Microsoft have given us a wonderful opportunity to utilize their office 365 setup at free of cost which they call it as Microsoft Developer Program. By following few simple steps, we can get access to their sandbox environment instantly.
There are 2 types of subscriptions available in this,
The Office 365 E3 Developer subscription – Old subscription type for all the accounts created before Aug 25 2019.
The Microsoft 365 E5 Developer subscription – This is the new Subscription type and the only available type for the developers currently.
Both these subscriptions provide access to multiple cloud platforms of Microsoft, and we can create up to 25 users in each environment. More details can be found at below link
Let’s see how we can create our own environment and start using the office 365 features.
Step 1: Open URL https://developer.microsoft.com/en-us/microsoft-365/dev-program and click Join Now button, it will open a sign in page where you need to provide your Microsoft Account credentials(email id’s ending with Hotmail.com or outlook.com), if you don’t have a Microsoft account then you have an option to create one from there.
If you have just created a new Microsoft account, then while logging in you may get this error
For which you just open the url mentioned there and complete the missing details in profile and wait for some time for your account to get activated across. And later click Join Now button again.
Step 2: Once you see below screen just fill the details and follow the instructions.
Once you complete the options then you will be presented with below screen, select instant sandbox option, the details are mentioned there.
Then enter the admin username and password for your environment and select the region there also enter the password for all the test users and click next and it asks for mobile number and after code verification you are done.
Now that the subscription is successfully created lets go checkout how we manage the features and apps using this subscription just click on the “Go to Subscription” link from above page or visit office.com and use your admin credentials created as part of subscription.
Now click on top left dots and select admin
It will ask to setup Microsoft Authenticator on your mobile device, once the setup is complete you will be asked for sign in again and after success you will be navigated to Microsoft 365 Admin Center.
That’s it. Your new M365 environment is ready and you can create users and enable outlook and configure all the office 365 features in this environment.
Please note that as we have selected instant sandbox at setup, the domain name is auto generated and cannot be changed. Here in my case, it is
But you have a provision to add a new domain within this environment which can be done from the Admin Center. Also you can setup office apps from this page using the button shown below
More information can be found at below Microsoft link
In my next post I will explain more about power apps, types of apps, tools to use for application development and use the environment that we created now to develop applications.
Thank You for Reading!! Have a good day Every One!!
Let’s Learn PowerApps – 1 Power Platform Introduction
Hello everyone! Hope you are doing well. Wish you all a Happy Deepavali!!
It’s been a while since I have posted some content in my blog as I was going through a major learning and transformation chapters in my life both personally & professionally.
Now that I’ve got some time, I have started this series of posts (Let’s Learn PowerApps) where we learn together about Microsoft Power platform, and how we build applications using the tools within. Let’s get to the introduction.
What is Microsoft Power Platform?
Microsoft Power platform is a group of applications/tools from Microsoft which you can use to quickly build Web/Mobile applications that can be used across different devices like Mobiles, Tablets & Computers etc. Basically, the tools/applications within power platform are mostly Low-Code/No-Code type for which we don’t need much of coding experience and development tools of these applications use drag & drop functionality which makes it easy for the developers and help them quickly develop the apps and get them available for users within no time. Moreover, it’s fully cloud based platform from Microsoft Azure with all their development tools can be accessed from web browser.
Basically, In Power Platform we have 4 main components/tools which are used for specific purposes as explained below.
Power Apps – This is the primary and main component which we can use to quickly create applications with less or no coding experience, it has the capability of creating Rich & Dynamic user interfaces which can be used across different devices. It has a simple coding language which is formula based like excel which they call as PowerFx which is used for code. We have types of apps like canvas apps, model driven apps, power pages and recently added power portals. We’ll learn more about these components in coming posts.
Power Automate – Used to develop/create business processes (here called as flows) that can be accessed from the applications. It has many built in connectors (275+ growing) using we which we connect to different types of backend systems. Within in this, there is a separate segment known as Power Automate Desktop which is an RPA tool used to create flows that can be automated to get rid of repeating manual tasks.
Power Bi – Very powerful analytics tool used to build/create Rich UI based Reports from the data across different back-end systems. We can create user-based dashboards to show customized statists as per their role.
Power Virtual Agents – These are automated virtual customer care agents (generally called as chat bots) which can answer the customer queries through chat options. They can be used to automate many repetitive manual simple tasks and help the customer care teams reduce their workload and concentrate on much complex customers. They can connect to different backend systems using connectors of power platform.
Also, we have few more important components like
Data verse which is the native backend tool provided in power platform to save data. Data will be stored in table with rows and column formats like SQL. We can create constraints which are called as business rules on these tables to validate the data. We can create and maintain relationships with other tables using keys like primary keys and foreign keys. Security can be configured based on roles. This data verse has an important concept called Common Data model which is a default data model framework provided by power platform which has many common table schemas available for use.
Power Platform Admin Center which is used to perform all administrative tasks to maintain power platform. Some of the important tasks are creating and managing environments, Licensing, Users, Roles, and Access Management etc.
