Microsoft Power Automate Desktop is now generally available. With the general availability, the capabilities that were announced at Microsoft Ignite, and have been in preview for the past year, are now available to all, providing a robust RPA experience that is accessible for everyone. 

Introducing a new tool – Power Automate Process Advisor, now available in preview, introduces process mining to Power Automate. It provides a deeper understanding of how people work and helps you understand which time-consuming processes are best suited for automation.

Further to the announcement, Microsoft has clarified its terminology to help distinguish the different types of flows available in Power Automate, as such, they have updated the names within Power Automate, as follows:

• Flows that execute in the Power Automate Service are now known as cloud flows. These typically use API connectors to automate across applications, services, and databases in the cloud or on-premises—also known as Digital Process Automation (DPA).
• Flows that run on customers’ virtual or physical machines are now known as desktop flows. Previously called UI flows, these automations usually perform UI-based automations, and are sometimes called Robotic Process Automation (RPA).
• The third type of flow continues to be known as business process flows, which support Business Process Management (BPM).

Power Automate Desktop

Now generally available, Power Automate Desktop extends the automation capabilities in Power Automate to on-premises processes and tasks, enabling anyone in the organization to automate desktop or web-based applications.

Fuelled by low-code RPA, Power Automate Desktop unifies automation between API-based automation with cloud flows and UI-based automation with desktop flows.

More information: Power Automate Desktop | Microsoft Power Automate

Power Automate Process Advisor

Not all processes are equal when it comes to the value of automating them. The processes that demand the most manual time and resources typically drive priority. Process advisor breaks down barriers that might make it difficult for an organization to identify where they might benefit the most from automation. 

Process advisor helps you find opportunities to automate old ways of working with easy–to–use process maps and analytics that provide insights into the areas that need automating across your organization. It provides a guided experience to visualize variations in your workflows and identify opportunities for optimisation by leveraging the following capabilities:

• Run simple process recorders: The process recorder quickly captures the detailed steps for each process—working solo or by inviting colleagues to contribute and collaborate. 
• Create rich process maps: Better understand how you work with a visual process map that provides an end-to-end visualisation of the variations in how processes are run across multiple users. These insights make it easy to identify inefficiencies and areas for potential automation.  
• Get in-depth analytics: Teams can leverage out-of-the-box analytics to better understand variations across each process map and learn from these metrics to improve how they work. Key insights include how many people recorded the task, the average time it takes to complete a task, how many different paths your users took, and more.

More information: Process Advisor—Process Mining | Microsoft Power Automate