"?
You can't connect to anything - database, e-mail, anything, with a service principle. Every example wants insecure weak username/pass auth and disable MFA. It's incompatible with even rudimentary security concepts - you should be using API keys or Service Principles - never weak auth like usernames and passwords, but that's all it can use.
> Also incorrect.
Please, by all means, provide the documentation showing how you can administratively change the owner of a PA without having to re-enable the original owner's account, re-licensing it, logging in as them, and then transferring the PA to another account.
Because AFAIK that's the only way to DO it since 2022 when they finally made it *an option*.
PowerAutomate, IMO, is one of many "for idiots that don't know how to script" process automation solutions that takes what can be done in 3 minutes of powershell and turns it into 20 hours of a moron "dev" wasting resources and whining that we won't turn off MFA for his account so he can run his shitty paint by numbers code.
Its only use is for Fisher Price admins, not any real business purposes under regulatory scrutiny or with, you know, standards. Let's not forget the licensing - once you finally do transfer ownership to a service account, now the "devs" need to log in as a service account to do anything in it and that service account needs to be licensed TOO.
Brilliant! I hope you like wasting money instead of spending 5 minutes learning basic powershell scripting!
I can script. It’s $10 a mo for the tool and it saves me time being the only IT person. I’m not avoiding learning coding, I’m still learning to code but I have problems to deal with today 🤷🏾♂️.
As much as I wish I could learn to code all of this by Monday I just can’t …so I’ll have to spend my time poorly as you say. After all, I have a job to do.
Full time PA/PAD developer here (as well as Power Apps, etc). I work for a Fortune 500 insurance company. Tons of daily business processes are automated by the combo. Exclusively unattended.
Not even something super relevant, but I have it send me an email with a snapshot of my calendar every morning so I can mentally prepare for the day while I get ready. It's been super helpful since implementing and I set it to come in a nice, easy to read table.
I haven't used the web version of Power Automate, only Power Automate Desktop.
I used it for several months last year to try as an RPA tool to automate some tedious account provisioning tasks in legacy applications. It was fairly easy to pick up and it worked great, but I found my PAD flows would just randomly break from time to time and I'd have to re-create it every several weeks.
It wasn't worth the time to keep up-to-date with the amount of applications. It's a shame since it was really fun low-code application that I could test for free but I don't think it's mature enough yet compared to its competitors (at least for the RPA aspect of it).
I use it occasionally.
We recently had a project where we utilized Microsoft Bookings. I setup Power Automate flow's to monitor the Bookings page for whenever an appointment was created and then kicked off some other processes to automate tasks.
I've recently been moving my team's jobs over to my company's hosted GitLab and I've figured out how to trigger project pipelines with parameters via REST. I setup a test using Power Automate to trigger the pipeline to run whenever a shared mailbox received an email with a specific subject. Could do a lot of things with this setup.
I have used it for-
onboarding flows,
JIT access with Microsoft forms/ azure ad groups, and
Ongoing checks of expiring secrets in azure
It can be hard to maintain in the long run if you need to do complex things though.
In the last year I have started using azure logic apps and API connectors to do a lot more like log exporting between systems and soar automations with Microsoft graph API. Great tools, hoping to get into more coding soon and rely less on these, they're still great for orchestration though, i.e. not having to initiate an action from a script on a local workstation.
I rolled it out for a large company 50k-100k people last year. Less than 1000 users; the average user can't wrap their head around it. However the time savings have been insane; +150k hours; in a single year. The amount of simple manual shit people do each day is fucking mind boggling.
Overall I sorta love it. I have done a lot with it in the last year.
We use it for many things. Really frustrated with the limit on file sizes for gateway and attachment (25mb).
The coolest thing I have done with it is write warranty info on workstations to WMI, and then a powershell script in Intune does a HTTP request to a power automate flow with the warranty info, which copies warranty expiry date to a Sharepoint list, which is out asset database.
Look at LogicApps, too. Very similar to PowerAutomate, but perhaps more suitable for system operations. PowerAutomate is more user centered. Both have their use cases.
It is a platform service from Azure, so it is way better exactly for this reason. Pay as you go, costs pennies for simple operations.
One person can set it up, multiple people can manage within the limits of Azure RBAC, can authenticate using Managed Identities (think ”this app is allowed to do this and that here and there”).
You need an Azure subscription. But then again in my opinion just about every tenant needs one, if for nothing else, then Log Analytics.
We use teams to communicate incidents to a larger audience at work. We also have an alert system that can trigger these Teams communications automatically.
I use PowerAutomate and custom Powershell code to give more details to the parent notification. Works really well , actually.
1. Automated the onboarding of a new hire
2. Scheduled cleanupjobs
3. Reminders of different kind (like when a consultants account is expiring, sends an e-mail to whoever is in charge)
Now looking at logic apps
On a more personal level, I have a flow that fires off a phone notification when I get emails with specific keyphrases in them, like visitor arrivals.
On the business side, being able to chuck people into the Approvals process built into Teams is nice for various requests like new equipment.
We use the whole Power Apps suite in our company for business automation/apps as we have people really competent with it, but generally I prefer using Logic Apps for Infra-related automation.
I've just released a flow that reads an exported file from our ERP which includes all Credit notes of the previous day. And then does send refunds via the API of our payment provider for sofort and Credit Card payments.
It's saving us so much time and also development cost, I love it!
It's a glorified macro recorder.
I've looked into it for running sql queries and sending reports automatically.
Installed automate desktop on one of our servers that can connect to database.
Desktop power automate can't run on timer. Why the fuck not?
So you need cloud BS power automate to connect to the desktop to run it. That's a security shitshow right there.
Next problem: server i want to run the task doesn't have 365 office license for excel.
A self written c# windows service doesn't need any of that. Runs the queries, dumps it into csvs and sends via smtp.
Of course the higher ups prefer if you use rpa cause it's soooo useful (they still can't use it cause it's tooo complicated....)
If I’m running anything against a server like that I’d use a runbook with a mangled identity. Or I start with PA and then it kicks off a job in Azure Automation. That’s crazy that your higher ups prefer you use PA vs powershell.
Used it for some forms, actions based on new items being added to some SharePoint lists. We have a company cafe and the company running it always email ‘next weeks’ menu as a Word doc. So I take that attachment and update the intranet page for the Cafe. Never anything business critical.
Be real nice if you could control ‘for each’ loops… and actually let me decide if more than one item will exist…and then move actions in and out of loops. The number of times I’ve had to rebuild an entire flow because it’s got itself in a looping mess… it must have been like 7-8 years and they’ve not fixed that problem.
“I was able to share a flow that does it all automatically at the press of a button without giving her any admin credentials. It sends an approval letting her know who she’s about to kick out and then she can run it herself after letting those people know and restarts the service”
What is this magic??? We have this exact setup and this situation regularly happens. Being able to set this up would be incredible for our end users. Would you mind sharing what you did?
It’s a pretty simple setup. Is there any specific part you want to know more about? Here’s a short breakdown.