Ai Builder – Power platform provides the capability of Ai by providing prebuilt AI Models which can be used across Power Automate flows power apps without any coding knowledge required. Some of the prebuilt Ai Models provided are Business Card Reader, Text Recognition, Entity extraction, Sentiment analysis etc.
And we have many more components about which we will learn together in coming posts. But for now, this is the basic introduction of what power platform is all about. In the next post I will show you how to create your own trail environment and get the access to all the components of power platform.
Also use the 2 links to install Chrome & Edge extensions which are required while automating the Webpages. We can install these extensions later as well but better do it now.
Step 2: Go through the options available in Power Automate Desktop
Let’s launch the Power Automate Desktop using the Desktop icon and go through options. It will ask for sign, give your Microsoft account details
Once you login you will be presented with below screen where you have multiple options which are explained in below screen shot
Let us create a New Flow and give it a name.
Click create and you will be presented with its designer where you build the automated flows.
You see Actions on left panel. There are various kind of Actions/Activities that we can use based on the type of automation that we are going to perform. We will know about different type of activities in detail once we start
On the top bar we have controls to save, execute, stop execution and go to next step in the flow and also 2 type recorders one for web and other for windows based applications. These recorders are useful to automatically record the actions of human and convert them to an automated flow. I will explain these recorders in detail in my coming posts.
Below top bar there is another line which shows the Main and Subflows drop menu item. Here the best practice is to create a subflow for each task in the automation and call them one by one in the Main flow.
And the Right panel is for creating Input and output variables also for normal flow variables. These variables can be used to store data or pass the data in and out from the automated flow.
Step 3: Create a simple automated process
There are different types of automated flows that we can create based on the type application like
Web Automation used for Web Applications
UI Automation used for Windows based applications.
For this sample I’m going to use a web automation and create a simple automated process to fetch the price of iPhone 12 pro and store in a variable. Steps will be as mentioned below
Open amazon site
Search for Iphone12 pro
Go through the results and find that particular model
Fetch the price and store it in a variable.
Each step I would consider as a Subflow and call them one by one in the Main flow.
Also as a best practice always make sure to use Comment activity before each step and add appropriate description in that.
Let’s Begin. In the Process Designer Variables Section, Create an output variable
We will create 3 subflows as below
OpenAmazonSite
SearchForIPhone
FetchPrice
Subflow 1: OpenAmazonSite.
From Sub flows section select + icon and create new Sub flow with name OpenAmazonSite. The purpose of this subflow is to open a chrome browser and launch amazon.in website.
In this sub flow we will have 2 steps,
Comment activity – we can add Some Description of the following activity
Launch new Chrome – this activity will Open Chrome Browser and launch Amazon site. Options are simple and easy to configure. Just have a look at below screen grab.
Subflow 2 : SearchForIPhone
The purpose of this subflow is to search for Iphone 12 pro max 256 gb. Below are the steps.
Comment Activity which describes the point from which this workflow execution begins.
Comment Activity which describes following activity
Focus text field on the webpage – This activity will set the focus on the search box of amazon site. While configuring this activity we will have a screen as below where Web browser Instance will be preselected.
Now in the UI element dropdown click down arrow and click on Add a new UI element button. Before clicking make sure that the previous open window is amazon website. Now you will see a small popup and red markers highlighting on the fields when you hover the mouse. Now just hover the mouse on search box until a red marker appears around it as shown below, then click CNTRL + Left mouse Click it will add that element to the flow. Now click done and click save on the activity step.
Now we have added one UI element to the elements list. In Next step we will type text into that element using the activity Populate text field on Web page and add text as shown in below screen shot, UI element you can select the same one which we have created in previous step.
Final Step in this subflow is to click on search Icon. We use activity “Press button on web page” and in UI element section we need to add that SearchIcon to the elements list
Complete Subflow steps should look like below screen shot.
Subflow 3 : FetchPrice
The purpose of this subflow is to read the price and display it on screen also store it in output variable. Steps would be as follow
Use Extract data from webpage and while configuring set store data mode as variable which means the extracted data will be stored as a variable.
Now keep this window open and navigate to the amazon site, when you hover on the elements you will see red border around, now select the text that you want to extract and right click which will show you 3 options from which select Extract element Value and select Text.
This is will be added as #Value 1. Similarly hover on the price and select as above add it to the list. Click finish and the output of these variables are stored in a variable with name DatafromWebPage. Below is the screenshot for your reference
Next activity is to show a popup for which we will use Display Message Activity and configure it as shown below. The DataFromWebpage will contain the list of values that are extracted from webpage and they are stored in table format like rows and columns. We can use the something like below to extract individual values.
Now next step is to store the price in output variable for which we need to use Set Variable Activity as below
And finally add close web Browser step as a good practise. Now the complete flow will look like below
Now in the Main flow use Run Subflow activity and call one by one as shown below
That’s it. The flow is complete. now you can run using the play button on top and see the execution as shown in below GIF.
This is it for this post. It looks simple to create automated flows using this power automate. In my coming posts i will show you how to use recorder option to automatically create flows and some other steps that are available in this tool.
