Demonstrate the capabilities of Power Automate
Flow types you must distinguish
- Automated cloud flow: starts from an event trigger (new SharePoint item, new email, new Dataverse row).
- Instant cloud flow: started manually, from a button, or called by another app or flow.
- Scheduled cloud flow: runs on a recurrence; no event is required.
- Desktop flow: robotic process automation (RPA) driving a Windows UI, usually launched by a cloud flow.
- Business process flow: not automation at all - a stage-based guide for humans inside a model-driven app.
Concepts to name
Triggers (exactly one per flow) and actions; dynamic content versus expressions such as utcNow() and formatDateTime(); Condition and Switch for branching; Apply to each with concurrency settings; Scope blocks combined with 'Configure run after' for error handling; Approvals; run-history statuses (Succeeded, Failed, Skipped); environment variables and solution-aware flows.
Traps
- 'Every Monday at 8am' → scheduled, not automated; the trigger is a recurrence, not an event.
- A manually triggered flow cannot be an automated cloud flow.
- If the target system has no API, the answer is a desktop flow.
- 'Configure run after' is how you handle failures - not 'put everything into one long action'.
Rule of thumb
Name the trigger first. Event → automated. Schedule → scheduled. Human click → instant. No API or legacy desktop app → desktop flow. Human-guided stages in an app → business process flow.
Worked example: 'When a SharePoint item is marked Approved, post to Teams and request manager sign-off.' Trigger = SharePoint item created or modified plus a condition; actions = Teams message and an Approval. If the requirement were 'every night at midnight, copy files', it becomes a scheduled flow.