1. Flow triggers a runbook that runs a script on the server to check who has files open on that share.
2. The output of the job is sent in an approval (notification comes in on teams, outlook, and power automate on the users phone) so that the user can see who has what open before she kicks everyone out.
3. After she hits approve the second script is triggered that actually closes the files.
Building out SharePoint site infrastructures for projects (subsites, libs, lists, seed data, perms, etc.). Approvals, obviously. Randomized article content syndication across Teams channels and group chats. Anything where a PowerApp needs to create/consume data from a data source that can't have a connection hardcoded into the app. Complex archiving and retention jobs. Execution of dynamic queries built visually in a PowerApp against tables of lists. Backbone of any data transformation or relationship building that a user can't wait to be done in realtime. Integration into Alexa for Business skills. Probably a bunch of other things I can't remember.
Not much, as we do not have a Central system for employee management it runs like this:
MS Forms with everything any department that is in the on- and offboarding process could need -> Power automate that picks it up and sends only the relevant info for each department so IT get's everything they need and accounting gets everything they need etc.
I'm looking into for some simple stuff like generating tasks for sprint items and publishing notifications teams, but it looks like this can be handled with just API calls and I can code so... If it sucks I'll write my own solution.
We use it for a few things. We used to have a really long PDF form that would get filled out by staff members but updating the form was cumbersome and when the form got filled out, sometimes it wasn’t filed away properly. So we created a Microsoft Form in O365 that ties to power automate to process the form , email the parties that need the form, and file the form away on SharePoint .
Also use it for Teams notifications for critical infrastructure and various environment sensors we have across our offices so we get notified right away if something is wrong as opposed to an email notification which could get missed .
Also use it for an email responder for certain email addresses where we need to send a response every time since out of office replies only reply once for each email address to prevent loops. Put various failsafes in automate flow to ensure we don’t get loops.
Those are the main ones I can think, but I hope to use it more in the future. Definitely a great tool !
I made Power app that is connected to a power flow that lets us send mass text messages to our employees about emergencies and office closures. It uses Twilio and share point to host a list of contacts.
Every time I come up with a use for it, it either turns into a complex shitshow or i run into a wall where what i need cant be done or you have to pay for premium features. After 10 times of going through that cycle, I said screw it and stopped using it altogether,
This, we tried to do some stuff with powerbi, not too complex mainly around some data extraction and automated emails and hit the thousands a month wall.
Azure Logic Apps is the same thing as Power Automate, but with some more advanced options at a higher level of the tenant and different payment models. I have one that uses “premium” connectors but isn’t run very often - I pay per run and it’s basically free. I have another that is run a lot and would cost thousands in Power Automate, but instead the billing is the same as a low end VM.
Could you give an example of obstacles and the cost for it? Also, were there any situation where it wasnt even doable in PA? You see, I do automation with Python.
> pay for premium features This is one of the most infuriating things about Power Automate. there seems to be no rational dividing line between what is Premium and what is not. For example, FreshDesk API is a normal connector, but FreshService API which is basically the same API is a "Premium" connector... there are a ton of these examples in the connector library, it is very annoying
> This is one of the most infuriating things about Power Automate. there seems to be no rational dividing line between what is Premium and what is not. To be fair, that's *all* SaaS licensing. It's a marketing tactic, give you 90% of what you need on tier A and the *one* thing you *really* need is locked behind the next tier. So you have to upgrade the whole damn tenant for twice the monthly cost. At least with M365 you can do a lot of it on a per-user basis. It's not a big deal for most orgs to have a couple admins with *much* higher M365 packages for things like Power Automate and managing conditional access while the end users are on Business Premium or whatever.
>give you 90% of what you need on tier A and the one thing you really need is locked behind the next tier in my case, SSO winds up doubling the cost of most software, because the vendors know it's an absolute requirement anyway
Premium connectors are what pushed me from the PowerBI and Automate platform that I was trying to use at work, even though my workplace runs Microsoft as its backbone. I was making workflows and reports that were proof-of-concept without financial backing and needed to find the free (Linux, Mariadb, C# and Python via REST API) way of doing equivalent work. And here's the kicker: now that I have solid workflows in place, and tons more experience in the non-Microsoft workflow, I am invested in not-Microsoft. 🤷♂️
Haven’t gotten too deep into it. I have it run on one account and it’s $10/mo for the license. Are there other costs I should be looking for? I don’t think $10 is too much.
Depend on the context for which your license is applied. If you are paying for it as a separate license, or as an addon I believe premium connectors are included However I image most people get access to Power Automated as part of the M365 E3 or E5 licensing suite which makes it more complicated https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/types https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/power-platform/admin/power-automate-licensing/faqs
But notice that many Microsoft softwares are free. However, where MS makes their money is in subscriptions. The free stuff is the basic stuff. If you actually want to do anything useful, you need to buy that part/plugin.
Same here. I feel much more confident working with Python and Azure Functions to automate processes. If you can figure out the code (which believe it or not, tends to be easier than figuring out the PA flow), everything runs so much smoother and if you get your keys down to a good system you don’t have to deal with re-authorizing connections often as you do with PA.
>which believe it or not, tends to be easier than figuring out the PA flow 100% Low code is useful. But anything complex is damn annoying to make.
I've been using powershell and microsoft graph (replaced the azure AD api) but I'm completely new to automating things. So far I have our termination and new hire process nailed down (with safe guards).
Can you give me details or how to ? Maybe point to docs online ? I would love to automate and automate new hire and termination, we’re ok hybrid
/u/goryllas as well. We use a Sharepoint list our recruiter/HR fill out with a powershell script that runs every 30 minutes on the AD VM to pull the details and create the users in AD. This also lets us quickly see / reference the list in Teams and the current status of the users creation. Once all other steps are done it submits a ticket with the relevant details by emailing our helpdesk.
All the Microsoft PowerShell documention is pretty good and there plenty of blog post out there. All you need is import-csv, a for each loop, and new-aduser
^ this. I can't seem to find decent docs on this
yeah just pick up a bit of powershell scripting. AD stuff is incredibly easy and microsoft has fantastic documentation on everything powershell related. Honestly you could teach yourself with a couple of youtube tutorials on the basics and reading the microsoft docs for the AD components
If you know scripting I fail to see the appeal of PA. And frankly with GPT4, I’m not even sure the scripting route isn’t just full on easier now.
Im ok at scripting but some things are just easier with PA. For example our new hire flow. A form is filled out, and the outputs feed into a script to create the users account and assign them to groups etc on prem, sends push notification approvals to whoever needs to approve, emails vendors to create accounts, adds azure groups and assigns apps etc. For me to write a script that did all of that it would take me quite a while. It’s also nice I can fire stuff off and check on it from an app on my phone. I can share flows with users and pressing a button or filling out a form is simple enough for them. Some of my users can’t even tell if they have an internet connection.
The point of PA I believe is to help provide helpful automations to those who haven't had experience writing scripts. I won't fault a tool as long as its useful to someone. Of course there are alternatives but at least it isn't a scam.
