Plan and prepare for Power Automate in 2021 release wave 2
Important
This content is archived and is not being updated. For the latest documentation, go to What's new in Power Automate?. For the latest release plans, go to Dynamics 365 and Microsoft Power Platform release plans.
Important
The 2021 release wave 2 plan covers all new functionalities planned to be delivered to market from October 2021 to March 2022. In this article, you'll find the product overview and what's new and planned for Power Automate.
Overview
Microsoft Power Automate provides the tools you can use to improve your business' productivity by automating repetitive, time-consuming tasks. Power Automate provides a better way to get things done across your organization through digital and robotic process automation (RPA).
Power Automate is investing in several areas as a part of Microsoft Power Platform 2021 release wave 2, including the following:
Microsoft Teams: With more than 100 million daily active users, Microsoft Teams is central to Microsoft's remote work strategy, and Power Automate is key to the Microsoft Teams extensibility strategy for providing automation for your collaboration scenarios. We will build more and easier entry points across the Microsoft Teams experience, such as in meetings/calendars and other types of conversations. It will also be possible for administrators to push solutions that contain flows across the teams in their organization.
Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI, and Microsoft Dataverse: With deeper integrations, we're making it easier for professional developers and users to collaborate and deploy solutions on Microsoft Power Platform.
Power Automate Desktop: This component was released to general availability in 2020, and it enables makers to automate the diversity of applications on their desktops. Going forward, we'll provide migration for existing Softomotive and UI flows customers, secure credential management, and much more. We're building enterprise trust for desktop flows by providing what centers of excellence need in the cloud: centralized management, monitoring, and reporting that allow users to scale beyond the per-flow experience in the portal. These experiences will provide security, governance, and administration so that administrators can extend their control over desktop flow artifacts in the Power Platform admin center and Center of Excellence toolkit.
AI builder: Effective automation in any organization relies heavily on AI to be reliable and scalable, so we're further investing in content intelligence – specifically, in document automation where we'll be adding better support for multiple layouts, extracting content from tables, working with checkboxes and radio buttons on forms, and support for more languages.
Process advisor: Process advisor is the newest component in Power Automate. This component provides organizations with insights into their tasks via a process map that shows variations across different instances and analytics. With this knowledge, organizations can use the recommendations that process advisor provides to make more informed decisions on which areas to automate to optimize their processes.
Updates to Power Automate 2021 release wave 2
Tip
Download the release overview guide and share with your team as you plan to onboard the new capabilities included in this release wave.
* Overview guide available in English version only
Investment areas
Desktop flows
Power Automate Desktop continues to get quicker and simpler to use, easier to deploy, more scalable, and easier to govern. In 2021 release wave 2, we'll make substantial improvements across the board to these capabilities.
Cloud flows
Cloud flows are automations that run in the cloud using our 475+ connectors. They can be triggered automatically, instantly, or with a schedule.
Process advisor
Process advisor quickly captures detailed steps for each process in your organization to help you better understand places to streamline workflows.
Document automation
Document automation is a solution that allows you automate processing of your documents in an end-to-end process. It includes the following capabilities:
- Process documents received in emails orchestrated by Power Automate
- Extract data from documents using AI Builder models
- Process the data extracted and allow users to review and approve data through central manual validation Power Apps
- Export the processed data to external systems using Power Automate connectors
- Statistics on number of documents processed
To learn more about the entire set of capabilities being delivered during this release wave, check out the release plan for Power Automate below:
For application administrators
User impacting features to the user experience enabled automatically
User impacting features should be reviewed by application administrators. This facilitates release change management and enables successful onboarding of new capabilities released to market. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users, automatically" in the release plan.
Features that must be enabled by application administrators
This release wave contains features that must be enabled or configured by administrators, makers, or business analysts to be available for their users. For the complete list, look for all features tagged "Users by admins, makers, or analysts" in the release plan.
Get the most out of Power Automate
| Helpful links | Description |
|---|---|
| Release plan | View all capabilities included in the release. |
| Product updates | Stay up to date on latest product updates. |
| Release calendar | Know important release milestones. |
| Licensing | Improve your understanding of how to license Power Automate. |
| Product documentation | Find documentation for Power Automate. |
| User community | Engage with Power Automate experts and peers in the community. |
| Upcoming events | Find and register for in person and online events. |
| Product trials | Get started with Power Automate. |