In this webinar, we explain how you can leverage Power Automate, a process automation application within Office 365 to automate mundane and repetitive processes.

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Morning and welcome everybody to our free process automation with Office 365 web and R. Today’s session is going to be around how we can automate processes using the tools that exist within Office 365. Specifically, an application as part of that stack called power automate, so power automates. Included with any license of Office 365 that includes the downloadable, so the downloadable version of Office. You can buy it as a stand alone application as well. So if you are just using a business basic license for example, you can actually buy. Power automate as a tool on its own. So what is process automation? It is, but it it it says that it is so process automation is our ability to automate, not necessarily the entire process, but steps in a process. That or a business process that we complete. So some examples of something that might require some process automation and might be a new inquiry. So we might get a new inquiry from a new business prospects and what we need to do is we need to collect that information we need to send that off to. By coming via reception, we might need to send that off to the sales team so that they can follow it up, but there needs to be a register of that. And in terms of the process automation, how could we do that? You might get them to fill in an inquiry form that might collect their information automatically put in the CRM and create an activity for a salesperson to follow them up so the system will automate those steps instead of someone having to sit there and go OK. Yes, I’ll take the information down. I’ll register them as a new lead and system. I will request someone. I will request someone follow the map. I’m just admitting some more people in. Request that somebody follow them up. The system will automate that process, so that’s what we’re referring to when we’re talking about process automation. Why you should use it. I use it because I’m lazy, so if you want somebody to automate processes for you, find a lazy person. I’ve been brought up with technology, so I expect that technology is going to do things for me. Not that I have to use the technology or manually do things all the time to get a process completed. I know the technology couldn’t do it so. That’s why you should use it if you want to automate processes so you don’t have to touch it. You don’t have to worry about it. Things are just going to work for you in the background to complete your business processes that is scalable and is available 24/7. There are heaps of advantages to having processes automated using digital technologies. Will also run through an intro to power automate so how to get into it where you can find things what you can do with it will also do some examples and there’s going to be all we’re doing for number 4 twice so I didn’t pick up on that when I created the presentation, but we have a special offer for attendees at the end, so the special offer is going to be basically a free consultation with either myself or someone in our technical team who specializes in power automate so you can ask any questions you’d like. You could even use that consultation. To get us to help you, you build out just a basic process so that you have a better understanding of how that system works in your environment so that you’ll be able to continue to use that forever. We go back in process automation evaluating mundane and repetitive tasks. So in your in your business process is one of the best ones. That inquiry coming in there is a process that we need to go through. We need to track that we need to record that we need to notify somebody. We need to make sure that it’s followed up. We need to create an activity for them to do something. There’s so many steps and we do that all the time, right? If you are as fortunate as we are, you getting new inquiry every day. What am I going to do with that information? And what is the next step in that process to make sure that that gets completed there? The things that we want to automate if you have to manually do something or manually check something there right for process automation, and that’s the stuff that we will be looking for. The processes will be looking for so that we can automate those with the technology. Why should you do it? So this is one of our existing customers that we’ve done a reasonable amount of process automation with, so this is Malcolm from Dundas lawyers or a customer of ours in Brisbane and basically he says the tasks that used to take 15 minutes and emails back and forth. And this is the other big thing you know the process automation helps with those emails that go back and forward all the time can be completed in just five minutes now so. Difference that that makes you know you go OK? Well that’s only saving 10 minutes, but it’s 10 minutes for each transaction that they do. Now you can see that Malcolm is a principle that Domino’s lawyers, so he is a practitioner. He’s a lawyer, still does legal work, and what that means for him is that instead of spending those extra 10 minutes chasing something up that he can’t build to a client, he can actually just keep focused on doing client work. So that’s better client outcomes through less billing through faster delivery of service. Lots of other things, and all of that information is really accessible now as well so he can see where things are up to at any point in time. Super super powerful stuff. So that’s the reason why you should do it. Alright power automate. What is this? So what I’m going to do? I think instead of having a look via this screenshot. So this is just a screenshot of our environment. This is what the interface looks like. I’m going to jump across 2. Add demo office environment. So at the moment all I’ve done is I’ve gone to a web browser and I’ve just gone to. You can see at the top here. Office.com. I’ve logged in, so instead of walking you through that process, I’m sure you know how to log in. We can see over on the left hand side we have our tabs. We can see one there called power automate, but I find the easiest way if you don’t actually have it in your tabs on the side is down the bottom. Here we can see all apps, So what we want to do is select. All apps and we can say that there’s a list of