Built-in actions, automations and automation actions

How they differ

	Built-in action	Automation	Automation action
What it is	A ready-made operation	A workflow with a trigger and steps	One step in an automation
Who starts it	You, by hand	A trigger: manually, on a schedule, on a policy violation, on form values or on a review	The automation it belongs to
Where you find it	On an object’s details page, or under “Actions” in an inventory datagrid	”Automation” on the navigation bar	Inside the automation builder
How many objects	The object or objects you select	Every object the trigger finds	The object the automation runs on
Example	Add user to a Team	Archive unused teams	Send email, Archive or unarchive a Team, Trigger webhook
Reference	Built-in actions	Automation templates	Automation actions

How it works

Built-in actions

A built-in action runs straight away on objects you pick. You open an object and click the action on its details page, or select several objects in a datagrid and choose the action under “Actions”. A dialog asks you to confirm or to fill in details, such as which Team to add a user to. Some actions need extra permissions in your tenant the first time you use one. An administrator gives consent, or you send them a consent link.

Automations

An automation has one trigger and one or more steps:

• Manually runs it on the object you start it from.
• On Schedule runs it periodically on policy violations or inventory items.
• On Policy Violation runs it after the next scan for every violation of a policy, and again for each object as long as it stays a violation.
• On form values runs it from a form, as provisioning templates do.
• On review runs it from a Review, for example when a reviewer chooses an action.

Steps can hold conditions, branches and approvals, so an automation can ask someone to approve before it archives or deletes anything. A threshold limit stops an automation after a number or a percentage of objects. You start from the “Automations Template Library” or build a custom automation. Every run that started from the same trigger at the same time is grouped in an automation batch, which is where you look when a run fails.

The automation page

1. Add Automation: opens the “Automations Template Library”, where you add a new automation.
2. Automation options ([…]): import an automation, or set the Automation page as your homepage.
3. Automations: the list of every configured automation. You can filter it by whether it is active, connector, name, trigger type, number of actions, number of times triggered, completed, incomplete or failed, category, owner and last update.

Automation actions

An automation action is what one step does. The actions available depend on the connector of the objects the automation runs on. Some work for every connector, such as sending an email or posting to a Teams channel. Send HTTP request, Trigger webhook and Trigger Azure Function connect an automation to other systems, such as Power Automate or ServiceNow.

Criticality

Built-in actions and automations each have a criticality level: Low, Medium or High. Sending an email to a site owner is Low, and deleting a SharePoint site collection is High. Roles carry separate permissions to run actions of each level, so you decide who may make high-impact changes.

Example

The policy “Teams with very few owners” lists three Teams that have one owner or none.

• For one urgent Team, you open it in the inventory and run the built-in action “Add or remove owner to/from a Team” to add a second owner.
• For the others, and for every Team that matches in future, you add the automation template “Send one email per Team owner” with the trigger On Policy Violation. Its automation action, Send email, writes to each owner, and you edit the message to ask for a second owner. It runs again after each scan until the Team has enough owners.

How it relates to other concepts

• Automations most often start from policy violations, and run after the next scan of the policy’s connector.
• Reviews can run automations when all reviewers reject a review, when it expires, or when a reviewer picks a custom action.
• Provisioning templates run automations on form values. See Provisioning.
• Automations are not available in a Virtual Environment.
• Who may run which action is set in roles.