3 Best Practices for Power Automate Automations. - Power Platform.

As the business world navigates an increasingly digital landscape, the Microsoft Power Platform has emerged as a vital tool for harnessing, processing, and interpreting data, to streamline operations and drive insightful decisions. With Power Apps, Power Automate, Power BI, and Power Virtual Agents at your disposal, there's almost no limit to the custom applications you can create to meet your business needs. However, with such power comes the need for best practices to ensure you are using the platform to its full potential without creating unnecessary complications. Here are three key best practices that every Power Platform user should consider:

1) Leverage Existing Tools When Possible

While the allure of building your custom Power App is tempting, it's important to recognize when existing tools, like Microsoft Forms or Templates, might adequately meet your needs. Creating a new Power App should not be your first instinct, but rather your strategic choice when the requirements extend beyond the capabilities of existing tools. 

For example, suppose you need to collect feedback from a customer. A simple form with multiple-choice and short-answer questions should suffice, making Microsoft Forms a perfect choice. The simplicity of Forms also aids in the quick rollout of the feedback collection process, with minimal training required for the end-users.

Creating a Power App to serve the same purpose could lead to increased development time, complexity, and maintenance needs without significantly improving the output. By utilizing existing tools, you save time and resources that can be better used elsewhere, making it a practice of efficiency and strategic use of resources.

2) Initiate Variables in Power Automate

Using the 'initialize variable' feature in Power Automate and taking inputs from the trigger can save you time and frustration, particularly during the development and debugging stages. 

Let's consider an example: you are creating a flow to automatically send an email report when a new item is added to a SharePoint list. The report includes information like the item's name, who added it, and when. Without initialized variables, if the flow encounters a problem, debugging becomes a challenge because you can't easily see or manipulate the data values at different stages.

If you use the 'initialize variable' action and set the values using data from the trigger, each value becomes visible and manageable independently. This practice not only simplifies troubleshooting but also enhances the clarity of the flow, making it easier for others to understand and maintain it.

3) Implement Trigger Conditions in Automations

Building checks within automations might seem like a logical way to filter out unnecessary triggers. However, it can make your flow unnecessarily complex and inefficient. It's much more effective to use trigger conditions at the start of automations. 

For instance, if you have a Power Automate flow that triggers every time an item is modified in a SharePoint list, but you only want it to run when the 'Status' field changes to 'Complete', adding a condition within the flow will still trigger it with every modification. The flow would then have to assess whether the 'Status' is 'Complete' for every single change, consuming unnecessary resources.

Using trigger conditions at the start of your flow can prevent this. By setting a condition that the flow should only trigger when 'Status' equals 'Complete', you reduce unnecessary triggering of the flow and save computational resources. 

Information on Trigger Conditions can be found Here:- Get started with triggers - Power Automate | Microsoft Learn

4) Bonus Tip - Keep Power Automate Flows Short and Leverage Linked Flows

Power Automate is an extremely powerful tool, capable of orchestrating intricate processes involving numerous steps. However, crafting long, complex flows can lead to a host of issues - they become hard to edit, slower to load, and more challenging to troubleshoot. Instead, a great best practice is to keep your flows short and sweet.

Consider a scenario where you have a flow that triggers on an email arrival, reads the contents, saves any attachments to SharePoint, posts a message to Teams, updates a record in your CRM, and finally, sends a summary email. That's a lot of steps for one flow! A minor error in any single step could stall the entire process, making it cumbersome to identify and resolve the problem.

Instead, you can split this into smaller, discrete flows, each accomplishing one or two tasks. For instance, one flow can save the attachments to SharePoint, another can post the message to Teams, and so on. You can then link these flows together to create the complete process.

The benefits of this approach are multifold. Firstly, each individual flow is simpler and faster to load. They are also easier to debug, as you can focus on a single, specific process. Additionally, using linked flows fosters reusability. If you have another process that also requires saving email attachments to SharePoint, you can simply call the same flow instead of duplicating the steps.

Breaking down your monolithic flows into smaller, linked ones, therefore, enhances manageability, performance, and reusability, making this a crucial best practice for every Power Automate user.

In conclusion,

Effective use of the Microsoft Power Platform extends beyond just knowing the functionality it offers. It involves adhering to best practices like making strategic use of existing tools, initializing variables in Power Automate, implementing trigger conditions in your automations, and keeping your flows short and linked. By doing so, you can fully harness the power of the platform while ensuring efficiency, clarity, and maintainability. Your journey in the world of automation and digital transformation will thus be all the smoother!