With a Microsoft account, you can use it as a tool for working with local applications, automating them and using the tool’s built-in actions to integrate with common business services and Office applications. You can get a free trial to try out the cloud integrations. To get the most out of Power Automate Desktop, you need a subscription to a premium account, tied to an organization’s Microsoft 365 or Power Apps identity. What you get from Power Automate Desktop depends on the account you sign in with, as the account enables different levels of integration with both the Microsoft Graph and the Dataverse common data model that underlies much of Power Apps. As a result, it’s a tool with two converging personalities: providing a desktop endpoint for cloud-hosted Power Apps as well as an environment for automating your own on-PC operations, bringing the two together. Originally developed by Softomotive, it’s quickly been rebranded and is now part of Microsoft’s business-focused Power Apps platform. You may know Power Automate Desktop by its pre-acquisition name, WinAutomate.
It’s intended to replace Microsoft’s own existing Windows Recorder automation tool or the open source Selenium desktop UI testing tools. Actions that could easily be automated are ignored, as the tools we need to automate them aren’t part of the standard PC operating environment-what Microsoft increasingly calls “inbox applications,” the software installed alongside Windows that we know will be on most PCs.Īt its recent March 2021 Ignite event, Microsoft made an interesting announcement, bringing the worlds of process automation and inbox apps together, by making its Power Automate Desktop tool part of the standard Windows install in future Windows releases (and quickly putting it in its Windows Insider dev channel releases). In many cases, there’s a disconnect between what happens on our desktop or laptop PCs and what happens in servers. But it’s not something we usually do on our personal machines, even when those tasks break our flow and reduce productivity.
These RPA (robotic process automation) tools are increasingly important, building on low- and no-code tools to build event-driven applications that take over and run our workflows. Much of this is the type of thing we might automate if we were passing information between enterprise applications and cloud services, using tools like Azure Logic Apps and Power Automate to manage information flows. It’s often the scaffolding around the work we’re actually doing, making reports and updating colleagues on progress. Events trigger events, on down a predictable chain. We put files in folders, we send form replies to emails, we make commits to git when we save files, we trigger tests when we build an application. A lot of what we do with computers is repetitive.
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