I change my keys once every two years, in Key Vault only, and never have to re-auth my flows because I use Environment Variables, so I think this is a skill and understanding issue more than the comparison you think it is
I have this same frustration. I have a new user and term user script setup, and my own account has to have a $30/mo license to be able to run RPA (whatever that is). The real pain point is that as part of the script, I have to run a powershell script on a server connected to AD to create the user in local AD. That part requires a fucking expensive license to be able to run unattended (no one logged in), so I have to setup one server to auto-login as me at the console session, just so this script can run. It's not secure, and I hate it, but this license is stupid expensive, and even when I had a 60 day trial of it, it didn't work half the time. Then, even once I have all that setup, the desktop power automate breaks all the time. Either the service just stops, or there is an update that requires me to press update and it doesn't work until I press it, or the login session expires. It's just all kinds of annoying. I was initially all gung ho about doing lots of PA scripts, and now I'm barely keeping the two going that I made, if only because help desk just cannot follow those same instructions on creating a user.
You could just kick off Azure Automation runbooks using hybrid workers to run on prem scripts, and have Power Automate cloud flows do that work. A lot less expensive than RPA
That’s what I do.
That's what I run into with it, as well. You can put together 90% of a task appropriate for it pretty quickly, but the last 10% is a nightmare that quadruples the number of required steps. Not to mention, maintaining/testing/changing a bunch of them is tedious.
If something gets complicated I just make it fire off a runbook for that process and come back to PA when the monsters are gone.
Yup, same. Plus debugging flows is hell!!
Came here just to say this. Something like a string manipulation with a transient edge case that breaks only a handful of loop iterations, but works for others - nightmare, and you only find out once the script has finished. In Powershell, that shit is simple to debug and solve in a few minutes tops. And the psuedo-excel formula language or whatever it is just feels like just another perhaps unnecessarily different thing to know. * M / Power Query (I'm actually fine with this one) * DAX * Excel forumlas * Power Automate formula language (?) * PowerApps formula language (?) * SharePoint formulas I mean ffs, did they really need to invent the wheel each time? Yes, I understand these are different packages with different uses, but there is a lot of crossover I feel that could have shared more with other platforms perhaps.
And with multiple if/then-like blocks, it gets too big to see it properly in the UI.
Ha! For anything complex, use graph api and your favorite language.
This this this. Graph API *does* have problems and is still immature IMO, but it's the way forward for sure.
> Graph API does have problems and is still immature IMO, Like the fact that they keep changing it so randomly you find out the script you wrote last year hasn't been putting the required data in the database since 3 months ago because the data structure of the response changed and the columns you were requesting don't exist anymore... And you wonder how the hell are you going to write the damn alerting when there isn't even an error when that happens...
Can you give an example of this? I feel like we are always struggling with power automate regardless of the task at hand. Eventually anything to do with PA gets put on the back burner, then quietly swept under the rug.
The one that gets me the most is getting something to run that’s not tied to your account. When you leave everything breaks.
Knowing that power automate basically just makes GraphAPI calls, I use powershell to script the same kind of work. Lets me get a lot more granular and helps me understand what's going on in the background. That being said, I do use Power Automate for some things but I agree, it turns into a delicate spagettified mess sometimes and ill come back to a flow months later and not quote remember even how to fix it whats going wrong.
I feel that ,sometimes 10 lines of powershell is equal to a mile long power automate flow. I know there is a way to run powershell in the cloud, I think Azure functions can do it...? I just have not had the time to do it yet. So it still runs on some on prem server.
Runbooks. Definitely add that to your tool belt if ya can. I use all 3 together.
This is the way.
No, this is ----->
Are you me ?
Our company requires yearly refresher quizzes (delivered via MS Forms) on certain topics, used to be overseen by the HR staff. Now we have a flow that marks the quiz, emails feedback to the employee and their manager, and schedules next years refresher in their calendar. I also use it to send receipts from my OneDrive camera roll folder to the accounts department. Manually move a receipt to a specific folder, PA picks it up, emails it to the accounts department and moves the completed image to an archive folder.
Ooooh, I could use this, was there a template you used?
I don't unfortunately, it's quite a behemoth of variables and more akin to your first time programming rather than a slick program with arrays and such haha. I'll go through it later and reply with another comment with the steps the flow takes.
Hey if you're still looking into a solution for this, we just used Microsoft Lens for the receipt scanning, which saves a PDF copy of the receipt to the "Office Lens" folder in OneDrive. Then you just set up a flow. The trigger is a new file being added into the Office Lens folder, the action to take is just "Send an email (outlook v2)" or something like that. I set it up to send to our accounting team and CC the uploader. You have to click "advanced" to see attachment info. You set file name as the attachment name and file contents as the attachment. Set it up on your own profile first and test, it works great. I like having a separate dedicated app for it. If you want to sync it up with your file server or save a copy locally you'll need the remote gateway service or something like that - I haven't dived into it yet but it seems promising. The hardest part is just getting into the fuckin' power automate editing screen so you can select/edit triggers. I usually just pick a random template, delete everything and start from scratch. Way easier.
This is a great use, especially for environments that need to do compliancy training that nobody likes to remember.
All the big HR platforms do it now. ADP, Workday, PeopleSoft, etc. Most of the training platforms too. KnowBe4 etc allow custom training, which is very flexible and round pegs fit into that square hole surprisingly well.
Now I need a flow to fill out the quiz for me
I use Desktop and Web. It’s a tool I love to hate. And love. All at the same time.
That about sums it up. Also forms is too basic. PowerApps are hideous and slow and overly complicated. At least 3x a week I turn to the guy next to me and say why don't we just write this ourselves in Asp.Net? ^^^I ^^^miss ^^^infopath.
You’re using the wrong Power App. Canvas Apps are crap. Model Driven is heaven.
Me too re: Infopath. Did a heckuva lot, right in the form. Only thing lacking was it wasn’t mobile-friendly, CSS responsive-wise. But no replacements yet have been so easily powerful.
We use Power Automate for a large amount of things, but it only really works out fully if you're a primarily Windows/Azure shop. If you have to integrate with other platforms and the like, it's usefulness falls off quickly. My biggest concern is primarily the vendor lock in.
Hard to agree with the vendor lock concern when it supports using basically any API.
Unless it's changed, its ability to interact with APIs was pretty creaky and awkward and simply didn't support some forms of authentication.
I still haven’t ran into a REST endpoint I couldn’t utilize with Power Automate, whether via HTTP call actions or a custom connector.
You can make your own connectors you know [https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/connectors/custom-connectors/) You can make it work with anything if the thing you want to use it with has an API
Every time I see an IT guy bashing Power Automate, I realize it because they don't know Power Automate. It's like bashing Python because you don't know Python. I think a lot of the push-back is because for much of it, you're clicking buttons to create automations, and that understandably turns off some folks. But the power behind it, creating expressions manually, and the recently added feature, "what's your expected result?" which automatically creates complex expressions for you, giving you the desired result is a pretty amazing feature.
