Julie Sebby

How to Build a Manageable Power Automate Solution

When we first began working with Power Automate solutions, we set up all solutions as unmanaged. This is not recommended, but we did it because learning new technology is hard. What we lacked was information on how to configure triggers and actions so that we could change things like SharePoint site links as solutions moved between environments. We’ve since learned how to work around this, but that’s the problem. It feels like a workaround. I want to show our solutions and also ask for some help. Both of these methods feel not quite right, and I can’t help but think there’s a better way. So, please give this a read, and tell me if there’s something I’m missing.

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How to Fix A Common Shared Inbox Trigger Error

A user reached out to me for help this week with a very specific, but also unhelpful, error message she received while running a cloud flow that uses the trigger When a new email arrives in shared inbox. The error starts with – “As of May 6, 2020, shared mailbox support”. The source of the error lies not in the trigger. The problem is somewhere else. Read on to learn how to easily fix this shared inbox trigger error.

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How To Grab Data from PDFs with Power Automate AI Builder

I’ve been curious about AI Builder for a long time but didn’t have a good use case until our Land department needed to get information out of a PDF email attachment. I was able to easily build my first AI Builder model and incorporate it into a Power Automate flow. This post will walk thru all the steps for working with Power Automate AI Builder, and you can apply it to your own use case. Read on to learn more.

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How to Prevent Email Triggers from Firing in Power Automate

Last week, I wrote a blog post that explained how to configure an email trigger for multiple strings. In other words, kick off the Power Automate flow when an email arrives with “Bug” or “Change Request” in the subject. I posted it on LinkedIn, and someone responded with a comment that showed how the same settings can be used to prevent email triggers from firing, such as when people reply to or forward an email with your subject filter. I love this use case, so I thought I’d explain it in its own post. Read on to learn more.

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How To Grab the File Extension of an Email Attachment

I’ve been working with email triggers a lot lately. Most of my use cases involve grabbing attachments from email and saving them on a shared drive. This is simple and easy to do, but….what you might not know about Power Automate is that it interprets any image in an email as an attachment. And, to avoid processing unnecessary files, the cloud flow should include a condition that looks at the file extension. So, how do you grab the file extension of an email attachment? It’s easy. Read on to find out.

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How To Build Power Automate Email Triggers With Multiple Strings

Our Automation team uses Microsoft Azure DevOps to track work. I wanted to build a Power Automate flow to monitor the team inbox, look for the words “Bug” or “Change Request” in email subjects, and then create an ADO bug or change request work item. This requires configuring an email trigger for multiple strings, which is a bit tricky. If you’ve never done it before, read on to learn more about Power Automate email triggers.

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How to Fix the ‘Failed to Assume Control of Chrome’ Error in Power Automate Desktop

This week, I ran into a problem when I moved a solution from our DEV environment to QA. A PAD flow I was calling from Power Automate started failing with the error ‘Failed to Assume Control of Chrome’. When I ran only the desktop flow, it worked fine. When calling PAD from Power Automate, it didn’t work. Based on the reviews of the Power Automate extension in the Chrome store, this has recently become a common problem. Read on to find the solution that worked for me.

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How to Pull the Right Data from SharePoint Tools in Alteryx

Many of the automation solutions we build incorporate Alteryx with Power Automate and Power Automate desktop. In many cases, we read and write to and from SharePoint lists. However, as you might know, the ODATA query is pretty slow, and you can’t refine the query in Alteryx. This post explains how to attack these two problems to make sure you get the right data as quickly as possible. Read on to learn more about SharePoint tools in Alteryx.

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