Power Automate

Power Automate is Microsoft's low-code workflow automation tool, part of the Power Platform that ships alongside Microsoft 365. It builds flows: a trigger (an email arriving, a SharePoint list row being added, a button press, a schedule) connected to a series of actions across hundreds of connectors. Flow types include cloud flows that run in Microsoft's cloud, desktop flows for RPA-style UI automation on Windows, and business process flows that guide users through staged processes in model-driven apps. Limited use is included with Microsoft 365; premium connectors and desktop flows require standalone Power Automate licensing.

Worked example

An HR team spends hours each week manually copying new-hire details from a submitted form into three separate systems and sending a welcome email. A cloud flow triggered by a Microsoft Forms submission does all three steps automatically: it writes the new-hire's details to a SharePoint list, creates a task in Planner for IT to provision equipment, and sends a templated welcome email through Outlook — all within seconds of the form being submitted, with zero manual copy-paste and a clear audit trail of every run in the flow's history.

Common pitfalls

Building a flow with no error handling and assuming it will always succeed is a common early mistake — a connector outage, a renamed SharePoint column, or an expired credential can silently break a flow, and without configured failure notifications, nobody finds out until someone asks why the automation stopped happening. Overusing premium connectors in flows intended to run at scale across many users, without checking licensing, is a frequent budget surprise similar to Power Apps — a flow that works fine in testing can become expensive once every user in the organisation is meant to trigger it. And treating a business-critical flow as a personal project owned by whoever happened to build it, rather than something IT tracks and can support, leaves organisations exposed when that person leaves and nobody else understands what the flow does or why it exists.