It’s been quite a while since I have explored a new technology as I was completely occupied with various kind of assignments in K2 BPM.
But due to COVID 19 and Work from Home Option for the last one year, I found some buffer time, which I have utilized to explore the automation area which is familiar as Robotic Process Automation RPA.
Let us understand what Automation is.
Automation is nothing but the process of creating a code or program to perform repetitive tasks by imitating the human actions and can run automatically with less or no human intervention at all.
The Program that is being developed is called as Robot/Bot/AutomatedProcess.
From the past few years we can see that World is rapidly moving towards automation and it looks like the future does belong to the world of Robots. What does that mean?
For Organizations this can improve their productivity, Quality, Reduction in cost and increase in the availability as Bots are faster, reliable, and accurate and can work seamlessly.
But the potential impact that will be caused to humans is unemployment. Many people may lose their jobs and will be replaced by robots. So the humans need to evolve and upgrade themselves to defend and service from the future world of Robots.
The advanced level of automation is creating a program using the concepts of Artificial Intelligence, machine learning, deep learning, Neural Networks etc. where the program is trained and learns itself to act like a human brain and take decisions on its own.
Some of the Real time automated bots that are currently in place are
Self-Driving Cars (Tesla)
Automated Voice controllers like Siri, Alexa.
Facial Recognitions & detections
Chat bots
Virtual personal assistants
Programmed Drones being used for deliveries by amazon.
Automobile manufacturing units using programmed robots to perform many complex jobs like assembling, painting etc.
And many more.
Now as we have a quite a bit of introduction to what Automation is, now let’s move on to RPA and know the prominent tools that we can use to program these so called Bots.
As per latest Forrester Wave Report for leaders in the Robotic Process Automation, Tools like
UiPath.
Automation Anywhere.
Microsoft Power Automate
NICE.
Kryon and some others are named as market leaders with strong market presence.
All the RPS tools will be similar with some minor UI differences or some additional features but they all have some common components which are mentioned below
A designer tool to create new automated processes along with Recorder option to record the human actions on the User interface of the applications.
An orchestrator to manage the RPA processes.
Robots that interact with applications.
Learning these tools should not be difficult as all of them have free trails using which you can download and install on your machine and start exploring them. Also, they have provided Free online training courses which we can go through and start automating. Also they have offered some certification based courses out of which some are for free and some are paid.
I have started exploring the tools like UiPath, Kryon, Microsoft Power Automate and was able to automate some processes.
In coming posts I will share more details of those automations and how to use their designer tools. Meanwhile if you guys are interested in having a look at these tools, you can register here at below URL’s respectively.
In this Post we shall see how we can trigger a K2 workflow
from a Microsoft flow.
We have 2 ways to do this.
Using the K2 connector.
Using the OOB K2 Api.
Using the K2 connector
Go to Microsoft flow Dashboard and click on “New” and you will see few options among which you need to select “Instant – from blank”.
Give your flow a name and there you will find different options to trigger this flow. Here I have selected “Manually trigger a flow”.
Once the flow designer opens, Click on New Step
in the search box and type K2 which will show you the K2 related connectors.
Select the K2 Workflow connector as shown in below.
Select Start Workflow from the list shown.
Next provide the details of your workflow, you
can pass either Workflow Id or workflow name here or you can select from the
list.
Now create a new connection by clicking on dots and select New Connection
Enter data and click create which will create a new K2 connection and use
it for this step.
** This Connector that we are using here is a preview K2 Connector version which uses a single user account credentials which we need to use only for development Purpose. But in general UAT and production environment we have to create a Custom Connector which uses Oauth to authenticate.
To Know about Creating K2 Custom Connector please visit the link below
Once you select the workflow it will provide
options to pass folio, data fields and
some advanced options as shown in below screengrab
Click on Save
and then Click on Test and Select I’ll Perform the trigger Action
Once flow Started Successfully, we can go “My Flows” and tab and select the flow
that we have created and click on dots Symbol and select Run history to see the status of the flow instance that we have
started.
Here the Flow instance status shows as Test Succeeded which means the flow has run successfully and it
should have created an instance in K2. Let’s go to K2 Management Site and see
if it has created an instance.
You can see the instance has been created successfully. Let’s
see the other approach using K2 api.
Using the
OOB K2 Api.
Enable K2 REST Api from K2 Management (Use below link to know how)
Go to Microsoft flow designer -> navigate to
my flows – > select the flow that we created before -> click edit ->
add new step -> Search for HTTP and select.
You can know the Workflow Id of your process from the “Process” smartobject which will be under category System/Management/Workflows/Smartobjects
Set the Headers Content-Type as Application/Json.
In Body we can set the Folio and data fields as shown.
Authentication we can user Basic/OAuth. Here I’m using Basic for Development purpose but generally we have to set it to OAuth. To know how to set OAuth for Api please refer below linkhttps://help.k2.com/kb002784
Save the flow and test run to see the result.
**Similarly we can follow the same approach performing a task
action and other K2 Activities.
That’s it. This is how we can trigger a K2 workflow from
Microsoft flow. Thanks for Reading!!
Uncode K2 