apps there. If you didn’t catch our last web and R on the apps that we like most in Office 365 that we think you should use, you should go and check that out. It’s actually really good and it ties into power automate really well too, so we can see there that there is the button for power automate. So I’m going to click that and open it and I would assume that for most people here you will already have an office license that will enable you to access it. Just jump into office.com, go to all apps, will see power, automate there. You are welcome to open it up on your screen and follow along. Might be a nice thing to do as well, so now we’re in the power automate application. This is what we can see when we go to the home screen, so there’s a couple of things that we can see in here. Will start by running down the navigation menu on the left hand side so the first thing that we can see is action items so approvals and business process flows. One of the things that you can do with power automate is you can send things off for approval so you can. Assign a task or an approval task to somebody and they will come up in their approvals list. Under action items you can see here that I don’t have any at the moment, but if I jump in and have a look at my history you can see some of the things that I have approved here historically, so nothing sent and received, which means there’s no approvals waiting on me or there’s nothing open at the moment that I am waiting on the next thing in that menu is my flow, so things that I have already created we can see here that there is a couple that are already created. Yeah, so we have our cloud flows so these are the ones that today that we’re going to run through. We also have desktop flows, business process flows and things that are shared with me as well. So you can actually if you create one you can share it with somebody else and they will be able to bring it into their environment. Now to provide some context here, everything that we are going to do today is in context of the user. Now, the reason that that’s important to note is because if you create something here, it’s not going to apply to. Everybody else in your in your 365 environment. It’s just going to be something that applies to you so it will use your user account. It can only access things who have access to and every transaction that gets done will have your name on it. So if you share that with somebody else, they can bring it into their personal cloud flows and it will then ask them to use their authentication so that they can do the same thing so we can see that we have some flows there configured at the moment we will come back to those so that we can have a bit more of a look. The next one on the left hand side in the menu is create. Now you can see there’s a couple of different ways that we can create flows in here so we can have an automated cloud flow instant cloud flow so you can trigger them on demand. We can schedule them, we can have desktop flowing through desktop flows today, but you can actually integrate power automate onto your desktop computer to have things happen on there as well and bring it back up into Office 365, which is pretty cool and business process flows which is across the entire T of the business of entity level. We’re going to go through that today either, but we can come back and have a look at those if that’s something that you might need. So one of the things that I really love about power automate is that power automate has a bit of a community so we can see here that we actually have a whole bunch of templates now. These templates are really, really powerful because for two reasons it simplifies your ability to actually implement some flows so that you can automate some processes. The other thing I love is that it gives you ideas. So when you think of ideas, what might I actually want to automate, though I’m not really sure that all seems good and well in theory, but what should I do so you can come down? And these are the topics so you can see the amount of people or the amount of. Businesses on tenants that actually use it. So this one for example has 32,000 people using it from the template, so that’s how many people have injected that template into their environment, and it’s really simple. Notify a team when it forms responses submitted, so something that seems relatively basic, but when we’re talking about OK, well we got a new business inquiry. Let’s get them to fill in a form and send that off to somebody. You might use this flow and go OK. Well, attach that to my form that I’ve created. Get them to fill that in, and then notify the team when an inquiry comes in so someone can follow it up. As we go down, you can see that they start to get a little more complicated. So if we come down to the bottom here, analyze emails sentiment with AI builder and send results to teams, so that’s identifying the tone of an email, and if it’s somebody’s upset, for example, send that off to a team so that they can action. That may be not going to be applicable for everyone that’s here today, but pretty cool nonetheless. We can start an approval process and teams order forms responses submitted. All sorts of stuff. There’s ones on notifications, so when we talk about power automate the easiest place to start is just by sending a notification when something happens so. When files get uploaded to OneDrive, for example, I don’t mind this one. When someone uploads a file to OneDrive to send a notification, hey, someone’s uploaded something into one drive. This is really good if you share a folder with somebody externally from your OneDrive, and you say hey, can you put these these files in there? You might want to get an email notification when they put those files in there, so that’s the type of basic stuff that you can do with power automate and I would recommend that everybody here in session today after we finished our session, going to power, automate going, pick a template and. Create something and test it out. Super good fun and it will give you some idea of how it works and how you can use it. And as you go through those, you can actually search through the templates as well. So if there’s something very, very particular that you wanted, you would be able to search through here and there might be a template for it. There’s also the templates tab as well, so this is more comprehensive way you can have a look at it, but