Take a Ride on the Connector Express
Ready to saddle up and ride the wild software? Lately, you may have noticed there have been a plethora of new Power Automate connectors that have become available.
Consequently, I have been reviewing my heart out, discovering some interesting ones, some that are fun and other real standouts. This assortment from A to X represents the final ones that were added during June and July-to-date of 2022. I have made these reviews deliberately brief so you can learn more by diving into each one as you see the need. My purpose in reviewing them is first to learn what they do, and second to let you know what they can do for you and your business.
With AikiDocs connector, your can extract information from your Word or Excel documents into your document or insert your documents into a Word document at a specified bookmark. In a phrase, with this connector, you can manage and manipulate your documents automatically.
Four stars
The Cognizant Automation Center control activities in the systems integration of bots, services IPs, platform and solutions. This connector’s actions offer you automation to:
- Create or update additional attribute of an activity.
- Create Activity Log.
- Create Technology or Application Activity.
- Update action output based on activity action id.
- Link as Child Activity.
- Read Attributes using activity Id and return in output in JSON format.
- Get the executed action status using activity action id.
- Get IS execution status based on activity id.
- Trigger IS in activity based on SkillId.
- Trigger Automation Center Derived Action.
The last two are confusing to read because they are actions, not triggers, so be careful not to get ahead of yourself when planning your flow.
Three stars
For contract management (AKA document signing), check out the Oneflow connector. It’s actions offer most of the typical features you’d expect a connector of this category to do, including:
- Ping to check if the Oneflow API is available.
- Create a new contract based on the selected template.
- Add attachment or a PDF document to a contract.
- Add participant to the contract.
- Send a contract to participants for signing.
- Get the details or status of a specific contract.
- Delete a specific contract.
- Download a specific contract file.
Three stars
PDFcross connector’s three actions let you manipulate your portable document files (PDFs) such that you can merge multiple PDFs into one PDF file, watermark your document, or password protect it. To use it you’ll need a PDFcross API key, and this platform is a pay-as-you-go model so if these features are ones you find useful, you can keep your costs to a minimum. Fun fact: the Microsoft documentation states, “We support Japanese language.”
Four stars
If you’re hopping the express train towards process management, you’ll want to take a look at Process Street, a platform for teams. With both actions and triggers, this Power Automate connector’s actions can:
- Get all the form fields of workflow run
- Get the most recent 200 active workflow runs that match your query
- Get a user
- Update a workflow run
- Update the workflow run form fields, and
- Run a workflow run based on a workflow
Plus, the connector will trigger a flow
- each time a task is completed, uncompleted or both, or becomes ready in Process Street
- when a workflow is run, and
- when a workflow run is completed
In addition, their site has a bunch of case studies, webinars and videos that you’ll find useful if you’re considering using this connector.
Four and a half stars!
“What might you want to use Text Analytics connector for?” you ask.
The Text Analytics connector automates actions that can perform sentiment analysis, extract key phrases, or scrub PII data from your text data.
This prompted me to ask, “What’s PII data?” Sometimes these things should be obvious, but let’s face it, ours is a field fraught with acronyms and sometimes I’m just having a Monday even when it’s mid-week. Not surprisingly, I found the answer at DHS.gov (Department of Homeland Security)
“DHS defines personally identifiable information or PII as any information that permits the identity of an individual to be directly or indirectly inferred, including any information that is linked or linkable to that individual, regardless of whether the individual is a U.S. citizen, lawful permanent resident, visitor to the U.S., or employee or contractor to the Department.”
Got it!
In order to use this connector, you’ll need an Office365 account to register, use their free trial button in the developer zone and save your API key, noting valid dates. While it only has three actions now, this connector seems like it could really be a supportive tool for market analytics and cleaning up your PII.
Four stars
The Turkish made Varuna connector helps users manage the documents in their sales, service and logistics processes. Several actions include:
- Create a document with document type and related body parameters
- Update a document with document type and document Id
- Delete a specific document with document type and document Id
- Get a specific document via a document type and a document Id
- Get all documents for a document type
There’s also a single trigger for a flow to get a notification for a specific document and event (create, delete, or update).
To use this one, you’ll need a Varuna subscription, a Microsoft Power Apps or Power Automate plan to use the Varuna connector, an API key and Tenant ID from the Varuna platform.
Three and a half stars
Cortex XSoar is an extended security orchestration, automation and response or (SOAR) platform. It unifies security automation, case management, real-time collaboration and threat intel management. So, it’s pulls together and automates security operations. This independently published connector for Power Automate has one action, to send JSON data to XSOAR. We reached out some time ago to the creator to learn more but so far, no answer.
One half star
When I wrote about new connectors at the start of June there were only 726 of them. Now, there are 786! At this rate, there will be more than 1000 Power Automate connectors to choose from before we know it, and I’ll continue to review each one as they become available. Not sure which connectors are best for your project? Ask us!
