Power Automate

What is it?

Power Automate (aka Flow) is an automation tool that can be used in simple and complex automations, connecting free, premium and/or internal and external data/platforms.

Power Automate is currently offered at the University as a personal productivity tool to allow staff to work smarter with some of their content using the free service (not premium) and within the limits of the service.

Power Automate is often used in conjunction with Power Apps. Power Apps is not currently offered as a service.

Examples of personal productivity flows

  • Schedule a reply such as select a Teams message and reply to be sent at a particular time
  • Compose an email based on values and changes in a Microsoft List
  • Save email attachment to OneDrive or a SharePoint library

IT Services do not currently offer an app building service. For local, departmental or organisational processes, a governance and guardrails framework is being worked on.

Flow Owner Responsibilities

Personal productivity is for you as an individual to use automation in your workday.

Although Data Loss Prevention (DLP) rules are in place, care should be taken when considering the data used in your automation and the sharing of it.

To mitigate some of the challenges of movers and leavers, you should firstly try to build flows that don’t impact your colleagues if you leave or move. If you do build something that is low risk but needs some contingency in the event of you leaving or moving, you should add a co-owner to your flow and confirm ahead of time that they can access your flow and run it.

Support

There is limited IT support for personal productivity use cases. Power Automate has a number of templates to help you get started as well as Microsoft help pages and community help.

Learning about Power Automate

You can use Microsoft’s own training pages, follow their blogs and YouTube channels.

The Digital Champions run several Microsoft 365 related training sessions, and there is an introduction to Power Automate. You can find information about these sessions in the training catalogue.

Information handling

Information classified as Very Sensitive must not be processed or stored on Microsoft 365, and advice must be sought from the Information Governance Office if you handle this type of information.