for example saveoutlook.com email attachments to OneDrive so automatically saving attachments to your OneDrive is potentially good because save it into a shared folder so that other people can access it. It might go into your backup cycle, so if you’re running a 365 backup, which you all should be, it will put it there going to your backup cycle and then it will be restorable. From that location as well. Saves trawling through emails. The next thing is connected, so we probably won’t delve too much into connectors today, but basically there’s a whole bunch of connectors to third party applications. Now this is really powerful because you may want one of those third party applications to contribute to your business process, so you might say, OK well. When I receive an email from somebody, what I want to do is add that person to my mailing list in MailChimp. So if I have a look in the connectors here then we can do a search. We can say that mailchimp’s available there, so we might create a float says Yep. If we receive an email on inquiries Adam to our MailChimp list in MailChimp, you would have a consent email, come through them and says hey would like to add you to our mailing list to accept. Please reply to this email so those are some of the things that you can do there so deserve to convenient, particularly if you’re lazy like me. The next thing that we have, we have our data, so tables and connections. That’s probably getting a little bit beyond where we want to be today, but basically what that saying is Microsoft have termed now all of the data they’ve turned at the data verse. That is embarrassingly nerdy, but it is really, really good. So any row that exists, so any transaction or any bit of data that exists in your Microsoft 365 tenant is available in the Microsoft data verse. And you could use that data verse access. To find different bits and pieces of information through Office 365 and then either trigger an an action or trigger a process and trigger an action. So you might want to update that data or change that data or send it to somebody else. So basically you can use it. We also have our monitor so you can jump in there and see how many flows you’re running, what’s going on. Want minimize a couple of these? We have our AI builder which is pretty cool but a little bit complicated. We also have our process advisor will do a webinar on this, but process advisor is good. You can run process advisor for those of us who have done macros before. You might remember the macro recorder that happened in the likes of Word and Excel, so if you wanted to record a macro you turn on the macro recorder. You do what you needed to do and it would create that macro process. Advisor is very similar, it just records what you do and then gives you ideas for what processes you might want to automate. So that’s basically a quick overview of power automate and what it is. I’m going to jump back to my presentation, so how can we use it? How do we use power automate? We jump back to. Our other window. So how do we use it? We create flows. So very, very simple. I might do is notify a team when new forms responses submitted. So I’m just going to select that you can see that this flow will connect with. My credentials here. I’m going to hit continue. OK, so we can select the ID of the form that we want to monitor so we have a couple of forms there. I’m just going to do this as an example. Select the team to notify. Of course I don’t have any teams in my demo tenant. And then select a teams channel and you create that and that’s done. That’s it. So when you go to that form and you fill it in and you hit submit, that will send that through obviously to the team that you select in Microsoft Teams. So that’s how we use it. Relatively simple, and that one is reasonably touchless. So if we have a look here, we might actually edit one of these, so this is forms processing to email and SharePoint. So basically what we’re saying here is wedding. You form responses submitted from new client onboarding. What we want to do is get the list of responses and with those response details I want to send an email and create an item in SharePoint. I want to create a task for somebody to follow something up and send an email notification back to the person who inquired in the 1st place and say. Hi, Yep, we’ve received your email. It’s now gone through to these places as part of the onboarding procedure and they’ll get in touch once that’s done. So something that I know it looks complicated with all these little steps and flows here, but it’s relatively simple once you start playing around with it. Relatively simple to do. So some of the other things that we can do here. We can add in new steps so we can add steps between steps that are already existing here. So if you selected something from a template. And I. Let’s find something here that’s going to be valuable to us. Not a fan email? When something is uploaded to OneDrive. ‘cause I’m not connected to my one drive but just need to sign in here so when I was talking about user authentication it’s going to use my authentication to do this. Basically we would sign in there. And would save that and every time something got uploaded to OneDrive, it would just send an email notification. So something simple that you can start with and and configuring your environment. So let’s build something. So this is the the fun part is actually getting in and building something. Now we’re going to do this. Two different ways, just very quick examples of building something. The first one I’m going to do, I’m going to start from a template I actually like to use them from here, because these are the topics and I do like the topics that come through here. So let’s find something here. When the status of a task in planner changes. So if you’re not using planet yet, you should be plan is really good. It’s just you know to set out your plans for things that you might want to do projects and bits and pieces, and basically when a status of something changes, just notify a team. So as an example of how you might use that, you might get someone to write a blog article, assign that to them in planner, and when that planner status gets set to completed, it will send a notification off to the marketing team or the Web developer. Hey, can you upload this to the website? Or to wherever it needs to go. So I can select a team I’m just going to use our demo team. Select