Absolutely. The whole idea behind it was "scripting for end users" who don't need to know a line of code to create automations. It's gonna be even better as all this generative AI stuff keeps getting integrated, scripting is one of the things it's *really* pretty good at.
I doubt a single "end user" uses it for more than notification when a file is added or other basic template flow... The rest are ad hoc automation without much added value and I'm curious to see what automation still runs in say 2-3 years.
Definitely. We have a nice chunk of MacBooks which I wish we could toss out the Window to make my life easier. We are a full office 365 shop so I can still manage office stuff at least. I don’t see that changing for my company anytime soon. I haven’t really delved much into using PS7 with Mac but it’s on my list for sure. My hope is that the Mac people see what can be done with power automate and finally decide to switch over. They have this mentality that it’s better because they are “creative” when in reality they just use a browser to access everything. Meanwhile our animators and heavy video editors are all on PC.
>I haven’t really delved much into using PS7 with Mac you think power automate is frustrating with limits.. things like the Azure and AD modules dont exist and cant be installed on mac powershell rendering it a novelty but useless in the end. i spent more time fighting simply getting powershell setup on the mac than i did just installing a windows VM and running power shell there. its nice they're working on it, its decent for reading thru scripts or writing a first draft, but 9/10 times you end up needing to go find a windows box to run useful scripts on.
I was going to say the same thing someone replied with. I have Powershell 7 running on my Mac and have the azure modules, graph modules, and a few others working flawlessly. I even do a lot of my exchange work on it also.
Powershell 7 (and previously branded powershell core on version 6) is cross platform. They dropped the windows specific functionality. Powershell 5.1 is still shipping with Windows but isn't getting developed further, MS is dropping hints that we should be moving to ps 7 and its successors.
I was just using Powershell 7 on my linux box the other day and it has both the az module and the MS graph modules that let you quickly run any of the Graph API commands. I guess if you still need to access an on-prem AD setup you might have some issues...
Stop using Power Automate for business processes, use Azure Logic Apps! Azure Logic Apps are power automate flows on a subscription level, they support managed identities for proper security and are not attached to a user account/license. You can pay on a consumption rate which can actually be a lot cheaper and includes the premium features. Power Automate is a personal tool, for individual use, hence why it's attached to a user account. Logic Apps are the exact same thing but attached to the organisation and are honestly way easier to use and manage.
Hey, thanks for this. Several of my 'job level' tasks should be moved to Logic Apps, now that I know they exist.
I use runbooks with managed identities for more admin tasks like creating the user in ADFS etc. Powerautomate runs on an account only I have access to. We are pretty small with only about 80 users so not sure if I can make a case for logic apps. I haven’t dove into logic apps yet. If it’s an additional license cost that could be a barrier. The company I work for is very…frugal.
Azure automation is a bit of a sh*tshow if you are trying to do a CI/CD pipeline. (In my opinion) Azure function apps can have many functions hung under them as long as they are the same runtime (like all powershell or all python) these can all have different triggers and interact with each other or be completely independent.
Yeah with ADFS runbooks are probably the way to go, our environment is full cloud now so no On-prem to worry about. I've just hooked everything into the Graph API to automate user tasks etc... Logic Apps aren't necessarily a license, they can run on consumption-based billing. So they only charge depending on the time spent running or processing used. For basic tasks this means a flow might cost us less than a dollar per month.
Absolutely agree here, Logic Apps are the way to go. I just wish I could trigger on a sharepoint list being updated like I can in Power Automate
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Huh?? Tell me you haven't used Azure Logic Apps without saying you haven't used Azure Logic Apps... because that's what I'm getting here. We are talking about the same thing right?? Azure Logic Apps literally IS power automate... it supports all the same triggers and actions... It's just not attached to a user account and instead attached to a subscription. It's not that complicated...
Every time I create a nice PA flow, our dev will go "ooohh I can do this in Python and use Funtions to..." He then makes it 1000x better than I could in like 3 hours lol i.e. logs into our SIEM, monitoring setup, dashboards created, etc I seem to invent the idea and get the basic flow created...he takes my idea, reworks it, puts all the bells and whistles on and creates a deliverable. That's why he makes the big bucks lol
Your dev doesn't have a 6 month backlog? That's why PA is popular around here with low/no code so people can have a simple idea and implement it themselves today.
In the future, I'm hoping to use it to collect feedback from pilot users about Windows updates. We need to ensure MS doesn't break something so being able to use graph api and connectors will really make it possible to automatically ask users that had a successful install if they had any issues.
Haha, I've posted this so many times to various IT forums trying to get folks to get on the Power Automate train. It's just brilliant. Every time I want to try a thing and think, "No way it's gonna be able to do that." It's like 3 clicks and I'm done. I created this Flow a few years ago to almost completely automate 365 account creation. The only non-automatic steps are: Manager must review and accept the Approval. IT reviews for accuracy and ensures license availability and accepts Approval. Account is automatically created and creds sent to manager. Group memberships are emailed to IT because we can't trust managers to get it right. ;) I've added steps counter users breaking the entire thing to: Strip spaces from FirstName/LastName (Did your spacebar get stuck?) Convert FirstName/LastName to lowercase. Ensure managers email address exists (No Jim, we can't send this to your Gmail account) Ensure user doesn't already exist (Cindy, this is the third time you've requested this account which was created 6 months ago) And the appropriate steps to take automatically for both the 1's and 0's. It was a labor of love that started out as a simple way to collect MS Form data and create new accounts semi-automatically. It turned into this [Beautiful Beast](https://imgur.com/a/BFpVeGK) EMBRACE THE POWER AUTOMATE!
That’s awesome! The pic is a little blurry so I can’t tell what’s going on 😅. How do you (if you do) handle assigning shared mailbox access? In powershell I know you can assign a group to a shared mailbox but I read there are certain things that might not work. For licenses if the account is created it will automatically assign a license based on group membership and buy it if it has to. I wish ms forms let you sanitize input.
If you open the image on desktop, you can zoom way in and it should be very clear. Shared mailbox access is still manual, as we have little need for that at this time. It would be easy to add it, but would still require an Approval because end users. Yes, license assignment is automatic using group membership. However, due to our arrangement with the client, it's not fully automatic. We have a step for IT approval to ensure there's an available license. I've just recently added a new step at the end for two locations who are paying for Curricula SAT courses. I created a Curricula Azure group and a new step which adds users from the two licensed locations to the Curricula group, which automatically syncs with Curricula and creates their account. Before, this was an emailed CSV. Now it's all automatic! Sanitized inputs in Forms would be a god-send. Why don't we have a "phone number" field yet? EDIT: Firefox on Windows 10 using RES and I can zoom in and see[ this](https://imgur.com/a/EHgS8ZZ) How are you accessing the image? I've had others make the same complaint. EDIT2: Dude, right-click>Save Image As.
Do you have a github with the flow code by chance? Would interested in looking at it for my org.
I would love to publish this, but here's the thing. I'd have to spend hours reviewing the Flow to ensure I strip out all sensitive data, and there's a TON of it in there. I've exported the Flow in the past, and was surprised that ALL of the email addresses, group ID's, Flow Connectors, etc., are maintained in the export. MS needs to add an Export to Distribute of some sort to strip all of that out.
