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How to Use Power Automate in SharePoint?

Published: February 28th, 2025 by Ivan Farafonov

Power Automate is Microsoft’s cloud-based service for automating processes and tasks in Office 365 applications. Integrated with SharePoint, it can run event-driven or manual workflows, reduce errors through automation, and streamline team workflows.

In this article, we’ll take a look at what Power Automation in SharePoint is, how it works, and demonstrate its value by discussing practical use cases and detailed setup instructions. You’ll also learn best practices to help you get the most out of combining Power Automation and SharePoint in your environment.

Key Features of Power Automate and SharePoint Integration

These features are the backbone of Power Automate’s integration with SharePoint, enabling seamless workflows and efficient data handling.

Triggers and Conditions

Power Automate uses triggers, conditions, and actions. For example, you can configure SharePoint triggers to fire when a file is created or modified, or when the metadata of your file changes.

Connectivity

With hundreds of connectors available, you can connect your SharePoint data to other Microsoft 365 applications such as Teams, Outlook, or OneDrive. For example, the process of a manager approving a document. The user creates a document and sends it for review, Power Automate immediately notifies the manager to approve or reject the document (we’ll look at this example later in the article).

Customization

Although Power Automate comes with many pre-built templates, there’s nothing stopping you from creating your own workflows for more specialized scenarios in your organization. However, if you are new to these tools, I would advise you to try the pre-built flows and customize them as little as possible. As there can be a lot of settings.

Power Automate in SharePoint facilitates the creation of automated workflows between your apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more, without coding expertise. By utilizing triggers and actions in Power Automate, SharePoint users can design custom workflows that automate document approvals, alert notifications, and data population tasks. This integration harnesses the power of SharePoint’s robust content management capabilities alongside Power Automate’s conditional logic, enabling complex, multi-step processes that can respond dynamically to changes within SharePoint environments.

Helmut D.

PowerApps / Power Automate / Power Platform Developer

Setting Up Power Automate Flow in SharePoint

Let’s take a look at how to get started integrating Power Automate with SharePoint. The first steps include making sure you have the correct licenses, permissions, and a basic understanding of the Power Automate interface.

Accessing Power Automate

Create a Flow

For example, let’s look at the template prepared by Microsoft ‘Request for manager’s approval of the selected position’.

For a selected item

Our first step is the trigger. It allows us to choose which list or library we want to call the flow from. Here we also see a message field for the manager, he will see this in his notifications, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Get item

Once we have received the item from the trigger, Power Automate will take all the details of that item, such as the title, description, or any necessary metadata fields, for further actions in the flow.

Get my profile / Get a manager

These actions are very interesting and show the principle of how the flow works. Since the user sent the item for verification, the flow works under his name. That’s why we use the Office 365 connector to get data about the user who started this flow. After we get the data about the current user, we can already request information about the user’s manager. This information is needed to send the approval to the right person.

Start an approval

After collecting all the necessary information, the workflow starts the approval action. This is a standard process, so the flow sends an email or a message to MS Teams to the manager that it needs to do an approval process. To make the message for the manager more informative, we also added additional information about what exactly he needs to check.

Condition
- We split the flow into two parts based on the manager’s response after he has approved or rejected the request.
  - If yes: Send an email to inform the requester of the approval.
  - If no: Send an email notifying the requester of the rejection.

Publishing
- Once you’re satisfied with your test results, Save or Publish the flow.
- Going forward, it will run automatically whenever the specified event – such as selecting an item for manager approval – occurs.

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How Does It Work?

In SharePoint, you can trigger the “Request manager approval for a selected item” flow that can be launched in two convenient ways- either directly from a list item’s right-click menu, or from a custom button added to the list interface. This flexibility to customize the manual call allows you to tailor any solution to your needs. For example, in our case study, it is better to use a button that is located directly within the list. This allows you to see which document requires confirmation when adding a new document. This allows us to perceive the data more conveniently.

Contextual Menu

Navigate to the SharePoint list or library where your items are stored.
Click On record what you want to Approve→ Automate → Request manager approval for a selected item (or the name you’ve assigned to your flow).

The flow will start, prompting you to confirm any necessary details before sending the request to the designated manager.

Custom Button

If you prefer a more visible and user-friendly approach, you can add a button in your SharePoint list’s command bar to trigger the same flow.

Once configured, team members simply select the item they want to approve and click the custom button. The system then launches the flow, capturing all relevant data and sending it to the approver.

By providing these two ways to run, you expand the possibilities for different types of tasks. Sometimes it’s better to invoke it from the right-click menu if you don’t need to run it often, maybe use the button embedded in the list if you always need to run it for a flow item.

In both cases, the flow can perform the same actions: gather information about the selected item, retrieve user profiles, and send approval requests. We can also use event triggers to start the flow, which will increase the automation of your business process.

Some of our Power Apps Experts

Gustavo M.

– Power Platform / SharePoint Developer

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Helmut D.

– PowerApps / Power Automate / Power Platform Developer

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Stephan W.

– Tableau / Power Apps / Power Automate Developer

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Common Automation Examples in SharePoint

Although the possibilities are nearly endless, let’s explore a few automation examples that highlight the range of tasks you can automate:

Automatic Notifications

Set up an alert to email a specific team whenever a list item is updated. Perfect for scenarios like help desk tickets.

