Holy Cow! Nine New Power Automate Connectors
Each of the latest Power Automate connectors come from an independent publisher, most coming from prolific plugin author Troy Taylor. Whether you are in marketing, design, financials, or are looking to share important news and information with your employees, there are options for you.
Here’s a quick recap of these nine independently published connectors, two of which get high marks from Reenhanced!
Carbon Intensity from the non-profit by the same name is a super niche connector! It has one goal: to share the current carbon intensity of the electrical system in England, Scotland and Wales. With actions only, all you are able to do with it now is get the current levels for a given half hour, each fuel type, or the mix of fuel types within the Great Britain power system and insert them into other flows. Its use seems to be confined to the B2C arena, hoping that consumers will optimize their behavior to help minimize CO2 emissions. And about those emissions…
Three stars. (It’s tempting to add an extra star for their attempt to help the humans.)
Fresh from the pasture, this connector is limited by having only one action: “get a logo.” If you’re looking for a particular brand (see what I did there?) it could help you. When your job requires you to create original logos for your clients but you are concerned about unconscious artistic influences, and you want to avoid any chance of similarity between your creation and other logos already in use, you may find this connector helpful.
If you already work with Clearbit for marketing, then this is one more tool for you. However, its narrow possibilities for use at present suggest it will need to be enhanced in future iterations.
Two stars…for the connector, not the cow.
This connector for FRED, that’s Federal Reserve Economic Data, not the cow’s name! is an excellent tool for anyone in the financial services industry who relies on the aggregate economic data from a variety of sources (most of which are U.S. government agencies.) It’s loaded with a long list of actions and worth a look.
Boom! 5 stars.
For marketing professionals, this connector for Icon Horse users makes sense, so long as it has its own stable. When you’re digging through the barn (I mean websites!) to grab icons, is can be super-frustrating to snag one with low image quality. This Power Automate connector’s single action fetches a favicon which can be used in additional steps of your flow. Of course, its only useful for Icon Horse customers, but if you’re one, you could use this in your marketing and sales outreach.
Two stars.
Another great connector for marketing pros, MailboxValidator will help to validate email addresses. This connector provides an excellent step to add to your flows that ensures you’re sending to only valid email addresses that don’t come from disposable email address (DEA) providers before you send out communications. Before you step in it, protect your sender reputation metric for marketing!
Four stars!
Cattle futures important to you? The new New York Times connector’s actions could easily be adopted by organizations to gather popular or noteworthy news articles to distribute to employees on a company intranet.
It’s three actions include:
- Search for NYT articles by keywords,
- Get a list of the most viewed articles on NYTimes.com for specified period of time (1 day, 7 days, or 30 days), OR
- Get a list of top stories by Section.
I’m sure you can think of some cool ways to use this connector to help your team stay on top of the news.
Three stars.
The connector for use with the Orb database at Dun & Bradstreet offers these actions:
- Get a list of companies for a given search criteria
- Get a full corporate tree of subsidiaries
- Get a full company profile
- Get a list of companies that are look-alikes of the target company
- Match (API call that performs a candidate retrieval process)
This tool can add deeper information about companies to your flows which can be powerful information to possess, but I’d like to see triggers added in future connector updates here, like one that notifies a small family farmer when there’s been a specified change in corporate farming that could affect business practices.
Three stars.
Another among those from an independent publisher is the Weather channel connector for Power automate. It is the fifth weather-related one we’ve identified, and its actions allows you to pull weather events by geocode and time into your flow.
Two stars.
To best understand this connector, you should first know that UNIX is a computer operating system that controls hardware and software. In pre-internet days when timekeeping on the farm had everything to do with sunrise and sunset, UNIX was everywhere else. At the end of one long day on the farm, a person determined that all time for computers should start on January 1, 1970 at 12:00AM UTC. Every second since (known as the epoch) is how UNIX tracks time. The Unix Timestamp Power Automate connector converts UNIX timestamps to DateTime objects, and DateTime objects to Unix timestamps, with or without time zone. Until now, there has not been a good way to do that.
Two stars.
I could talk about the myriad (579 Power Automate connectors of which 37 hail from an independent publisher) ’til the cows come home, but that might be a bit much. At Reenhanced, we work hard to keep you astride of the latest connectors available. So much fun! What are you working on?
