How much learning have you done on the Microsoft Power Platform? This includes out-of-the-box tools available to you in Office 365 including PowerApps a form building tool, Power BI used for building reports and charts and Power Automate which is used for creating workflow.

As a SharePoint solutions developer, I push myself to continuously learn and broaden my understanding of all available tools on the platform. Ultimate Forms has been at the forefront of my development activities and luckily I have found that these tools combine well with existing Microsoft tools.

I should comment that until recently Power Automate was known as Flow. Just something to be aware of! The workflows that you create are still called Flows so that term hasn't fallen completely by the wayside.

The most important attitude that you should embrace as it relates to all of these tools is that you shouldn't embrace one toolset exclusively. In all of your SharePoint related solutions, the data is stored in SharePoint lists. You can use Microsoft tools in combination with Ultimate Forms tools to build solutions. Understanding how to utilize all toolsets allows you to be more flexible and adaptable in the face of unique business requirements.

Power Automate provides a robust workflow platform that can be used to drive automation based on triggers (or scheduled) both for activity in your SharePoint environment or even outside of that environment. In many cases Ultimate Forms Actions are an easier path to create this functionality. However, Power Automate provides support for connections with many other web based software systems and tools outside of SharePoint. Functionally there are some differences in constructing workflow as well. Using the For Each pattern in Power Automate lets you loop through records in a SharePoint list and perform various actions. The logical If constructor allows you to create branches in your workflow according to your conditions. A drawback to Power Automate is that it is more developer oriented requiring use of code snippets. These are similar to formulas that you would use in Excel.

The best possible situation is to take advantage of the best of all toolsets combining functionality to use the best of what each has to offer.

In both cases you can define trigger conditions and update SharePoint list data accordingly.

Many people I talk to have not yet had the opportunity to learn Power Automate. Microsoft provides many different examples and videos to learn these tools. In my experience, the best possible situation is to do hands on learning by practicing creating your own Flows in connection with a practice SharePoint list. Come up with a simple task and figure out how to make a Flow to handle that task. Here is an example to get you started: Update a field "System Date" in a practice SharePoint list each night with the current date. Avoid passive learning! Watching videos give you some big picture information, but the knowledge it only truly earned by using the tools to build your own functionality.

Watch for updates as we will soon be hosting a webinar demonstrating some use cases where you can combine Power Automate and Ultimate Forms Actions to build more full featured solutions!