With the upcoming Microsoft Power Platform 2022 Release Wave 1, I wanted to provide a guide to the community of the upcoming feature enhancements that will help make a difference in your deployments. My intention is to provide rolling commentary across the next couple of weeks with a focus on each of the major products within the Power Platform, continuing with today with Power Automate.
If you missed my previous article on Power BI, you can read it here.
An early peek of Microsoft Power Automate 2022 Wave 1 release it shows that there have been significant enhancements in respect to Usability, Security and Monitoring.
Here is my top 10 new features that you should be across in this release.
Usability
Solution Cloud Flows now shown in My Flows (General Availability April 2022)
Flows created as part of a solution package do not automatically appear within the My Flows section within the Power Automate centre. For new users to the platform this is often a source of confusion and hence why Microsoft has moved quickly to address this issue by displaying solution flows within the My Flows section.
New SharePoint actions in Power Automate desktop (Public Preview – September 2022)
This next enhancement aims to reduce your development time and increase productivity of Power Automate flows connecting to SharePoint Online.
You will be able to embed SharePoint cloud actions within your desktop automations with the new SharePoint actions coming later this year. This will enable you to loop over SharePoint lists and enter data into your core business applications.
Enforce Screen Resolution in Desktop Flows (Public Preview – August 2022)
In order to make UI based automation more robust, Microsoft are introducing an option to set the desktop screen resolution. There will be a new option when you configure your flow, to set both the desktop screen resolution and scale setting (DPI).
Figure 1 – Screen Resolution enforcement in Power Automate Desktop
OData Editor Improvements (GA April 2022)
OData syntax is hidden by default, and an option will be provided to enable basic and advanced options. This change has been made to make actions more accessible to users whilst enabling advanced users control over their OData actions.
Figure 2 – Example of SharePoint Online GetItems actions
Better handling of null values in JSON (General Availability – April 2022)
This enhancement improves the handling of null values when using JSON actions. Currently what happens is that when an null value is detected an error is thrown which makes it difficult to troubleshoot. There will now be a path for error handling that is baked directly into the Power Automate designer.
Security
Connections enhancements (GA April 2022)
Service Principal accounts can be configured with minimal privileges for the purposes of data integration. Where a flow would previously be owned by a single user, this user may now be a Service Principal account.
CyberArk Credentials in Desktop Flow Connections (Public Preview – Jul 2022)
One of the challenges of using windows credentials within Power Automate Desktop is rotating password policies require you update your flow connections.
For organisations using CyberArk as a workforce identity and access manager, your desktop flow automations can now retrieve the credentials from CyberArk at runtime, allowing your flows to continuing to run even if the password is changed.
Figure 3 – CyberArk Credentials within PA Desktop Flow
Azure Key Vault credentials to connect to Windows Sessions (Public Preview – Sept 2022)
As with the previous enhancement, this enhancement allows for desktop flows to log onto Windows machines with credentials from Azure Key Vault. This also means that rotating passwords will no longer interrupt the successful running of your flows.
Monitoring
Resubmit multiple failed runs (GA April 2022)
Previously when a flow run has failed, you would had to have resubmitted each flow run individually. With Wave 1 2022, you now have the option to select all or multiple flows to re-run. A small but welcome enhancement in my opinion.
Figure 4 – Multiple Cloud Flows Re-submitted
Desktop Flow monitoring improvements (Public Preview August 2022)
Enhancements are on the way that will enable you to track the health of machines and desktop flows. A new dashboard available from the Power Platform admin centre will help with tracking machines, successful runs, failed runs, top flows, and provide additional actionable error messages to help with troubleshooting.
Figure 5 – Power Automate Desktop Flow Analytics
Summary
Microsoft continue to make huge strides in all aspects of the Power Automate platform, and whilst this is a short overview of my top 10 favourite upcoming features, you can download the entire Release Notes for Wave 1 here:
Download the 2022 Release Wave 1 PDF
What did you think of this Wave 1 release for Power Automate? Are there features you think should be on this list or are looking forward to. Please do drop me a comment.