RPA in a Day

Editor's Notes

• #5: (shared tenant/environment, desktop-based execution of labs 1-9 OR current format) Rem Day labs 2 4.5 6. Day 3 rest ind them that they can do the labs in their own pace, but we’ll be online every day for 3 days.
• #12: The Microsoft Power Platform is composed of 4 products: Power BI, which is a self service Analytics tools, Power Apps to build Applications and Portals, Power Automate to automate tasks and processes using APIs (DPA), Robotic Process Automation (RPA) and Business Process Management (BPM) and finally Power Virtual Agents which provides conversational bots to your employees or your clients. While each of these solutions are best of breed on their own, when combined together with over 350 connectors to data sources and webservices, Embedded Artificial Intelligence and scalable data storage, possibilities are limitless! These tools are built with Citizen Developers in mind so anyone in the organization can get started with little to no-code. But, it can also be extended with Pro Developers when needed.
• #13: Businesses face pressure from every angle to become more productive and efficient. But resources are finite. The hours in a day are finite. There is simply only so much a person can do. Power Automate enables all parts of the organization to contribute.
• #15: What is the promise of doing more and working less for all? It means automation at scale. From small to large organizations. And it means putting the power to automate in the hands of those who do the work, not just those with PhDs in engineering. It means seamless, secure integration that gives you the confidence to empower users with more control, freeing up IT resources for more complex work. It means accelerated productivity—minimizing repetitive manual tasks in favor of more strategic work. Scale automation efficiently with automated workflows, across favorite apps and services. Integrate with Azure M365 and D365. Access and integrate data across on-premise software and cloud services. Integrate automation securely with an environment founded on security and compliance, while applying enterprise-grade governance and data loss prevention policies. Accelerate productivity by reducing manual, repetitive and time-consuming tasks, enabling your team to focus on more strategic work. Empower IT to solve complex business challenges while reducing the backlog of service requests. Reduce costly errors due to manual entry.
• #16: Microsoft Power Automate offers connectors to 470+ of the most widely used 1st and 3rd party applications, providing seamless connectivity and integration with the services which enhance your organization’s productivity. With the growing pace of business, Power Automate serves as the fabric which helps ensure your business stays ahead of the competitive landscape. connect to more than 470 services, and can manage data either in the cloud or in on-premises sources like SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server. The list of applications you can use with Microsoft Flow grows constantly. Power Automate is also designed for a hybrid ecosystem enabling connections to on-prem systems via the Data Gateway which we’ll learn more about later today. Also, Power Automate supports Custom Connectors to integrate with existing LOB systems. We’ll discuss this in greater detail later today. Let’s now show you some of the powerful integration Power Automate offers to help make your organization more productive. File providers Databases Web APIs Productivity apps, etc. Pluggable extensibility via Custom Connectors to integrate existing LOB systems into Power Automate
• #24: Workflow designer and orchestrator: Core engine that connects the actions together, passes data between actions and executes them + interface for kicking off bots and monitoring their execution. OCR engine: Parses data from sources like documents, images (such as an invoice) API connectivity: Interacts with systems that expose an API endpoint, such as modern cloud services GUI screen scraping and actions: Records an action and replicate it in the future (eg, business process analytics to track overall usage of processes in organizations and make recommendations)
• #25: To be updated with UI flows content Today, we’re excited to announce UI flows, the new Power Automate feature to automate legacy software Robotic Process Automation (RPA) automates applications via record and playback user actions on software UX. It mimics user interactions faster and more reliably than humans. AI Builder benefits from all the Azure AI and Machine learning technologies and investments It is available starting today in Public Preview for our customers in the US and in Europe.
• #26: While most organizations are experiencing some form of digital transformation, every organization has their own pace and strategy. And in some cases, you may want to keep some of your older system. Digital transformation ultimately is about allowing your organization to be nimble and efficient. Sometimes that means keeping your older systems and figuring out how to integrate them with your more modern systems. With this critical need in mind, we’re very excited to begin the public preview of Power Automate’s new Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capability. With the new RPA capability, Power Automate further empowers non-technical users by offering automation for your older applications which don’t have APIs. With RPA, you can now apply the efficiencies of automation to your older systems. The need for Robotic Process Automation Break down the barriers to automating legacy software with RPA Robotic process automation (RPA) enables us to automate mundane, rules-based tasks. With RPA you can automate legacy software without APIs. It opens the world of automation to include software that’s old or new, on-premises or in the cloud.