Archiving Old Documents

You can use the date to determine when a file was last modified, and if it was a long time ago, flow can move it to an archive folder. This automation will keep your sites in order without spending too much time.

Create a Folder in SharePoint for New Projects

You can configure Power Automate to automatically create a folder in SharePoint when a new "Project" list item is created, allowing you to standardize file management across the site. This also allows you to have a consistent file structure and access scheme that migrates from site to site.

Synchronizing Lists

If you have multiple SharePoint lists with overlapping data, use a workflow to synchronize them. When an item is updated in one list, the changes are duplicated in the other. This can be useful if you have two tables in which you store customer information. For example, Sales and Marketing should have a list of customers, but the other tables and files are different. To avoid confusion and to merge the two departments into one SharePoint site, you can synchronize the customer table for the two SharePoint sites. This will establish communication between the departments, and each department will have only the information it needs on its own site.

Scenarios like these demonstrate how easy it is to customize Power Automate – SharePoint solutions to your organization’s needs. Once you develop the flow you need, you essentially have a “set it and forget it” system.

Our Successful Case Study

Among our long-term contracts is a Microsoft cloud solutions provider. The team specializes in empowering small and medium-sized businesses with advanced cloud solutions and has been very successful!

The firm came to us with an urgent need for an additional part-time consultant. They needed a Senior professional with a high level of proficiency in Microsoft Power Platform tools, including Power Apps, Power Automate, and Power BI. In addition, they were looking for candidates with at least four years of consulting experience to provide hands-on experience.

Within a short timeframe, we successfully found and hired a Business Central Consultant with extensive Power Apps experience and a strong portfolio. The selected candidate easily integrated into the company’s operations and helped to deliver projects on time and with high quality.

Our client was satisfied with the fast and efficient hiring process, as our expert’s qualifications were exactly in line with their needs.

Best Practices for SharePoint - Power Automate Integration

Here are some recommendations I can give you that will help you get the most out of SharePoint automation in the shortest possible time:

Start Small

Start with simple automation scenarios to familiarize your team with the Power Automate concept and interface. You don’t need to consolidate a large business process into a single flow!

Break the business process into parts and describe the operations that the flow should perform. And start with a small flow. Then you can create a second flow and transfer information from the previous one into it. This way you will have a flexible system where you can easily add sub-processes or additional automation, or quickly replace a part of the process.

With this approach, you will end up with an impressive database of flows, which allows you to adapt existing flows rather than creating new ones for automation. This allows you to reduce the time spent on automation development.

Leverage Templates

Microsoft provides a library of flow templates for common scenarios. They can speed up development and serve as a learning tool. This is a great opportunity to avoid the problem of a clean slate. Use the templates, adapt them to your business process, it will broaden your understanding of how to use the tool.

Use Variables and Expressions

Make your flows more flexible by storing reusable data in variables. This approach helps you keep your flow organized, which serves as a foundation for easy support and scalability of that flow.

Monitor Runs

Regularly review and analyze your execution history in Power Automate. This will give you insight into how to optimize the process, and you’ll be able to find the bottleneck in the process more quickly.

Testing and Iteration

Always run a thorough test with different data sets, user accounts, and site configurations to make sure your flows are robust before rolling them out to an entire organization.

Document All Flows

Keep information about why each flow was created, who owns it, and what it does. Documenting each block of your flow will make it easier to share this business process, because when you read such a document, you already understand what the flow does and what is expected of it. It will also help when introducing new team members, they will not have to understand each flow on their own, and they will be able to start working in your environment quickly.

Why Is It Effective?

Power Automate is an incredible tool that with SharePoint, will transform your organization’s routine into a process that won’t even be visible. By understanding the essence of SharePoint automation and carefully planning your flows, you will automate your business processes in the shortest time. From automatically archiving outdated documents to organizing multi-step approval processes, combine Power Automate and SharePoint.

Of course, you will need to learn the Power Automate interface, and an in-depth understanding of SharePoint at the API level to properly configure the events to which the flow will respond. You will be constantly improving your workflows. Whether you need a complex multi-step integration with a third-party service or a consistent chain of approvals, the integration of SharePoint and Power Automate lays a solid foundation that will enable you to automate.

Study what your departments do, ask about their routine tasks, adopt SharePoint and Power Automate, and watch those unloved processes become smooth and fast. Explore different automation examples, experiment with SharePoint triggers, and remember that there is no limit in process automation, just like there is no limit to the power of Power Automate and SharePoint.

If you need to cope with this integration hassle-free, we are here to help. Hire Power Automate developers with us to set up workflows and get reliable tools.

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By Ivan Farafonov

I'm passionate about sharing my extensive experience in Microsoft and Dynamics 365 technologies. Beyond the technical realm, I excel in recruiting and building high-performing teams, ensuring every project is executed with precision and collaboration. As a contributor to HireDynamicsDevelopers, I share my insights on maximizing Dynamics 365’s potential, blending technical expertise with strategic team development. My passion lies in both technology and fostering talented professionals to achieve outstanding results.

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How to Use Power Automate in SharePoint?