a plan to monitor. We can just monitor out our test plan. So that’s from our test site. So what we can see in here is we can see the the teams so fine. She. Select a custom team. Now it’s not gonna find it. Well edited and advanced mode. So what would happen when you say that it would come through to this interface? So we can see here when the task is completed. And then we’re going to post that through into a team. Now, I didn’t realize that we don’t have any team, so we might do is pick. Something else will ignore that one. Uhm? Let’s do something simple. So when there’s a calendar, so this one is another good one. When a calendar event is created, create something in planner. So I will select the calendar just being my calendar. And will select a plan. Can be our test plan. And what we can say here will save this. And we can use these things up here so we have our flow checker to make sure that there’s no errors and we can also run a test. So we can trigger with an item that we’ve recently created, or we can do it manually, which means we’re creating new one. And I can test out that flow. So basically that’s how we create one. So I’m going to say that. And what I might do is. Write something in the calendar. Will create something for today. This is a great chance to just test to make sure that this works. We can save that in there. So we can say create a task in planner. And now that that’s in there and saved, we can do a. Test on that. Open allowing me to create the task. And that’s because I don’t have permission to do it, so that’s why we do the tests and we test things out. My apologies, I’ve got things beeping in the background here. Alright, So what we might do? The next thing is have a look at some things that we’ve already built, so these are actually what we use in our for our demos that we do and the videos that we create. So one of the things that we can see here. We’ve got forms processing to email and SharePoint. We got sent a planner and a sign. We got contract expires. So this is another quite good one. We can have a look at the contract expiry, but seeing as we’re running out of time here we might just quickly look at the forms processing. To SharePoint. So basically we have a form here. New client onboarding and whenever we get a response, what we’re going to do is we’re going to send an email and that one is going to come through to me. We’re going to create an item in SharePoint, so I’m going to call this the customer register and what we can do is all of the form responses were using to fill out fields in the customer register in our SharePoint list. So if we jump back across and have a look at SharePoint. We have our customer Register here and what happens when someone fills in the form is that all of their data comes through to here and it sends those email notifications. So let’s have a look at. That form will fill one in very, very quickly so that we can have a look at a live demo and how that works. So if I go back to here, I’m going to test we’re going to do it manually and this is going to. Give us the ability to actually look at what that flow is doing. Course while people are watching me, I’m definitely going to get this wrong. And make typos so my apologies. The answer officer can be sky. OK, so in the background we can see that we’ve submitted that form in power automate. We can see that it’s running. So the form response was submitted so we can actually see the outputs here and what got put in and we can see that a whole bunch of these tasks actually flowed through. So one of the things that was going to happen was that we were going to be sent an email. So if I jump back to my emails here. We can see that. Hi Rob, thanks for completing your own boarding. This is being moved through at our end, so that’s the one that goes to the client. Someone has completed their onboarding form. Accounts are being notified, so this might go back to the sales team to notify them. And a new task has been created, which is to do the on boarding process. So we’ve actually created a task in our to do lists which we can jump across here and see. But these were the functions that happened automatically and then if we jump into our customer register we will see test, test, sarabian number. So all those details have come through. Now that might be your CRM. You might write that data out to another location, but that’s some of the power of automate is to automate those little processes that historically we would have sent out the form we would have got that information back. It would have entered that information through into our system. We would have. Entered into our account system that all would have been done via email with an attachment that had the data on it. So we’ve interrupted three people and ask the customer to fill something out. It can be automated all in one step using power automate, so that’s the power of using the power automate solution. Alright, uh, special offer. We did mention that earlier that all of today’s live attendees are eligible for a free half hour consult with our team to ask any questions privately. It’s a good opportunity to take us up on that and just ask any questions you have about, particularly capability, so can it do this or can it do that the way the system works is there is a trigger. So what is the trigger? It might be time it might be when we receive something. It might be a change of status. On a field on something that exists in the Microsoft 365 environment and then there was an action, what do we do when that happens? So those are the things that we do with power, automate and happy to answer any questions that anybody might have. Make sure I think Sky is going to send something out so that you can book that in with us. And yeah, hopefully you will take us up on that so we can do a bit of a walkthrough with you. Thank you again for coming along. That brings today’s webinar to a conclusion to get in touch with us. You can either go to merch, check comma you, or service gala.com. There’s obviously our phone number there, or to fix an email through infotech or inquiries Act service gala. If you don’t already, please follow us on our socials. We would really appreciate that LinkedIn, Instagram and Facebook YouTube is where we upload all of these webinars and bits and pieces so there is. A huge amount of content on there if you need to learn anything else about Office 365 or Microsoft 365.