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Can someone help me understand Power Automate Desktop licensing

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Posted on by Aapok

Hi.

I've been researching the possibility of creating a Power Automate Desktop flow to automate a SAP transaction, but I can't figure out if this solution will work in practice due to the licensing of PA.

Some information regarding my project:

1) Most people in my company (myself included) have the Microsoft 365 E3 - license, which includes Power Automate for Office365.

2) The flow I've built uses no premium features. There's a couple of simple custom forms for gathering user inputs, logic to launch SAP GUI and executing the transaction (by running VBScript).

3) With Windows 11, the PAD-application is installed on our computers by default. This is one of the main reasons we're looking into the possibilities of PAD.

The question I'm looking to answer:

With my current license, I'm unable to share my flow with others. If I had a premium license, would I be able to share my flow to others in my company, and would they be able to use my flow with their current licenses (Microsoft 365 E3), or would they require a premium license as well? If a premium license is required from everyone who uses the flow I'm going to have to look for other ways to implement the automation.

I'm happy to provide more information / answer any questions if my post wasn't clear enough.

Thanks in advance.

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Power Automate Desktop

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stephen81 16 on at

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You might be interested to know that new SAP connectors and app/automate templates have just been announced. I don't have a link at the moment but you might be able to do what you want in a cloud flow in the very near future.

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LogicSmith 225 on at

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You basically have it correct. The free PAD from the Windows Store or O365 works great, but doesn't share nicely. If you want to share flows, both you and the sharees will need the Premium license. When we got ours (3 of us), they were on sale for $15/month, but I think they're normally $40.

As a workaround, you can edit your flow and copy to the clipboard (Ctrl-A, Ctrl-C), paste into a new Notepad file, and send that file to your coworkers. They copy the contents, then paste into an empty flow. As far as I can tell, this is about the only way to freely share a flow.

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Aapok on at

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Thanks for your reply.

I feared this was the case, and I don't think buying the premium license for everyone who would use the flow is a feasible scenario. Also thanks for suggesting the copy paste method, but again maintaining the flow would be too much work like this. I'll have to work on some other implementation then.

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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That's odd...my previous supervisor and I shared flows no problem, so unless it has been deprecated, this should work:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wfe7yPdGUCE

Good luck!

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Aapok on at

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Hi.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll have to look into it. From what I could tell you can download a local copy, I'm assuming if I make changes to the flow they won't be updated to other users using this method?

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LogicSmith 225 on at

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That is probably a safe assumption. However, if someone makes a change to theirs and it is desired everywhere, they can still do the copy/paste via Notepad and email it to everyone else. Crude but workable on a small scale.

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MichaelAnnis 5,727 Moderator on at

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If they download a copy, no, but there is version control, so you can see what version it was created in which assists in that and you can name them however you wish. There might be a way for them to simply run it from the web, but I'm not sure, as we always downloaded our own local copy.

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