The top automations and actions that will save you time in O365.
There are stacks of options for automation within the Microsoft 365 eco-system. Automation allows you to set up a process that runs automatically to reduce manual processing and repetition.
Microsoft Power Automate is an excellent cloud program in the Microsoft 365 ecosystem. Previously called Microsoft Flow, Power Automate allows you to create actions that will save you time.
There are also other great automation options around, outside of the Microsoft eco-system such as Zapier, Tray.io, and Integromat. These can still be integrated with Microsoft 365.
We have put together a quick list of 5 quick and easy automations to get you started.
1. Save email attachments in Outlook to OneDrive
This is fairly simple time saver which automatically saves all of the attachments sent to your Office 365 Email address to a folder in OneDrive for Business. A few tweaks, would allow you to change the folder locations to even sort into folder by date or by sender.
2. Save email attachments from Outlook.com to Dropbox
Similar to the above automation, this one takes attachments received at your Outlook.com email address and saves them to Dropbox. Follow up additions could see you add an email or notification to another email address such as Gmail.
3. Create a task in Planner when a new email arrives in a shared mailbox
This is a handy automation that triggers when an email arrives into a shared mailbox. Let’s say that your company has a customer service or support email address and when an email is received, a task is created in Microsoft Planner with a due date after a specified time. This could be used to create a support ticket for follow up by staff. Assign a due date of how long you would like, say 48 hours to have the issue actioned or resolved.Â
4. Email me with a list of upcoming Calendar events
This automation is rather clever, you can schedule it to run whenever is best. It analyses the following week in your calendar, looking for events, flights, hotels, weather information and locations, and sends you a handy summary via email.
5. Email yourself new Tweets about a certain keyword
Easily track tweets containing specific keywords on Twitter, according to your interests. You will get an email every time that your keyword is included in a tweet. This could be a good way to track your brand specific keywords or just keep up on the latest #CatVideos 😺
So, there are a few automations to get you started, but as you can imagine, the options are basically endless. Take a look at some more templates on Microsoft’s Power Automate site.