• #30: Power Automate for desktop has recently been introduced as a way to design and run UI Automations. The previous offering of Desktop flows continues to be in the product, however Power Automate for desktop is the best way forward. So if we take a look at the overall process on the right, you start by designing the flows, and when you design these flows, you're actually starting from the web portal, or Power Automate for desktop, but we leverage these components running locally on users' machines to be able to record the steps that they want to execute. Once the user has recorded what they want, all of that information is persisted in Microsoft Dataverse. When they want to go and execute their process, they do that through the Power Automate service, which calls down to the user's machine via the machine registration functionality. The machine registration talks to the UI flow service that’s always running on the machine. And this service can be used to bootstrap logging the user on and creating sessions. This is particularly important for unattended scenarios where no user is going to be on the machine. Finally, when the flow runs, it will either use the WinAppDriver or Power Automate for desktop to execute that windows application or the web application. One other important thing to note, is that you can have many different machines with registered under the same group. And the service will automatically distribute load across all of those different machines through technology that we call Clustering. This allows you to scale out the unattended processes that you have.
• #31: For the final section, I would like to talk about Environments, because environments are how users can manage the lifecycle of their scripts in their applications in a way to ensure that everything is always working as best as it can. Environments provide a logical container that you can have different points on your lifecycle. For example, you can have a Development environment, where you can start building your solutions and that may be connected to development data, and when you're ready to have that solution be in Production, you can move that to your production environment, connected to real live production data. CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #33: Note: CDS has been renamed to Microsoft Dataverse
• #35: The keyway that this works, is by leveraging another concept called Solutions. You can have several Solutions inside of an environment. The solution represents the package, for all the different components that a business problem needs to be solved with. We leverage Azure DevOps, so that way, customers can automate the deployment of the Solutions, and most importantly, there’s rich analytics and monitoring so, that way, the health of the Solutions can be well understood. So, if something does go wrong in a production environment, say, a UI flow is running on a legacy application, but something changes in that legacy application, you can actually detect it very quickly with our analytics and monitoring. You can then develop a fix in your development envelopment environment, validate that against the latest version of the application, and then automatically push that to your production environment. So, this full lifecycle really makes it possible for organizations to ensure that they have the most reliable Solution possible, running no matter what. With that, I would like to close, and thank you for learning about Power Automate’s architecture. CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #36: Can we have a virtual machine copy that people can install on their laptop?
• #41: Automation opportunities exists through-out the enterprise. The problem is that it is difficult to extract these opportunities from employees who are comfortable with the status quo. In addition, there may be processes that are not consistently being executed. Whether that be by a person or a team. It is difficult to capture these processes through traditional means like whiteboarding sessions and stakeholder interviews. There is a more ‘intelligent and productive’ approach to accomplishing this. The answer is Process advisor Process advisor allows you to record the actions that users perform as part of a business process. Process advisor using the recorder found in Power Automate for desktop which provides a familiar experience for those who are building RPA processes. Once a process has been recorded, it can be analyzed and analytics can be published for review. Business process owners can identify where the bottlenecks are in their business process and also identify where people may be deviating from the business process. The more examples, the more value that can be extracted from the process. As a result, we can invite colleagues to record on their machine and then contribute their recording to the over all process collection so that it can also be included in the insights derived from the analysis.
• #42: There are 5 steps to get started: Within Power Automate, a maker can create a new Process where all our recordings will belong to. With a Process defined, we can now invite other colleagues to participate in our Process using familiar Power Automate gestures – much like sharing a Cloud flow. Makers can now create their recordings and have them saved in our Process, up in the cloud. There is no need to send around files. After a recording has been completed, the transcript can be modified to allow for grouping and any sensitive data can be removed Analysis is as simple as clicking a button where after a few minutes we will have insights automatically generated for us.
