Using Power Automate with RapidStart CRM (Part 1)

To demonstrate how you can easily customize RapidStart CRM to meet your needs, we created this "Tips and Tricks" Series. In this series we will outline some simple-to-perform solutions to common things customers ask about RapidStart CRM. Enjoy!

Power Automate

Power Automate is a part of the Microsoft Power Platform, and works hand-in-hand with RapidStartCRM. If you read our previous post in this series, we used Power Automate to connect a Web Form to RapidStartCRM. But that was just scratching the surface of what could be done with this “automation” component. For this Part 1, we will focus on making a Flow from a Template.

Connectors

A key thing to understand is the concept of a “Connector”. A connector is basically a bridge between one app over to one or more other apps. While most of the Microsoft services are available as connectors, these are not limited to Microsoft by any means. As of this writing there are over 400 of these connectors. Here’s a screen shot of just a few:

Power Automate Interface

First you should get familiar with the Power Automate interface. You can login here to get to the page shown below. (You will want to confirm that you are connected to your RapidStartCRM environment.)

There are quite a few things to explore in the Power Automate landing page above. There are many pre-built templates for many common automation tasks you can explore. For RapidStartCRM, there are also many pre-built templates available. To view them, click on “Templates” in the sidebar and then enter “Dataverse” in the search bar to see the list below of about 85 ready-to-use templates.

Some of these templates assume you are using Dynamics 365 apps specifically, and will not work with RapidStartCRM without some tweaks. Also many of these assume you are using some other services of the Power Platform like AI Builder, or other services of Microsoft Cloud like Office 365, Microsoft Teams, Onedrive, etc. However these services are all available to you, depending on your Microsoft subscriptions.

Option 1: Start with a Template

To get the feel for this quickly, you can start with a template. Let’s try that with a simple one “When a record is updated in Microsoft Dataverse, send an email”. This is a pretty common desire.

The first thing you will be asked to do is “sign in” to any connected services this template uses to make the connections. After you sign in you can click “Continue” to be presented with the page below.

This looks more intimidating than it actually is.

1. In the “Environment” column, select “Current”.
2. In the “Table Name” column, select the table that you want to get notified for. For example, “Cases”.
3. You can leave the “Scope” as “Organization”
4. In the “Environment” column of the next section,  select “Current” again
5. In the “Table Name” column, select “Cases” again.
6. In the “Item Identifier” column, use the Dynamic selector and click on the “Unique Identifier for Case” item.

Your screen should like like the image below.

Now let’s take care of the email section by filling in the 3 necessary columns.

1. In the “To” column, you can start typing the user(s) that you want to get this notification, and select them.
2. Like any Email, the Subject is the same
3. In the body, you can include information from the Case like the Case Name using the Dynamic selector.

When complete, it should look like the below image.

You can now click the “Save” button, and if there is no alert next to the Flow Checker, your Flow will be activated. If there is an alert, you made a mistake somewhere. So let’s test this Flow now, by clicking on “Test” in the upper right.

We’re going to perform our test Manually, so click that and save like below.

Open a new tab in your browser, go to RapidStartCRM and make any change to any case record and save it. Then go back to the Flow tab. You should see the below screen.

If you see all green checks on the steps… congratulations, you have built your first Power Automate Flow for RapidStartCRM! But just to make sure, check that your recipients did indeed get the email :)

Summary

One of the things I noticed while creating this tutorial is that the Template uses some older versions of the connectors, but it will still works, and you got to try it. This flow may not be very practical as it will literally send an email every time anything on any case changes. But this was just to get you familiar. If you wanted to dial it in a little better, you can edit the flow, and open the “show advanced options” on the first step, and add a filter like “Priority”. In that case, only when the Priority column changes on a Case, will the email be sent. To learn how to create a Power Automate Flow from scratch, check out Part 2.

If you have any questions feel free to post them in the Free Support Forum.

If you need a more advanced solution, contact Forceworks.