Learning Microsoft Power Automate

Chapter 6. Integrating with Other Power Platform Applications

Power Automate flows are a very powerful tool for automating manual business processes. But they do have some limitations. Cloud flows are triggered by an event, like a user pressing a button in the mobile app or modifying a record in a data source. But Power Automate alone doesn’t provide much in the way of a user interface (UI) to interact with a flow at runtime. Some flow triggers can present a simple data entry panel to enter parameters at runtime, but there is no provision for formatting or styling such a panel—it is simply a list of the fields you specify in the flow trigger in the order that you add them. Similarly, while a flow is running, your options for interacting with a user are limited. The most common mechanism for interaction is email, which has limited capability for returning information to the flow.

Power Automate’s limitations can be alleviated in many cases by integrating a Power Automate flow with one of the other Power Platform applications. In this chapter, I’ll review what you need to know to integrate cloud flows with each of the other Power Platform applications.

As we discussed earlier in the book, Power Automate is one of five applications in the Microsoft Power Platform. The other Power Platform applications are as follows:

Power BI

A tool to manipulate and visualize data to help make business decisions

Power Apps

A low-code/no-code application for creating custom apps that leverage ...