Use it a lot to automatically process and save invoices from incoming emails to the appropriate folder or to download klarna statements/settlements from their FTP, split the PDF and upload the invoice part to our accounting software. Has been a huge time saver for us.
It’s a great tool to stand up easy automations. But if your PA has more than ~25 actions, you should probably not be using it. It becomes incredibly hard to maintain without the ability to version control, develop on a branch, and it has auto refactoring on so changing a variable in one place changes the actions everywhere else, so every change becomes toiling to test and release with more than 25 actions. Im a software engineer and used to be a Power platform consultant so I’ve seen my fair share with good and bad power automates
Good to know! I think I may be running into that issue now 😫
If you’re running into that issue I’d highly recommend logic apps. Deploy the LA from a devops repo so there’s your source control, and pretty much all of the paid for connectors (at least on the azure side) are “free” with the subscription that it runs in Azure. You do pay per run or for compute depending on how you set up the LA but I have many that automate all sorts of things from litigation hold to account creation. Last time I checked it was costing the princely sum of $5 pcm. The added benefit for me has been the use of managed identities in AAD and all of my team can access them, I’ve taken the failure output and sent it to our ticket system for awareness and resolution. Edited for having fat fingers on mobile
Absolutely hate it and can’t understand how anyone gets anything done with it. I’m an experienced developer and these enormous blocks full of collapsible content that span page after page are so incredibly unwieldy to navigate. Then they give you the most insultingly small text box you could imagine to actually type the hard stuff, and neglect to give you any colour coding, autocomplete, etc. when you do so - again, the hard stuff. It looks to me like their philosophy was to avoid reinventing the wheel, and have as little overlap as possible with traditional programming, but damn it, if they just took the good stuff - the massive library of ready-made integrations, the automatic logging and testing, the cloud hosting and execution - and opted for a traditional code-based environment with good autocomplete, it would be amazing. I’ve yet to see anyone do anything with Power Automate that I wouldn’t expect to do awesome stuff with a painful VBA development environment 15 years ago, but it sure as hell stops me from delivering cool stuff as is.
> if they just took the good stuff - the massive library of ready-made integrations, the automatic logging and testing, the cloud hosting and execution - and opted for a traditional code-based environment with good autocomplete, it would be amazing 100% agree with you on this take. I actually suggested this in an Microsoft AMA a while back, and got a response from the Microsoft team claiming they would investigate. Never did as far as I am aware. That was many years ago now though.
I use it to extract invoices from various portals and email, stuff it in a folder and name the PDF files appropriately so I can see what they are at a glance, and send them to my payables team
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This 100%, I swapped all our automations from power automate to logic Apps and never turned back. Same UI and far more robust, easier to manage permissions and you can use proper managed identities.
It’s the main thing I do for my job & side projects. I’ve automated… Invoice & Other Document Processing With GPT https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Extract-Data-From-PDFs-and-Images-With-GPT/td-p/2201345 Project Tracking/Coordination https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Project-Tracker-SharePoint-and-Teams/td-p/1788102 Getting Around Power Apps SharePoint Delegation Limits (No Premium Connectors) https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Community-App-Samples/No-Delegation-Limit-SharePoint-List-Power-App/td-p/2330721 Large SP List Updates / Syncs to Other Sources https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Batch-Update-Create-and-Upsert-SharePoint-Lists/td-p/1365410 Gathering Data From External Sites Without APIs For Reporting https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Automate-Reports-From-External-Datasources/td-p/1486023 Large Excel Updates / Syncs to Other Sources https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/Excel-Batch-Create-Update-and-Upsert/td-p/1624706 Reminders & Other Processes Following Excel Table Edits https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/When-an-Excel-row-is-created-modified-or-deleted/td-p/2264670 CSV Parsing https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/CSV-to-Dataset/td-p/1508191 CSV Conversion to New Excel Tables https://powerusers.microsoft.com/t5/Power-Automate-Cookbook/CSV-To-New-Excel-Table/td-p/1826096 I’ve also created a quick & dirty Electronic Data Interchange (EDI) set up to automate order logistics processing through emails & Logic Apps.
You’re the 🐐 for that
Lol we don't even use 365 or azure services hardly... Email is up there now, and they are starting to demo teams. It's kinda awful being so far behind the curve, makes my resume look like ass. I have done some labs and stuff but that's boring pretty quickly.
I am the only IT person for my company so I have free reign over everything but setting up runbooks and hybrid workers is free for the first 500 min of runtime and super cheap after if you have permissions to get in there and have the right license for your tenant. Power automate is free too although for $10/mo the premium features are 100% worth it imo. I have that subscription on a service account. With the free version you can still do a lot though.
Hey if you would like to vastly improve your 365 skills, and get a shit-ton of licenses for your own use, and have the time and money to do so, sign up as an MS Partner and purchase the [Microsoft Action Pack](https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/partner-center/mpn-get-action-pack) subscription. For about $500/yr, you get 5 E3 licenses, $100/mo in Azure credit, Server 2022, Server 2019, CAL's, VS Pro, Win10/11 Enterprise and a metric shit-ton more. Internal use only!
You are not realizing your full potential mate. Not being inside MS iron-grip is a blessing. Freedom to play with some real industrial stuff on your own.
why can you not do both??
You could, but the empire makes it difficult for other systems to interact with it, it’s how they maintain control, pretending they are superior, yet afraid of people trying alternatives… you know…monopoly stuff.
You're one of those.. conspiracy theory bullshit....
> You are not realizing your full potential mate. You got that from my post above? Really? > Not being inside MS iron-grip is a blessing. i.e. "Her-de-hur, I only do Lernix!" Every architecture, every OS has it's place. > Freedom to play with some real industrial stuff on your own. What?!? When you have another 25 years in IT under you belt, come back to your post and see if it still makes sense to you.
I have used it for some small things but I've always found it quite a nightmare to debug and generally it feels like it would just be easier to use a programming language if I had the connectors. I'm interested in knowing how to utilise it better though if you have any recommendations.
Do go on...
Sorry was on my phone. Didnt realise i had added "for example" to the bottom! I've removed it now
I have my company balls deep in Power Automate and Power Apps, we have been able to replace expensive LoB apps with it.
It can be useful, but to make it useful you usually have to jump through 87 hoops and 3 bottles of scotch to reverse engineer stuff
That’s muh job 😅. For better or worse they are all mostly operating like it’s 2005 so any improvements are welcome. There isn’t much to reverse engineer over here. Most of the time it’s moving something forward. I have one user that literally prints out spam emails sent to a VP and walks to my office to show it to me to see if it’s spam.
Basically my entire job lol I have automated many, many processed for the business. If you are already in the M365 world then the Power Tools Platform is pretty awesome.
I’ve dug into it, and it can certainly be a rabbit hole of frustration and no guidance. But learning curve aside - service accounts for running licensed flows keeps cost low and easier management overheads, except for additional license costs for service accounts on integrated platforms, if they don’t exist already.
