Overview of Power Automate 2021 release wave 1
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
Some of the functionality described in this release plan has not been released. Delivery timelines may change and projected functionality may not be released (see Microsoft policy). Learn more: What's new and planned
Microsoft Power Automate makes it possible to grow 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).
There are many areas that are being invested in for Power Automate as a part of 2021 release wave 1. First, Microsoft Teams, with more than 100 million daily active users, is central to Microsoft's remote work strategy, and Power Automate is key to the Microsoft Teams extensibility strategy by 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.
We will continue our deeper integrations of Dynamics 365, Power Apps, Power BI, and Microsoft Dataverse, and we're making it easier for professional developers and users to collaborate and deploy solutions on Microsoft Power Platform.
Power Automate Desktop was released to general availability in December 2020, and it enables makers to automate the diversity of applications on their desktops. Going forward, we will provide migration for existing Softomotive and UI flows customers, secure credential management, and much more.
Beyond Power Automate Desktop itself, we’re building enterprise trust 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 administrators can extend their control over desktop flow artifacts in the Power Platform admin center and Center of Excellence toolkit.
Effective automation in any organization also relies heavily on AI to be reliable and scalable, so we are further investing in content intelligence—specifically, in forms where we’ll be adding better support for multiple layouts, extracting content from tables, working with checkboxes and radio buttons on forms, and supporting more languages.
Finally, there is a new component in Power Automate: process advisor. We’ll provide users with the insights into their tasks, with a process map showing variations across different instances and analytics. With this knowledge, customers will make more informed business decisions to optimize their processes and receive recommendations on areas of automation.
Updates to Power Automate 2021 release wave 1