Power Automate News: 17 New Connectors!
Looking for that one perfect connector for your project? Narrowing the choices down is now easier than finding that one gregarious friend in a large crowd.
First, ask yourself:
“What do aviation, banking, Congress, conference planning, dummy text, education, non-profits, time zones, the weather and tides, and URL access, ALL have in common?”
If you answered,
“Independent publishers delivered new Power Automate connectors to address each of these topics,” you would be correct! Ha!
Maybe one of these new ones will become your perfect connector or one you can build on.
A Look at Independently Published Connectors
With the actions of the Aviationstack connector you can track: airplanes and aircraft, aircraft types, global airlines or airports, destination cities and countries, aviation taxes, and flights and flight status information in real-time. In your business, if used in combination with a weather information connector for Power Automate, you’ll wield a lot of power to anticipate real changes that could affect your supply chain.
Four stars
If you have the need to verify a debit or credit card’s Bank Identification Number (BIN), the sole action of the BIN Checker connector automates your search for a provided BIN code.
Two stars
Fun for web developers and designers who want to insert a random page of dummy text, or a page of text from a specific title within the Gutenberg Project (instead of the more widely used Latin Lorem Ipsum), you can utilize Lit Ipsum actions. This one tickles my designer heart. If not random, then choose from titles like The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, The Picture of Dorian Gray, or other copyright-free pieces of classic literature.
Two and a half stars
“Basil,” he said, coming over quite close and looking him straight in the face, “we have each of us a secret. Let me know yours, and I shall tell you mine. What was your reason for refusing to exhibit my picture?”
The painter shuddered in spite of himself. “Dorian, if I told you, you might like me less than you do, and you would certainly laugh at me. I could not bear your doing either of those two things. If you wish me never to look at your picture again, I am content. I have always you to look at. If you wish the best work I have ever done to be hidden from the world, I am satisfied. Your friendship is dearer to me than any fame or reputation.”
~ The Picture of Dorian Gray
ProPublica
Keeping tabs on the U.S. Congress? With great power comes great responsibility.
With 44 possible actions, the ProPublica Congress connector should excite all politically minded people. I can see this one being heavily used by PACs, opposition watchers, and politicians alike. With its boatload of possible details about House and Senate members, votes, bills, nominations and other aspects of congressional activity, a user can automate the information they retrieve about current status of their favorite or less favored reps or legislation of interest.
Four stars
For grant writers, foundations and others who provide grants to non-profit organizations, the term “small but mighty” comes to mind here. The ProPublica Non-Profit Explorer connector lets you tap into the summaries of 3 million tax returns from tax-exempt organizations. These detail finances including executive compensation, and revenue and expenses. Its two actions let you get all available data for a given organization by it’s EIN, or a list of non-profit organizations matching given search terms. With it, those who are looking for funding can get a sense of other non-profits in the same or similar sectors in which they serve such as: the arts, education, addressing social justice issues, the environment, and more. Foundations, prior to distributing funds, can confirm the status of the organizations to which they are considering granting monies. Boom!
Four stars
Independently Published (continued)
The Reachability connector for Power Automate has a single action that helps to determine the “reachability” of any URL, which is useful for discovering network issues from different routes so you could then build your status pages accordingly.
Four stars
Event planners, specifically those who are coordinating conferences may already have encountered the Sessionize API. With this connector, you’ll be able to get a list of sessions or a list of speakers for your conference. I’d love to see the addition of triggers in future iterations, particularly to address the earliest stages of planning, i.e. trigger a flow when a speaker is officially booked, or when a co-presenter is added to a session.
Three stars
The ninth available weather-info connector for Power Automate, Storm Glass snags not only weather, but tides, sea level, elevation data and more. This one is another resource for scientists and scholars who study climate change.
- Get sunrise, sunset, moonrise, moonset and moon phase for a single coordinate.
- Get bio related data for a point.
- Get elevation data (bathymetry for oceans and topography for land) for a point.
- Get all available tide stations list.
- Get the tide stations area within a defined geographic area.