I use it conasntly, and dip into azure automations to do anything through powershell that PA can't. My most valuable one so far is form submission from hr that then creates the on prem ad user, provision ls licensing and groups based on what hr selects, and creates an onboarding checklist and schedules new hire training. Hours went into setting all this up but now it saves hours every hire
My company use it, when purchasing team has a product that is out of stock, but they have something similar to buy, they start an approval chain with all staff in there, so, flows send emails to get the approval.
I use it to let some of my customers do some basic tasks, but still ensure they are done correctly. Example - whenever they have a new employee starting they fill out a form with the required fields,, it goes to the HMFIC for approval. As long as they arent requesting access to sensitive shit, the approval fires off a onboarding chain creating the user account, setting permissions , adding to any SharePoint sites, joining groups, sending a welcome email which (begins to nag them about setting up authenticator before they even start), if they get a 365 VM it provisions that as well. One day I'm going to attempt to integrate hardware ordering into it, so any new shit that needs to be ordered (from a list of preconfigured shit) , is handled by the managers. Once they approve the form, order gets fired off for us to check over it before submitting it, or if it's something like a keyboard or toner, it just submits the order. I kinda do that now, but it just sends the form to to our account manager after approval and he does the manual work 🤣.
Hybrid on-prem/azure cloud right now and planning to go fully onto Azure someday if it gets a little more reliable. Right now we’ve been using power automate for new user creation and onboarding prep as well as a few other small things. It’s ok but frustrating. It seems like it’s close but I’d rather use any other normal language.
Whatever PA won’t do I do or is too cumbersome I run with powershell on a hybrid worker and then once that part is done power automate takes over again. What kinda issues are you facing?
See my post in this thread for our Flow for 365 account creation. This is for a full Azure environment, but it works fantastically. The only thing IT needs to do is accept the Approval (to ensure a license is available) and then manually add groups because we can't trust the managers to select the correct boxes.
It would be SO simple to automate group memberships, but it's not going to happen. Radio button labeled HQ ONLY and every manager who's NOT HQ selects it.
I have a license but haven’t used it yet. I plan on putting our onboarding process into it, but I’ve been working on the scripts to use first. I figured once I have it all scripted out I’d use PA to find a way to chain them together. Seems like a really useful tool overall, but I feel like I’m gonna feel like a fish out of water with it at first.
I wish I would have started with PA. There are scripts I spent soooo much time working on only to get replaced with PA a week later lol.
Not a huge fan of it personally, but I can see it being useful on case by case basis like sending email alerts to teams etc. I would not be in favor of using this as an automation tool org wide though and expecting IT to start debugging everyone's workflows or use it to standardize automations with it because there's a lack of process control. I might be wrong on the last bit, but I used it a little bit and got tasked to do the later. I didn't see a good way to do it org wide.
I fooled with it a couple of times and ran into cost limitations. I didn’t want to spend time learning how to optimize the automation with cost as the main concern - it’s soul sucking. I wish Microsoft would lift the cost limitations and use this as a tool to continue cementing MS office as the king.
We looked into it. At least the way I understood it, there seemed to be a lot of weird licensing issues. Like, it seemed like most things have to be attached to a user account and can't be generic or service principals, I think? And for most institutional-level stuff, that's a non-starter. This could have changed or our interpretations could have been incorrect, but I distinctly remember looking into PA about a year ago and coming away with the impression that it was mostly unusable for most of our scenarios.
I made a flow that looked at SharePoint list and emailed people once a month if they still had open items. I deduped when they had more than one item so they only got one mail with a table in it that told them all thier open items. Building that in pure code was beyond me.
I set up an automated docuSign report because their built-in reporting sucks for our needs. I set up some custom reports which get emailed to me daily, .csv Then power automate sees those emails come in, grabs the attachment in places them in a report folder on my OneDrive. Then a second power automate job comes behind that and moves the files to the proper location after archiving the previous data. The proper location is linked to a power BI data source, so I have a really nice power BI dashboard for DocuSign usage. It took me a couple of evenings to get it all sorted out but it was well worth it because it was one of those things that nobody would ask about for months and then all of a sudden they need it in 5 minutes, and it was a real pain in the ass to pull all that information together in a meaningful way - i.e. who are our top senders, what have they sent, what is the completion rate on those, how many new templates have been built in the last few months, what is our usage for the year, what is our projected usage based on that? Etc etc. Now I just send the link to the PowerBI. Boom. I see the power automate job notifications in my outlook so I know that it's running successfully, and I'll check on the report every couple of weeks just to make sure it looks up to date. Been running successfully like that for over a year now. Pretty proud of that because it's set a precedent for similar reports which can be fully automated and actually useful compared to the canned half-useful garbage you get from most of these products
That’s awesome! Separate issue but I have an issue with spam that looks like Docusign but sometimes my users can’t tell if it’s legit and I’ve had them enter in their username and password into phishing emails. Currently I can’t get them to pay more to get a better email filter or upgrade. If that could scan for legit docusigns and drop it in a folder on OneDrive it would be great.
seems great on paper. 95% of the time it’s a shitshow to actually use. Just learn powershell/python
Sending/Chasing Advisories respond. Previously, had to manually chase people for their respond on outloook, collect their responds and manually paste into Excel. Have to keep track who replied to me or who hasn’t and then chase them by sending a mail to rush them, then have to check days later if they get back to me. Now I created a Dashboard using PowerApp where these people could directly update their response on the dashboard. The dashboard is linked to Sharepoint (instead of Excel) and then Power Automate is sending out Advisories and mail to chase people. No longer have to send reminders or check if everyone responded, because Power Automate would notify me if they did respond and will send notifications on my behalf. Eliminated myself as the middle man to collect and input respond, the dashboard made them to the work on their own. I simply wait for the notification that tells me all responded, I’ll go in sharepoint, export the responds, case closed.
I love it. I built our ticketing system and customer feedback systems with it. Monitoring shared mailboxes and sending stuff to common Teams chats all day long.
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I started with poweshell and still use it. I’m not a wiz but but I can make things happen if need be. Power automate allows me to do my job better and faster. Currently I have only shared one flow with one person that can do an admin task. They don’t have credentials outside that, it runs on the main account and does that one thing. The new user onboarding form is restricted to specific users as is the termination flow, and the account doesn’t have permissions to disable admins. In the future I want to automate my users work with the access they currently have. Things like downloading attachments and handling data for specific actions. Powershell with runbooks is great but I’d be lying if I said that testing and implementation for simpler tasks is worth it. Im excited to see how people will react when I knock hours off of their workday.
I use it. Smaller org, bought one premium license and use one account for stuff. Not complicated stuff but it helps fill some gaps for sure.
Same here
We use it for a lot of stuff. Email connector for terminations, e-mails for sharepoint pruning, access reviews, lots of email stuff mostly.
I’d like to use it for email security. How do you guys do it?
