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The cloud flows are intended to interact with cloud systems (such as the ever growing number of SaaS providers) whereas the desktop flows are designed to deal with the more traditional RPA automation of repetitive data entry. RPA desktop automationĭespite Power Automate combining both cloud and desktop automation, it is obvious that both tools work quite differently. As it stands, there is still a way to go before it can offer many of the same features of its more established competitors, however its capability is certainly now mature enough to serve enterprise needs in the right circumstances.
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Power Automate has really come into its own in the past year, previously offering too basic or too unwieldy a tool to coax users away from other vendors. Costs too, are considerably lower, and in many cases enterprises may already have access to Power Automate through their other Microsoft technologies (such as Microsoft’s recent announcement to make the desktop automation component free for Windows 10 users). This is one of Power Automate’s biggest selling points against more established RPA providers. All of the components both within and outside of the Power Platform integrate with one another seamlessly. Power Automate is also entirely cloud based (to the extent that even when creating desktop flows, the source code is stored and managed in the cloud), and Microsoft’s tagline of “Powerful alone. This sits as a separate product suite from the Microsoft cloud computing service Azure. Power Automate forms part of the Microsoft Power Platform along with Power BI, Power Apps and Power Virtual Agents. This article will dive into some of these improvements, comparing and contrasting the RPA offerings provided by Power Automate with the more established players on the market across several key areas for enterprise capability, including product architecture, desktop automation, cloud integration, queue based processing, and extensibility. However, recently Microsoft (with its Power Automate offering) has made significant inroads to the extent that Forrester has named Microsoft a wave leader for RPA. Many of the more well-established providers (such as UiPath) have been making great strides introducing this to the enterprise market. Over recent years there has been a huge amount of interest in Robotic Process Automation (RPA), and it seems almost every company has invested some time investigating potential use cases within their business.
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