Everyday Automation With Microsoft Power Automate

One of my favorite tools these days is Microsoft Power Automate (formerly Microsoft Flows). Power Automate lets you visually construct workflows for all kinds of things, and I’ve found it to be an incredibly powerful way to automate tasks. Here are some examples:

• Post in Slack when an email is sent to a shared mailbox
• Post status tweets from a SaaS provider’s Twitter account in Slack
• Send an SMS text message when a critical process fails

The thing I love most about Power Automate is that you can make sophisticated workflows very quickly, and they don’t require hosting or deployment. You just create, save, and it’s live.

Many of my workflows start by me realizing that I didn’t notice a certain category of emails quickly enough or that I need to give my team better awareness of an event. For example, I wanted to ensure that expense reports get approved right away so that employees get reimbursed, so I created a workflow to send a direct message in Slack whenever I get an approval request email from the expense system. Another common example has been to notify my team when applications report failures through various means.

Power Automate boasts a “low code” experience, but most of the workflows I’ve created have required coding skills and creative troubleshooting to figure out. That said, you can still do useful things with pretty much zero code as long as you’re not trying to get too fancy. In this post, we’ll build a simple workflow that posts a notification to Slack when an email comes in.

We begin by creating a new automated workflow. Automated workflows always start with a trigger, so I’m going to pick “When a new email arrives.” Another option that’s been useful to me is “When an email arrives in a shared mailbox,” but as you see in the screenshot below, there are many options to explore–and many that have nothing to do with email, as well.

If you’re automating something for an unmonitored mailbox, you may not want additional criteria, but I’m usually looking for something like an email from a specific sender with a certain subject. So, the next step in our workflow will be a Condition so we can specify which criteria we care about.

The last step in our workflow will be to define what happens when the condition is met or not met. We want our sample workflow to send a private message in Slack. To accomplish this, I’ll add the “Post message to Slack” step and enter my Slack username for the channel and some text for the message. Instead of hard-coded message text, you could also include attributes from the email message entity, similar to those used in the condition step.

The final step is simply to save it. That’s it. When an email arrives, the workflow checks it against the conditions you’ve defined, and performs the corresponding Yes/No actions–in this case send ourselves a message in Slack.