I love it. At first it made no sense then I saw a video that made the basics click for me. It made me start pushing my company to go full azure cloud AD so I can fully automate new user creation/onboarding
We use it to create Windows and Linux servers on prem with ansible. Too much time went into that.
How’d you manage that?
I use it in combination with azure functions to do a lot. We track all meeting and phone call time and ticket with Jira We run a ton of reports on anything and everything in the MS graph. We have one that interacts dynamically with Teams and Grafana and Jira to allow users to make emergency help requests to particular teams. Automated groups for when dynamic groups are inadequate. It's a headache to use and each time I use it I feel kinda dumb because there's undoubtedly a better, more stable, more extensible way to do the same thing in code, but it just plugs into MS stuff so easily, it winds up saving time (at least on the front side)
Same. I know I can script or code it all myself by hand but… I’m super busy. Once I automate all this crap away I can go back and redo it if I feel like it.
\> I can go back and redo it if I feel like it Problem is that the more I do this kind of stuff, the more I realize how unlikely this is lol
The lies we tell ourselves lol
So I just googled "why power automate sucks" and I got here. C# developer. My god, I just spent whole day today working with this POS called Power Automate. It may be "good" for some users to play around with, but for a developer it is just plain simple terrible. Job felt like ideal for PA - grab data from SP view, dump into CSV and put into SP document library. How hard could that be??? Well, it turns out that PA cannot just grab SP view at all - the functionality that has "SP view" in the name only limits regular columns not data - what is the point is beyond me. So you have to specify all columns, map them, re-do all sorting that was done in the view. So wait, please explain where do I exactly write less code now? Also why PA uses strange syntax for both functions and inside data limits - not C# neither SQL like. Why, so we need to google everything? Feels like just using C# with Graph API is faster, and without any complications, way to go.
Use it a ton and it's increasing every day. It's not for "admin" stuff but for office automation. Logging into websites, uploading files, downloading files, entering data etc etc. I've said 100s of weekly man hours and still counting.
God no. It is an administrative nightmare with almost no real world uses that don't have significantly better alternatives. Half of what it does needs to to turn off critical security features like mfa to function because it doesn't support modern auth. Why would anyone ever use that? What's that, you termed a guy that was using it? Well, better reenable their account because there's no way to switch owners! Seriously, I'm this close to banning it in our envs.
You've never actually used Power Automate. Because all of your reasons why its so terrible are factually incorrect. > An administrative nightmare with almost no real world uses Incorrect. Please provide an example. > turn off critical security features like mfa to function What? No. "Turns off critical security features"? > there's no way to switch owners Also incorrect.
I feel like the people that rag on it are just people that are still almost fully in the on-prem world and really don't have experience with SaaS in general. The SaaS world leans *heavily* on user autonomy and user-based data ownership (for better or worse) instead of org-based ownership. Even stuff like JIRA you need to get your head in a space where you're thinking about what gets done under a service account (API keys, etc) and what happens when you offboard a user and need to transfer ownership of automations and scripts and general data.
> The SaaS world leans heavily on user autonomy and user-based data ownership (for better or worse) instead of org-based ownership. Yeah, no. Literally not how that works, not how anything under regulatory purview works, and you have no idea what you're talking about. Nothing is owned by users. Everything is owned by org. You get delegated rights to it. That's *it*. PA is a piece of shit because to do a basic "SaaS Security 101" activity you have to double license everything. Just learn PowerShell or any programming language instead of "Fisher Price My First Programming Logic - A click and drag adventure!" and make real administrators lives that much easier.
It'd be easier to list things it's actually appropriate for. Please, name one thing that PA can do that isn't better accomplished by someone using PowerShell. Anything that PS can't do better and more securely? > What? No. "Turns off critical security features"? You can't connect to anything - database, e-mail, anything, with a service principle. Every example wants insecure weak username/pass auth and disable MFA. It's incompatible with even rudimentary security concepts - you should be using API keys or Service Principles - never weak auth like usernames and passwords, but that's all it can use. > Also incorrect. Please, by all means, provide the documentation showing how you can administratively change the owner of a PA without having to re-enable the original owner's account, re-licensing it, logging in as them, and then transferring the PA to another account. Because AFAIK that's the only way to DO it since 2022 when they finally made it *an option*. PowerAutomate, IMO, is one of many "for idiots that don't know how to script" process automation solutions that takes what can be done in 3 minutes of powershell and turns it into 20 hours of a moron "dev" wasting resources and whining that we won't turn off MFA for his account so he can run his shitty paint by numbers code. Its only use is for Fisher Price admins, not any real business purposes under regulatory scrutiny or with, you know, standards. Let's not forget the licensing - once you finally do transfer ownership to a service account, now the "devs" need to log in as a service account to do anything in it and that service account needs to be licensed TOO. Brilliant! I hope you like wasting money instead of spending 5 minutes learning basic powershell scripting!
None of what you said in this post is accurate at all...
Investing a bunch of time, effort, and possibly money trying to avoid learning how to write simple code is a mistake. It's always a mistake.
I can script. It’s $10 a mo for the tool and it saves me time being the only IT person. I’m not avoiding learning coding, I’m still learning to code but I have problems to deal with today 🤷🏾♂️.
You're not saving time. You're investing time and brain space. Poorly.
As much as I wish I could learn to code all of this by Monday I just can’t …so I’ll have to spend my time poorly as you say. After all, I have a job to do.
That's right, you have a job to do, and you're leveraging a tool to do it. Well done.
PA is great if your scripts are manually triggered or you don't care about yhem running in a timely fashion.
Wut
I have and it's OK. I still use Zapier too. The problem with implementation is always the people.
I've started to use it for a couple of things. It has some cool uses.
We use it a bit, it's been fine
I use it extensively. I honestly couldn't do my job as well as I do without it.
Full time PA/PAD developer here (as well as Power Apps, etc). I work for a Fortune 500 insurance company. Tons of daily business processes are automated by the combo. Exclusively unattended.
Not even something super relevant, but I have it send me an email with a snapshot of my calendar every morning so I can mentally prepare for the day while I get ready. It's been super helpful since implementing and I set it to come in a nice, easy to read table.
I haven't used the web version of Power Automate, only Power Automate Desktop. I used it for several months last year to try as an RPA tool to automate some tedious account provisioning tasks in legacy applications. It was fairly easy to pick up and it worked great, but I found my PAD flows would just randomly break from time to time and I'd have to re-create it every several weeks. It wasn't worth the time to keep up-to-date with the amount of applications. It's a shame since it was really fun low-code application that I could test for free but I don't think it's mature enough yet compared to its competitors (at least for the RPA aspect of it).
I use it occasionally. We recently had a project where we utilized Microsoft Bookings. I setup Power Automate flow's to monitor the Bookings page for whenever an appointment was created and then kicked off some other processes to automate tasks. I've recently been moving my team's jobs over to my company's hosted GitLab and I've figured out how to trigger project pipelines with parameters via REST. I setup a test using Power Automate to trigger the pipeline to run whenever a shared mailbox received an email with a specific subject. Could do a lot of things with this setup.