• #43: Here is the experience of creating a new Process. Since this can be found in the Power Automate maker portal, the UX gestures are consistent and easy to learn for existing Power Automate makers.
• #44: Here is the sharing experience, which is similar to other Power Platform experiences. There are two roles that are available: Contributor – where participants with this role can add their own recording to their process (task) Co-Owner – where participants can edit recordings(transcriptions), publish tasks and invite people to record and their recordings
• #47: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Create a new Desktop flow Record actions performed in the desktop-based Contoso Invoicing application Perform a test run of the new Desktop flow.
• #50: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Create a new Desktop-based Desktop flow Record actions performed in the desktop-based Contoso Invoicing application Perform a test run of the new Desktop flow.
• #52: The user can edit the recorded actions to ensure accurate automation of the task.
• #53: Some of them are not applicable to this lab #2. maybe confusing
• #59: The user can edit the recorded actions to ensure accurate automation of the task.
• #60: The user can edit the recorded actions to ensure accurate automation of the task.
• #62: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Create a new Windows-based Desktop flow with predefined inputs Record actions performed in the desktop-based Contoso Invoicing application using these inputs, and capturing application data for output Perform a test run of the new Desktop flow with a new set of inputs
• #64: 1’ [INTRO]
• #66: A typical flow consists of a few building blocks. Flows consist of a trigger, an action, and typically a conditional logic step. Let’s look at each a bit closer.
• #67: Flows are designed with three type of trigger options. A manual action trigger is one where a manual action from a user is required to begin the flow. For example: From dedicated Power Automate button From other apps – PowerApps, SharePoint… A scheduled trigger is one which begins at a pre-defined day and time and if it is a recurrence, with a specified cadence. For example: Every Saturday at 3pm The third type of trigger occurs when an event occurs on another service that a flow is connected to. For example: Someone tweets a keyword or about your product and you receive an email alert
• #68: Actions can: Connect to any cloud service or via the on-prem data gateway Connect to any HTTP endpoints if there’s no out-of-box connector Also, some actions may not even use connections – they may just manipulate data locally.
• #69: Flows also offer conditional logic steps which execute decisions based on the scenario. For example, if you receive and email with an “!” in the subject line, you will get a notification on your mobile device. If the email subject does not contain a “!” then you will not receive the mobile alert.
• #70: Here is the basic Power Automate UI where you can see a trigger, an action, and the conditional logic. In this case, the trigger occurs when a new email arrives. When an email arrives an automated action is taken which in this case is the creation of a file. The conditional logic is a IF THEN function which offers a yes or no option for the flow process to execute depending on the criteria.
• #71: The new RPA feature is made available with the introduction of the new UI Power Automate connector.
• #75: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Create a Cloud flow Install and configure the on-premises data gateway to enable the Cloud flow to execute the Windows based Desktop flow on your device  Add the “Enter invoice with input” Windows-based Desktop flow to this new Cloud flow Perform a test run of the new Cloud flow
• #78: Move to lab #9: When creating gateway cluster connection, you will only see the primary machine in the cluster in the drop down
• #81: Microsoft Power Automate offers connectors to 470+ of the most widely used 1st and 3rd party applications, providing seamless connectivity and integration with the services which enhance your organization’s productivity. With the growing pace of business, Power Automate serves as the fabric which helps ensure your business stays ahead of the competitive landscape. Power Automate is also designed for a hybrid ecosystem enabling connections to on-prem systems via the Data Gateway which we’ll learn more about later today. Also, Power Automate supports Custom Connectors to integrate with existing LOB systems. We’ll discuss this in greater detail later today. Let’s now show you some of the powerful integration Power Automate offers to help make your organization more productive.
• #82: With Power Automate, you can begin automating directly from your OneDrive, as you are using Teams, or as you create an excel worksheet. No other automation service can be accesses and initiated so rapidly and efficiently.
