Having purchased WinAutomation I cannot envisage Microsoft will spend cash duplicating Power Automate Desktop capabilities in the other options. I suspect that Power Automate Desktop will become the preferred option for creating UI Flows. When you create a new UI Flow you are prompted to select which of the three types of UI flow you want to create. Prior to this UI Flows could be created by either utilizing the Windows recorder or using the Selenium open source framework see my post on these. WinAutomation was a well established RPA product with significant capabilities and the purchase allowed Microsft to jump-start their RPA offering. It was previously known as WinAutomation until Microsoft made the very shrewd move of purchasing Softomotive the owners of WinAutomation.

Power Automate Desktop is a relatively new addition to the Power Platform. RPA is typically used for legacy applications where integration support is not available or expensive. RPA is when software replicates the actions of an user such as mouse clicks and keyboard entry. UI Flows provide RPA, Robotic Processing, Automation, capabilities to the Power Platform. In this post, I am going to expand on this and take this invoice information and use a UI Flow to submit the invoice details to a legacy application.

In a recent blog post I showed how you can use the Form Processing capabilities in AI Builder to extract the details of invoices received as email attachments.

Power automate desktop install