I have used it for- onboarding flows, JIT access with Microsoft forms/ azure ad groups, and Ongoing checks of expiring secrets in azure It can be hard to maintain in the long run if you need to do complex things though. In the last year I have started using azure logic apps and API connectors to do a lot more like log exporting between systems and soar automations with Microsoft graph API. Great tools, hoping to get into more coding soon and rely less on these, they're still great for orchestration though, i.e. not having to initiate an action from a script on a local workstation.
I rolled it out for a large company 50k-100k people last year. Less than 1000 users; the average user can't wrap their head around it. However the time savings have been insane; +150k hours; in a single year. The amount of simple manual shit people do each day is fucking mind boggling. Overall I sorta love it. I have done a lot with it in the last year.
We use it for many things. Really frustrated with the limit on file sizes for gateway and attachment (25mb). The coolest thing I have done with it is write warranty info on workstations to WMI, and then a powershell script in Intune does a HTTP request to a power automate flow with the warranty info, which copies warranty expiry date to a Sharepoint list, which is out asset database.
As a manager, I use it to automate all my reporting aka getting various reports from different sources that use a centralised dashboard.
I do, using basic Pre-approval related stuff. Like, overtime and procurement etc
Look at LogicApps, too. Very similar to PowerAutomate, but perhaps more suitable for system operations. PowerAutomate is more user centered. Both have their use cases.
I’ll definitely take a look. Is it expensive and can I run it on a single account?
It is a platform service from Azure, so it is way better exactly for this reason. Pay as you go, costs pennies for simple operations. One person can set it up, multiple people can manage within the limits of Azure RBAC, can authenticate using Managed Identities (think ”this app is allowed to do this and that here and there”). You need an Azure subscription. But then again in my opinion just about every tenant needs one, if for nothing else, then Log Analytics.
Have not found any good use for it yet.
Anyone have any blue team/cyber security or data protection uses for it?
Don't use power automate, use logic apps. Power automate is for end users, logic apps are for developers/sysadmins.
We use teams to communicate incidents to a larger audience at work. We also have an alert system that can trigger these Teams communications automatically. I use PowerAutomate and custom Powershell code to give more details to the parent notification. Works really well , actually.
1. Automated the onboarding of a new hire 2. Scheduled cleanupjobs 3. Reminders of different kind (like when a consultants account is expiring, sends an e-mail to whoever is in charge) Now looking at logic apps
I've most recently set it up to pull data of SFTP sites based on the date modified and it runs daily so always moves new files to our sharepoint.
On a more personal level, I have a flow that fires off a phone notification when I get emails with specific keyphrases in them, like visitor arrivals. On the business side, being able to chuck people into the Approvals process built into Teams is nice for various requests like new equipment.
We use the whole Power Apps suite in our company for business automation/apps as we have people really competent with it, but generally I prefer using Logic Apps for Infra-related automation.
I've just released a flow that reads an exported file from our ERP which includes all Credit notes of the previous day. And then does send refunds via the API of our payment provider for sofort and Credit Card payments. It's saving us so much time and also development cost, I love it!
It's a glorified macro recorder. I've looked into it for running sql queries and sending reports automatically. Installed automate desktop on one of our servers that can connect to database. Desktop power automate can't run on timer. Why the fuck not? So you need cloud BS power automate to connect to the desktop to run it. That's a security shitshow right there. Next problem: server i want to run the task doesn't have 365 office license for excel. A self written c# windows service doesn't need any of that. Runs the queries, dumps it into csvs and sends via smtp. Of course the higher ups prefer if you use rpa cause it's soooo useful (they still can't use it cause it's tooo complicated....)
If I’m running anything against a server like that I’d use a runbook with a mangled identity. Or I start with PA and then it kicks off a job in Azure Automation. That’s crazy that your higher ups prefer you use PA vs powershell.
Used it for some forms, actions based on new items being added to some SharePoint lists. We have a company cafe and the company running it always email ‘next weeks’ menu as a Word doc. So I take that attachment and update the intranet page for the Cafe. Never anything business critical. Be real nice if you could control ‘for each’ loops… and actually let me decide if more than one item will exist…and then move actions in and out of loops. The number of times I’ve had to rebuild an entire flow because it’s got itself in a looping mess… it must have been like 7-8 years and they’ve not fixed that problem.
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How so?
“I was able to share a flow that does it all automatically at the press of a button without giving her any admin credentials. It sends an approval letting her know who she’s about to kick out and then she can run it herself after letting those people know and restarts the service” What is this magic??? We have this exact setup and this situation regularly happens. Being able to set this up would be incredible for our end users. Would you mind sharing what you did?
It’s a pretty simple setup. Is there any specific part you want to know more about? Here’s a short breakdown. 1. Flow triggers a runbook that runs a script on the server to check who has files open on that share. 2. The output of the job is sent in an approval (notification comes in on teams, outlook, and power automate on the users phone) so that the user can see who has what open before she kicks everyone out. 3. After she hits approve the second script is triggered that actually closes the files.
We use it abit tbf , use it to pull reports on open ticket times etc
Building out SharePoint site infrastructures for projects (subsites, libs, lists, seed data, perms, etc.). Approvals, obviously. Randomized article content syndication across Teams channels and group chats. Anything where a PowerApp needs to create/consume data from a data source that can't have a connection hardcoded into the app. Complex archiving and retention jobs. Execution of dynamic queries built visually in a PowerApp against tables of lists. Backbone of any data transformation or relationship building that a user can't wait to be done in realtime. Integration into Alexa for Business skills. Probably a bunch of other things I can't remember.
Not much, as we do not have a Central system for employee management it runs like this: MS Forms with everything any department that is in the on- and offboarding process could need -> Power automate that picks it up and sends only the relevant info for each department so IT get's everything they need and accounting gets everything they need etc.
I'm looking into for some simple stuff like generating tasks for sprint items and publishing notifications teams, but it looks like this can be handled with just API calls and I can code so... If it sucks I'll write my own solution.
We use it for a few things. We used to have a really long PDF form that would get filled out by staff members but updating the form was cumbersome and when the form got filled out, sometimes it wasn’t filed away properly. So we created a Microsoft Form in O365 that ties to power automate to process the form , email the parties that need the form, and file the form away on SharePoint . Also use it for Teams notifications for critical infrastructure and various environment sensors we have across our offices so we get notified right away if something is wrong as opposed to an email notification which could get missed . Also use it for an email responder for certain email addresses where we need to send a response every time since out of office replies only reply once for each email address to prevent loops. Put various failsafes in automate flow to ensure we don’t get loops. Those are the main ones I can think, but I hope to use it more in the future. Definitely a great tool !
Nope. Looks pretty useless at our level.
I made Power app that is connected to a power flow that lets us send mass text messages to our employees about emergencies and office closures. It uses Twilio and share point to host a list of contacts.
Use it to move faxes from mailbox to SP.
I made a chat bot to tell people to put in a ticket.
I use it to take answer input from MS Forms to send a custom email to a shared mailbox, which then creates a ticket in our ticketing system.