Microsoft prides itself on making productivity and creativity a priority. Everyone knows, including Microsoft, that being truly productive and creative is often hindered by tedious tasks that no one actually enjoys doing but take up a lot of our time.
The solution to combatting these tedious tasks is automation. Automation doesn’t just exist in factory settings. There are many ways to have small tasks complete themselves with things like software and programming but Microsoft has a great user-friendly tool that you won’t even need a Managed IT Services Company to help you use, it’s ready to go to help anyone with any skill level.
Microsoft Power Automate is a great tool made to streamline processes and increase productivity all with low code automated workflows between services and apps. This solution can easily collect data, schedule notifications and synchronize files so that you don’t have to.
Power Automate works by creating automated workflows, or simply “flows”, that begin with a ‘trigger’ that is a pre-defined event to get a desired response. These are easy enough to set up but TechQuarters, a trusted IT support company, find that users don’t even know where to start or what tasks can be automated. We’ve compiled a list of a few examples that can improve work-life within any business.
Email attachments
For starters, users can use Power Automate to automatically save emailed attachments to a relevant folder in SharePoint. If you’re working on big projects with specific clients then you can now find all needed files in the correct document library without having to store it yourself. This can also be used for auto-archiving items so that content types are matched and stored.
Planner tasks
With flows, project managers and teams can easily keep up with tasks and progress reports. Users can trigger an automatic notification whenever a Planner task has been completed.
Holiday requests and approvals
This way managers can more easily manage employee holidays and effectively manage time off throughout the year. When an automated request is sent to the manager by an employee and then a notification of their response can be added.
Power BI alerts
For support teams, it can be beneficial to receive data-driven alerts via email in regards to Power BI. Users can receive emails if incident volumes are too high, when certain leads haven’t been updated in a certain amount of time, if targets haven’t been hit on time, or if a deadline is soon approaching.
Adaptive cards
One of the more popular Power Automate flows according to Microsoft 365 Consulting providers is the ability to create adaptive cards for Microsoft Teams. Adaptive cards can share data blocks without needing customizations with HTML or CSS. They can create helpful virtual experiences to collect data, generate leads or boost engagement with things like polls, forms and snippets.
Approvals for documents
If you need to generate, approve and send various documents when working on a project in a team it can be very time-consuming. You can now create flows to notify when documents are uploaded to a SharePoint file. Team members no longer need to manually send requests for each document upload.
Managers will be automatically notified and once approval is given then the uploader will receive a notification in response.
Power Automate has the ability to make significant differences in everyday work life with small actions. All the tedious tasks that are important to complete but boring to do so can now be completed without you. The fact that Power Automate can help users of any skill level create these workflows quickly just by dragging and dropping makes the software more accessible than ever. There’s no reason to not give it a try.
