Modern data workflows rarely stop at moving and transforming data. Once data is ready, you may need to trigger another operation in Fabric, refresh a semantic model, update a business application, send a notification, generate a document, or kick off the next step in a business process.
With Fabric Actions and Business Actions activities in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory, you can bring these steps directly into your Fabric pipelines. Together, these activities make it easier to orchestrate workflows across Fabric and the business applications your organization relies on, without having to build and maintain custom API integrations for every scenario.
We’re continuing to expand what you can do with these activities, with support for more Fabric operations and 25 additional third-party connectors for Business Actions.
Bring Fabric operations directly into your pipelines
The Fabric Actions activity lets you invoke supported Fabric REST API operations directly from a pipeline. Instead of manually constructing REST API requests and managing the underlying authentication and request details, you can select the Fabric operation you need, configure its inputs, and incorporate it into the rest of your pipeline workflow.
We’re expanding the range of supported Fabric actions across experiences such as Lakehouse, Warehouse, Notebook, Copy Job, Dataflow, Eventhouse, Eventstream, semantic models, OneLake shortcuts, Workspaces, Capacity, and more.
This gives you more ways to automate Fabric as part of an end-to-end workflow. For example, you could run a Notebook as part of your data processing flow, manage a OneLake shortcut, perform a Lakehouse operation, or refresh a semantic model after new data is ready, all orchestrated from the same pipeline.
Fabric Actions also provides built-in connection and credential handling, helping reduce the authentication and integration work that would otherwise be required when calling supported Fabric APIs directly.
The following visual shows how you can select and configure a Fabric operation directly within your pipeline.
Figure: Invoke supported Fabric operations directly from your pipeline with Fabric Actions.Connect your pipelines to more business applications
While Fabric Actions helps you orchestrate operations within Fabric, Business Actions helps connect your data workflows to the business applications and services where business processes happen.
With this release, we’re expanding Business Actions with 25 additional third-party connectors, opening new possibilities across CRM, communications, document generation and signing, security, financial planning, project management, marketing, and more.
For example, you can use Business Actions to:
- Send SMS notifications with D7SMS.
- Generate contracts, invoices, proposals, and other documents with Formstack Documents.
- Automate CRM and sales processes with connectors such as Pipeliner CRM and Commercient.
- Incorporate electronic signature workflows with Nitro Sign Enterprise Verified.
- Connect pipeline workflows with project and portfolio management systems.
- Integrate security and threat intelligence operations with services such as RiskIQ.
- Automate website content publishing with WP Connectr for WordPress.
These additions build on the Business Actions experience to give pipeline authors more ways to connect data with the systems and processes that teams use every day.
The following visual highlights some of the business applications that can be connected to your pipeline using Business Actions.
Figure: Connect your pipelines to business applications and services with Business Actions.Find and configure the action you need
As we expand the actions available to pipeline authors, we’re also making them easier to discover and configure.
Discover Fabric operations
With the updated Fabric Actions experience, you can browse or search for supported Fabric operations instead of needing to know the underlying REST API endpoint ahead of time.
Once you select an operation, the activity surfaces the relevant configuration and required parameters. You can then select an existing Fabric connection or create one, provide the required inputs, and use dynamic content where supported.
The following visual shows the updated experience for discovering the Fabric operation you want to use.
Figure: Browse supported Fabric operations from the Fabric Actions picker.Figure: Search for supported Fabric operations from the Fabric Actions picker.Configure your action
Getting started is straightforward. Add Fabric Actions or Business Actions to your pipeline, find the operation you want to perform, configure the required inputs and connection, and incorporate the activity into your pipeline flow.
For Fabric Actions:
- Create or open a pipeline in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory.
- Add the Fabric Actions activity to the pipeline.
- Browse or search for the Fabric operation you want to perform.
- Select or create a Fabric connection.
- Configure the required inputs.
- Save and run your pipeline.
When the activity runs, the selected Fabric operation executes as part of the pipeline, with its response available through the activity output.
Business Actions follows the same principle by providing structured configuration for supported business application operations, so you can incorporate business processes without starting from a custom API integration.
Go from data workflows to business workflows
The real power comes from combining Fabric Actions and Business Actions with the rest of your pipeline.
Consider a pipeline that processes the latest sales data. Once processing completes, the same pipeline could refresh the semantic model used for reporting, create or update a record in a CRM system, generate a customer document, and send a notification that the latest information is ready.
Or imagine a document workflow where a pipeline processes business data, generates a contract from that data, starts an electronic signature process, and continues downstream processing once the appropriate business step has taken place.
Rather than building separate integrations for each part of the process, you can bring data processing, Fabric operations, and business actions together as part of a larger orchestrated workflow.
This allows your pipelines to coordinate not only what happens to your data, but what happens next because of your data.
The following visual shows an example of an end-to-end pipeline that brings data processing, Fabric operations, and business processes together.
Figure: Bring data, Fabric operations, and business actions together in a single pipeline.More actions, more possibilities
We’re continuing to expand both Fabric Actions and Business Actions to give pipeline authors more ways to connect their data workflows with the next step in their business process.
For Fabric Actions, that means broader coverage across Fabric workloads and platform operations, from Lakehouse, Warehouse, Notebook, and Copy Job to semantic models, OneLake shortcuts, Workspaces, Capacity, and more.
For Business Actions, that means expanding the connector ecosystem so pipelines can interact with more of the applications and services organizations use every day.
Our goal is to make these integrations easier to discover, configure, and incorporate into the pipelines you already build, so you can spend less time building integration plumbing and more time building end-to-end workflows.
Get started
To get started, open a pipeline in Microsoft Fabric Data Factory and explore the Fabric Actions and Business Actions activities.
Whether you’re automating an operation within Fabric, connecting your pipeline to a downstream business application, or building a workflow that spans both, Fabric Actions and Business Actions give you more ways to turn data into action directly from Fabric Pipelines.
We’re excited to continue expanding the actions you can connect and automate as part of your Fabric data workflows.
To learn more, check out the Use the Fabric actions activity in a pipeline and Use the business action activity in a pipeline documentation.
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