Item: Microsoft Power Automate
Rating: 7
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flow)

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

MS Power Automate is a part of the overall o365 suite and is directly available for any of our staff who wishes to use it. It helps us to automate all those repetitive functions over desktop and SharePoint with ease. Best part is it is very easy to take up and learn and not requires the user to get too technical unnecessarily.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Repetitive task can be automated
Filling up forms and managing plans and data flow/ approval processes
Integrates well with other commonly used products in office suite
For 3rd party products, it can be used by means of mouse movements and keyboard click recording

Cons

integrations to PowerPoint not as strong as one might see or expect.
similarly, integrations to Outlook could also be enhanced.
sometimes the "flow developer IDE" is a bit slow and laggy that lowers user experience

Most Important Features

automation abilities
tight integration to common Office products
ease of availability to all staff
ease of use

Return on Investment

we have seen improvement in productivity due to increased automation
where additional headcounts were required in the past, we are now able to manage with the current team as-is.
critical reports are generated with minimal effort and without concerns of human error in the data.

Alternatives Considered

i have used open source products like sikuli and other direct programming in vba, perl/python/shell/batch, C & Java

Key Insights

Do you think Microsoft Power Automate delivers good value for the price?

Yes

Are you happy with Microsoft Power Automate's feature set?

Yes

Did Microsoft Power Automate live up to sales and marketing promises?

I wasn't involved with the selection/purchase process

Did implementation of Microsoft Power Automate go as expected?

Yes

Would you buy Microsoft Power Automate again?

Yes

Other Software Used

QlikView, Splunk Enterprise, Fortinet FortiGate

Likelihood to Recommend

Unlike all other automation tool, this is from Microsoft and hence has a good patch/support mechanism by default and is readily available to all the o365 users as a part of the subscription making it one of the most easily accessible tools across all levels of staff. This has helped in places where we need to do mundane and repetitive tasks by enabling automation - one such scenario is creating reports from excel data on a weekly basis. The data is always of the same format and so is the final report. Once the flow is setup, the weekly reports are automatically generated and sent to end users via the outlook integrations thereby saving a good deal of manual labour.

Comments

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MS Power Automate - Usage & Benefits