- Get solar-related data for a point.
- Get information about high and low tide for a single coordinate.
- Get the sea level given in meters hour by hour for a single coordinate.
- Get weather data for a single coordinate.
Three stars
Educators looking to teach courses or business organizations looking for continuing education courses for their employees can get info about Udemy learning courses with the four possible actions which include:
- Get a list of courses.
- Get course details.
- Get a list of course reviews.
- Get a list of curriculum items.
A cool idea for a future update would be to trigger a flow when a new course has been added in a specific category. That alone would save potential users from having to randomly scout through the Udemy site on a regular basis, and avoid relying on Udemy’s website to promote exactly what you might be looking for at just the right time.
Three stars
The WorldTime connector lets the user request the current time in a given time zone. It’s five actions let you get a list of all time zones, or valid time zones for an area, request the current time based on an IP address (a best guess sourced from open source data), or the time zone for a location or region.
Two stars
This one bears further investigation so we’ve reached out to the creator to get the details. For this reason, I’m holding off on a rating right now, so stay tuned!
The Final Six ~ Is Your Next Perfect Connector Among Them?
This group may hold your next perfect connector given the topics of education, language translation, logistics, relationship database management and security.
DomainTools Iris Enich Power Automate connector for the security API is designed for high volumes of queries of domain name attributes including: Whois, DNS, SSL certificate, and risk scoring elements. Its two actions enable automation to obtain either the infrastructure and whois data associated with a domain (or comma-separated list of up to 100 domains), or the information of the active API endpoints, rate limits and usage for an account. To use this connector requires:
- A Microsoft Power Apps or Power Automate plan with custom connector feature
- An Azure subscription
- DomainTools API Username
- DomainTools API Key
Three and a half stars
DomainTools Iris Investigate connector pairs well with the DomainTools Iris Enrich one, and requires the same prerequisites listed above. “The Iris Investigate API delivers dozens of domain name attributes on every result including Risk Score, DNS, Whois, SSL, and more,” according to the documentation. However, I was not thrilled with the caveat quote “It is best suited for human-scale interactions.” While this connector may be useful and I think in general the human touch when possible elevates digital integration, that just doesn’t sound like automation to me.
Two and a half stars
For relational database management system analytics needs, Exasol delivered its first connector with seven actions. Prerequisites require a Microsoft Power Apps or Power Automate plan, an Exasol database, and an internet facing Exasol REST API set up. This connector does not currently support on-premises data.
Two stars
Business is global. With My Accclaro connector, you can automate the language translation services you require from Acclaro for your website, URLs and translation integrations. Formidable at the outset with a slew of actions (45), this connector taps users into translations provided by professional, native language speakers. Powerful stuff!
Four stars
Geared to educational institutions, the tribal API works to assist them in connecting with potential students, and to provide qualitative experiences as students interact with those higher education institutions. With actions and triggers, the Tribal connector resource offers actions to:
- Create, read, update, or delete an entity
- Create, read, update, or delete a child entity; or to
- Read an entity collection or child entity collection
It triggers a flow when:
- a long running operation is performed on an entity
- an entity is created, updated or deleted, or
- when an event is triggered on an entity
Three stars
Use the Uber Freight connector’s actions to tap the logistics platform which provides 24/7 access to truckload freight. The API includes instant quoting and booking with “real-time visibility.” Its three actions can: tender an Uber Freight load, cancel a tender, or generate a price quote for an Uber Freight load.
Two stars
Other Power Automate connector changes of note
- Pitney Bowes Tax Calculator connector has been fully deprecated.
- Microsoft Dataverse added a trigger for when an action has completed.
- ArcGIS, which we originally covered HERE, added three triggers and several new actions.
It’s official! We’ve crossed another threshold in the Power Automate connector landscape. With the addition of these 17 new ones, there’s now a grand total of 711 from which to choose your perfect connector! If you’re not already using Power Automate connectors, your next project should include at least one. We can help you find that gem.
What sort of connector are you looking for?
