Microsoft Teams provides an excellent toolkit for small to mid-sized business (SMB) owners like you to boost collaboration and communication within your organization. But automation can further support the efficiencies you’ll find with Microsoft Teams. It reduces the need to sift through your inbox for important emails, or spend time manually assigning tasks to your workforce. In truth, you aren’t using Teams to its fullest potential if you aren’t automating repetitive tasks.
You may have considered automation but weren’t sure where to start, or were worried that you don’t have enough coding or data science experience to set up automation-based workflows. This is why you need to know about Microsoft’s Power Automate.
What Is Power Automate?
Formerly known as Microsoft Flow and part of the Microsoft Power Platform, Power Automate is an automation and integration platform that connects your cloud apps and automates repetitive and mundane tasks easily—saving time and simplifying your workflows. One of the greatest benefits of Power Automate is how user-friendly it is. It uses what’s known as low-code, which means users can have zero coding or data science experience and still be able to use the platform to its fullest.
Additionally, it comes with thousands of pre-built templates and AI assistance to help get beginners started. Below we explore a few of the ways Power Automate can help you streamline your business processes.
Intelligent Correspondence
Waiting for an important email—especially when you have multiple accounts and hundreds of incoming messages—can be stressful. And constantly checking your inbox can eat up valuable time. Using Power Automate, you can create a simple alert that sends a notification text to the phone of your choosing or posts a message directly to Teams when you receive emails with defined conditions, such as coming from a designated address.
Immediate Approvals
When your team members need approval for document uploads on SharePoint, for example, traditionally they would need to message you individually and wait for you to manually approve the process. With Power Automate, you can eliminate all of that waiting time by creating a flow which aggregates permission requests whenever an employee is trying to upload a document and automates approvals. There is also a useful template that will send notifications in Teams to inform your employees when approvals are completed, maintaining a constant flow of productivity.
Dynamic Messaging
When you’re juggling multiple tasks, it can be difficult keeping up with the Teams chat and remembering which messages need attention. Power Automate comes with templates that help manage your Teams messages so you can focus your attention on where it’s needed most. One such template will remind you after a certain time period to respond to a message you’ve received. Additional templates allow you to schedule meetings as well as create and assign tasks with a message sender from within your Teams chatbox.
Adaptive Cards
Adaptive cards are interactive tools such as polls or forms that can be a great way to share and collect information throughout an organization within Teams. With Power Automate, you can create flows that will direct your adaptive cards towards specific users or Teams channels, greatly reducing time that would be spent doing so manually.
Do More with Less: Say Yes to Power Automate
As an SMB owner who wears many hats, you don’t have time to do repetitive tasks—and neither do your employees. When you’re trying to cut costs and create efficiencies, automation just makes sense. Contact Point Alliance today and learn how you can let Power Automate do all the heavy lifting.
