Great product, just needs to sand off some rough edges
Updated October 10, 2023
Great product, just needs to sand off some rough edges
Score 8 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Software Version
Other
Overall Satisfaction with Microsoft Power Automate
We use Microsoft Power Automate extensively throughout the business. My usage of it is to streamline, schedule, and automate the evaluation, training, and onboarding of qualified individuals who meet the skillset required for the job. It addresses the primary business problem of being able to track/manage thousands of candidates in a way that works for a temp/outsourcing firm. It does everything from staged onboarding to scheduled mailings of bespoke examinations, to preparing emails to our customers for items such as employee terminations. My scope handles over 90,000 unique records.
- "When an item is changed in a SharePoint list, do ____" - very easy to trigger massive flows of data based upon a one-field change on a SharePoint list.
- Being able to manually trigger from a Microsoft PowerApp button press to perform actions.
- Scheduled tasks - once a day, get every record in (LIST) with (Filters) and do (Stuff) to them.
- The Power Automate tool can often take upwards of 10 minutes to start a "When an item is changed" flow, which is very frustrating when the action is time-sensitive.
- The Power Automate builder's search is hot garbage - it only searches the names of the already-fetched Flows. so if you are looking for a flow with the word "Resignation" in it, you have to sit there and click "Load More", and wait ~30 seconds per click for it to fetch more data.
- The documentation is Poor at best, and even the Forums can be rather incorrect.
- SharePoint Integration.
- Dataverse integration.
- PowerApps integration.
- The project I am on would not have proceeded without PowerAutomate or a bespoke software solution.
we have not implemented the conversational AI tools within my scope of work. There are plans to investigate the AI functionality in the future however to move items closer to MS Teams and chat-based processing
within my scope of work here, we did not evaluate competitive software. Primarily we looked at homegrown solutions that were massive shell scripts and nested code blocks... the power automate tool integrates MUCH better with the azure environment,
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
Using Microsoft Power Automate
5000 - every business function has at least one engagement with power automate
50 - our technical, HR, and IT Teams have this skillset.
- automation
- data processing
- bulk notifications
- candidate management
- onboarding
- automating the user onboarding cycle
- outlier detection based on large data models
- further streamlining processes
- replacing low-effort job roles
Evaluating Microsoft Power Automate and Competitors
Not Sure
- Cloud Solutions
- Scalability
- Integration with Other Systems
the ability to integrate it easily within our existing microsoft investment was key in this regard towards selection
I would not, our process worked well.
Microsoft Power Automate Implementation
- Implemented in-house
Change management was a big part of the implementation and was well-handled - our Change Advisory Board is very very strict in their requirements and what hoops we had to jump through
- unexpected authentication issues
- fetching data from sharepoint lists was ungodly complicated
Microsoft Power Automate Support
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Quick Resolution Good followup Knowledgeable team Problems get solved Kept well informed No escalation required Immediate help available Support cares about my success Quick Initial Response | None |
my employer purchased premium support, as that is our SOP for vendors and cloud services. no decision was made in this regard, that is simply our Standard Operating Procedure.
Yes - my issue definitely was solved in a very satisfactory manner, and it was really honestly quite quick to get the results back. I am very happy with the speed and quality of the overall responses i received.
when i thought i had discovered a bug in the power auto mate tool around its handling of JSONpath extracted variables as substrings, the support team was really very fast in pointing me at two potential solutions, and then they were able to get me on the right track towards a successful implementation and solution to my issue.
Using Microsoft Power Automate
| Pros | Cons |
|---|---|
Technical support not required Feel confident using | Do not like to use Unnecessarily complex Not well integrated Inconsistent Slow to learn Cumbersome Lots to learn |
- basic design
- wysiwyg flow between code blocks
- low-code implementation
- advanced use cases
- integrating with Live datasets
- fetching more than 2,000 records to process from a Sharepoint List