• #83: Power Automate also natively integrates with Dynamics 365 to help automate your CRM and ERP core processes. Power Automate is also integrated with Salesforce and will soon have connectors for SAP. With just the integrations with Office 365 and Dynamics, Salesforce, and SAP, Power Automate helps automate the productivity and core operational processes in your organization. These are just some of the integrations available with Power Automate. We’ll cover many more during our discussion.
• #84: connect to more than 300+ services, and can manage data either in the cloud or in on-premises sources like SharePoint and Microsoft SQL Server. The list of applications you can use with Microsoft Flow grows constantly.
• #85: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Create a new Solution to package the end-to-end invoice processing solution Create a new Cloud flow that initiates the invoicing process via receipt of an email Integrate the Windows-based Desktop flow from Lab 3 into the Cloud flow Perform a test run of the new Cloud flow
• #88: Microsoft first to achieve human parity in Vision, Speech, and Language
• #91: Power Automate also unlocks the power of AI by integrating with AI Builder which: Is the no-code AI capability in the Power Platform. It enables business users to tailor AI to your specific needs. You don’t need data scientists or pro devs to make your apps and processes more intelligent. Because it’s customizable, AI Builder can help a broad range of industries such as retail, manufacturing, banking and more. AI Builder benefits from all the Azure AI and Machine learning technologies and investments Easily create AI models and follow step by step instructions on how to create custom models to address your specific use case.
• #92: Several built-in AI models come with AI builder which can be embedded to your Power Automates. Models include: Form Processing ​Read, extract, and process data from scans, emails, PDFs, and images.​ Object Detection Quickly build an AI model that recognizes and counts visual objects.​ ​​Text Classification ​ Build an AI application that reviews, tags, and classifies large volumes of text to track sentiment, improve customer experiences, and mine valuable insights.​​Business Card Reader​Pull contact information from business cards, store this information in your database, and import it into your CRM system.​
• #95: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Build a new AI model for Form Processing Train the new AI model to process Contoso Invoice forms Integrate the new AI model into the Cloud flow from Lab 5 Perform a test run of the updated Cloud flow and associated AI Builder-based predictions
• #98: Now your contoso store is up and running, and you want to the VA for your business to do more. E.g. do this xxx scenario for you, how can you do that? (biz pain points) In previous session, you learn how to implement dialogs for the VA. In the session, I will show you how to leverage flow to extend the VA capability.
• #99: While most organizations are experiencing some form of digital transformation, every organization has their own pace and strategy. And in some cases, you may want to keep some of your older system. Digital transformation ultimately is about allowing your organization to be nimble and efficient. Sometimes that means keeping your older systems and figuring out how to integrate them with your more modern systems. With this critical need in mind, we’re very excited to begin the public preview of Power Automate’s new Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capability. With the new RPA capability, Power Automate further empowers non-technical users by offering automation for your older applications which don’t have APIs. With RPA, you can now apply the efficiencies of automation to your older systems. The need for Robotic Process Automation Break down the barriers to automating legacy software with RPA Robotic process automation (RPA) enables us to automate mundane, rules-based tasks. With RPA you can automate legacy software without APIs. It opens the world of automation to include software that’s old or new, on-premises or in the cloud.
• #100: Approvals are time consuming tasks which are essential for business operations, but are not high value tasks. Yet everyday, employees in organizations around the world, manually handle approvals processes, which are inefficient. Power Automate enables easy automation of many types of approvals scenarios and common scenarios are pre-built as templates. Simply select the right scenario to match your needs, customize on top of one of the existing templates, or build your own approval Power Automate from scratch. By automating approvals processes, save your organization time and improve you employees’ efficiency and capacity.
• #101: You will complete the following tasks in this lab, which will complete the end-to-end invoice processing solution: Integrate a Teams-based approval model and the associated conditional logic into the invoice processing Cloud flow Integrate the Windows-based Desktop flow for entering the invoice information into the approval process Integrate Outlook-based approval/rejection notifications into the invoice process Perform a test of the end-to-end invoice processing Cloud flow
• #109: This lab has some requirements on unattended licensing. There is currently no trial licenses available so best to just walk students through this unless they want to acquire licenses.
