Streamline workflows with Power Automate
Most business processes don't stop at the edge of Dynamics 365. An opportunity reaches a critical stage, and finance needs a notification. A support case exceeds its SLA, and a manager needs an immediate alert. A field work order is completed, and an invoice needs to go to another system. Power Automate handles all of these, and the good news is that it's directly accessible from within your Dynamics 365 apps.
What embedded Power Automate flows are
When users work in Dynamics 365 model-driven apps, they can access Power Automate directly from the command bar through the Flow menu. From there, they can create new flows or run existing ones, all without leaving the record they're working on.
These are standard Power Automate cloud flows. What makes them "embedded" is that they surface contextually within the model-driven app and automatically receive the current record as input. When a sales rep runs a flow from an opportunity record, the flow already has the opportunity ID, account, estimated value, and other record fields available as data. Manual input isn't required.
Embedded flows are different from background automations that run without user involvement, like an automated flow triggered whenever a record changes. Embedded flows are user-initiated. A deliberate action taken at a specific moment in a workflow. The user decides when to run the flow and in what context.
Use cases across Dynamics 365 apps
The embedded flow experience is consistent across all model-driven Dynamics 365 apps. Here's how it adds value in each:
| App | Use case | What the flow does |
|---|---|---|
| Dynamics 365 Sales | Quote approval | A sales rep triggers an approval flow from an opportunity, routing the proposed quote to their manager for digital sign-off before it's sent to the customer |
| Dynamics 365 Customer Service | Case escalation | A support agent escalates a case with one selection, triggering a flow that notifies a senior agent, flags the priority, and creates a follow-up task |
| Dynamics 365 Customer Insights | Segment entry | A marketer manually adds a contact to a journey entry list, triggering a flow that updates the contact's profile and queues the journey entry event |
| Dynamics 365 Field Service | Scheduling notification | A dispatcher confirms a booking and triggers a flow that sends an SMS confirmation to the customer and updates the technician's calendar |
These examples reflect common patterns—your team builds the actual flows to match your specific business requirements. Power Automate has connectors for hundreds of services, so the same escalation pattern could notify in Teams, create a record in ServiceNow, post to a SharePoint list, or send an email, depending on your environment.
Enabling embedded flows in your organization
Embedded flows are a feature that an administrator enables at the environment level. In the Power Platform admin center, you turn on the Power Automate embedded setting for each environment where you want this capability. Once enabled, the Flow button appears in the command bar of model-driven apps in that environment.
Tip
Use solution-aware flows when deploying embedded flows across environments. A solution-aware flow can be exported from a development environment and imported into production as part of your standard application lifecycle management (ALM) process.
Creating and running flows from within Dynamics 365
From a user's perspective, the experience is straightforward:
- Open a record—an opportunity, a case, a work order—in your Dynamics 365 app.
- Select Flow in the command bar to see a list of flows available for that record type.
- Select an existing flow to run it immediately, or select Create a flow to build a new one.
- If creating a new flow, Power Automate opens in a new browser tab with the Dynamics 365 record preconfigured as the trigger input.
- Build and save the flow, then return to Dynamics 365 where it now appears in the Flow menu.
Flows appear in the menu for users who have access to them, either through personal sharing or organization-wide sharing. How flows are shared depends on how they were built and which environment they belong to.
You're not limited to user-initiated flows. For fully automated processes, like triggering an action whenever a case status changes, continue to use standard automated or scheduled flows built directly in Power Automate. Both approaches can coexist in the same environment and complement each other.
Learn more about enabling embedded flows in your organization.