Integrate Power Automate with other services
Connectors, triggers and actions
Nearly every integration question is about picking the right connector and the right trigger. Event triggers (new email, item created, row added in Dataverse, Teams message) start a flow; actions perform work. Know that Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, Dataverse and Excel Online each have distinct connector behaviours, and that the Dataverse connector needs the correct environment URL - pointing at the wrong environment is a frequent failure.
Composing services
Use child flows when logic is reused: the child must use a manual or Power Apps trigger, live in the same environment and solution, and receive parameters and return values explicitly. Use Office Scripts (Run script) for Excel manipulation that desktop actions handle poorly. Use Approvals for human decisions, AI Builder for document or form extraction, and HTTP with Azure AD for secured REST endpoints that have no first-party connector. Power Apps can start a cloud flow and pass parameters; the flow can return data to the app.
Desktop flows in the mix
The Run a desktop flow action is the bridge for screen-only systems. Inputs must be declared as input variables; results return through output variables. For batch workloads, a work queue lets a cloud flow feed items and a desktop flow process them one at a time, which keeps retries and failure isolation manageable.
Worked example
Orders must be entered into a legacy ERP while approvals happen in Teams. Design: Dataverse trigger fires on order creation, an Approval action routes to a manager, and on approval the cloud flow calls a child flow that pushes the item to a work queue and runs a desktop flow unattended against the ERP, then posts the confirmation to Teams.
Rule of thumb: if two flows share logic, extract a child flow; if two systems share data through an API, never route it through the UI.