• #114: You will complete the following tasks in this lab: Exercise 1 – Basic Desktop flow in Unattended mode Register new virtual machine Create new group and add machine to it Create a new API Flow that calls an existing Windows-based Desktop flow from Lab 3 in unattended mode Perform a test run of this simple unattended Desktop flow scenario Exercise 2 – Desktop flow + API Flow scenario in Unattended mode Streamline the invoice processing solution to simplify the test scenario Perform a test run of the updated invoice processing solution in unattended mode Exercise 3 – Unattended gateway cluster scenario Register a second virtual machine Add the second VM’s to the group with the first VM’s Perform multiple test runs of the updated invoice processing solution in unattended mode, distributing the test runs across the group
• #134: Workflow designer and orchestrator: Core engine that connects the actions together, passes data between actions and executes them + interface for kicking off bots and monitoring their execution. OCR engine: Parses data from sources like documents, images (such as an invoice) API connectivity: Interacts with systems that expose an API endpoint, such as modern cloud services GUI screen scraping and actions: Records an action and replicate it in the future (eg, business process analytics to track overall usage of processes in organizations and make recommendations)
• #152: Move to lab #9: When creating gateway cluster connection, you will only see the primary machine in the cluster in the drop down
• #160: CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #161: The Power Automate service starts from the web. We have a web portal, where any user can get started and author the processes that they want. This is based on Azure Cloud Services. We also have an iOS Android mobile application that can be used for basic monitoring and management as well. The web portal and mobile application connect to our management APIs, which are also hosted on Azure Cloud Services. Much of the data in the service is stored in Microsoft Dataverse. The Microsoft Dataverse is the canonical business store for everything inside of the Power Platform. This includes things like the definitions of the processes that you build, as well as the status of all the UI flows that have run and what exactly has happened in those UI flows. But the heart of the execution of the service is Azure Logic Apps. That’s the service that actually does the orchestration across the hundreds of different of APIs that you can connect to, as well as, allows you to bring in AI Builder and UI flows as a part of your process. All this works through our Data connectors. Data connectors can connect to third party services, as well as built in services that we have. In order to get UI flows to work in particular though, we also need something called the On-premises Data Gateway. The On-premises Data Gateway acts as a bridge between the data connectors, which run in the cloud in our multi-tenant service, and the user’s machine. So, let’s look at UI flows specifically. CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #162: Now, when we think about the scalability of the service end to end, it’s important to note that the vast majority of components are actually a fully Multi-tenant software as a service. That means, that we automatically scale up and down the service in response to customer demand, and customers never have to worry about whether or not we can handle the load that they’re providing. And that’s true for all of these components -the Web experiences logic apps actually executing the flows, the connectors and the Microsoft Dataverse. Multi tenancy is implemented in a way where the customer’s data is always safely sharded in their own section of the service, such that there is no possibility of cross contamination or even one user impacting the performance of the experience of another user. Because it is built on Azure at global scale, that means that we can handle billions of actions every single month. Or, if a customer just has a small number of actions, that runs just as quickly. The only component that isn’t multi-tenant is the On-premises Data Gateway itself, because it has to run on the machines at the IT admins or that the user's provision in their own infrastructure. So, that’s why we have clustering built specifically to allow you to have a highly scalable service running in the cloud, and to have multiple copies of that On-premises Data Gateway when you need it. CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #163: Go over each of these components in later slides Similar deployments with differing # of instances for the backend services (US and Europe have a lot more roles) CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #164: https://flow-apim-msmanaged-na-eastus2-01.azure-apim.net/apim/visualstudioteamservices/shared-visualstudiot-3327595b-b71c-4fbb-a41f-ef2487653e1c/.... CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #165: Go over each of these components in later slides Similar deployments with differing # of instances for the backend services (US and Europe have a lot more roles) CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.
• #166: https://flow-apim-msmanaged-na-eastus2-01.azure-apim.net/apim/visualstudioteamservices/shared-visualstudiot-3327595b-b71c-4fbb-a41f-ef2487653e1c/.... CLICK STEP Click the screen to advance the slide.