Licensing hosted RPA scenarios

Power Automate now supports two hosted RPA scenarios to enable organisations to set up and scale automation. As a reminder, RPA desktop flows can be run either with human interaction (known as “attended”) or without (“unattended”). The new options offer a hosted machine for attended or unattended RPA aimed at users who want to build, test or run automation. Alternatively, there’s a hosted machine group option for unattended RPA which offers automatic scaling and dynamic load balancing. From a licensing perspective, you need to acquire a Hosted RPA Add-on licence for as many bots as you want to run concurrently, and this licence has a prerequisite of either the Power Automate Per User with Attended RPA licence or a Per Flow licence, and costs $215 per bot per month.

You can find the announcement here: http://bit.ly/3JbWoZ4, pricing here: http://bit.ly/3ooVJb2, and the Learn documentation here: http://bit.ly/3DfJN3f.

Power Automate Desktop

Microsoft announce that Power Automate Desktop is now available to Windows 10 users at no additional cost.

It’s a free download and enables users to automate tasks by recording actions such as mouse and keyboard clicks across multiple applications, and then replaying them when needed. Users who then want to share flows across an organisation and to take advantage of additional capabilities will need to be licensed with a Power Automate with Attended RPA user licence.

This currently costs $40 per user per month, but there’s a promotion beginning on 1 April, 2021 where the licence (as long as a minimum of 5,000 are purchased) will only cost $15 per user per month until 30 September, 2021.

Find the announcement with links to download Power Automate Desktop and to access further information, here: http://bit.ly/2PLXLE7.

Power Apps Licensing Guide

There’s an updated (August 2020) Power Apps Licensing Guide.

The main change is clarification that the Power Apps per app/per user licences do not include RPA functionality for which a separate purchase of Power Automate per user with attended RPA plan is required.

As usual, find the details of all of the changes in the Change Log on page 24, and get the updated guide itself here: https://bit.ly/3kumMyF.

RPA Licensing Brief

Microsoft launched their Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capability in April, 2020. As a reminder, RPA helps users to automate tasks by recording actions to be played back later, either with human interaction (known as “attended”) or without (“unattended”). if you want to find out more about this capability, then there’s a new (April 2020) Licensing Brief which directs you to RPA documentation and resources, and includes a number of FAQs with a full section dedicated to licensing and pricing questions.

Find this Licensing Brief here: https://bit.ly/RPVPowAutApr2020

Robotic Process Automation availability

Microsoft announce that Robotic Process Automation (RPA) capability is available from 2 April, 2020. RPA helps users to automate tasks by recording actions to be played back later, either with human interaction (known as “attended”) or without (“unattended”).

There are two new licences to support this functionality: a Power Automate per user plan with attended RPA at $40 per user per month, and an Unattended RPA Add-on at $150 per bot per month which must be added on to the Attended plan or a Power Automate per flow plan.

Find the announcement here: https://bit.ly/34uD4A0, along with examples of RPA in action and an overview video.

Power Platform Updates

Microsoft announce some changes to the Power Platform of which the most notable enhancements are: Microsoft Flow is renamed to Microsoft Power Automate, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is added for delivering an end-to-end automation solution, and Microsoft Power Virtual Agents are added to allow intelligent AI-powered virtual agents to be created and deployed. Find the full announcement here: http://bit.ly/2NWKFQT.