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Tag: power automate
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Timeghost Power Automate Connector for Timekeeping
The 360th Power Automate connector to enter the ether is the new Timeghost.
Great Vibe
Right off the bat, I found the name intriguing and loved the ghost logo for this new timekeeping connector. So, I was hoping its functionality would match my initial excitement because looks (even if they are other-worldly) aren’t everything!
So, let’s look under the sheet!
Easy Integration
The Timeghost integration allows you to login using your Office 365 credentials to generate time reports, invoices and other documents that you’ll want for a clear picture of how and where you and your team are spending time. The ability to drag and drop scheduled events directly from a list sourced from your Outlook Calendar onto the workspace makes it less likely you’ll forget to track important billable events.
Time Tracking the Details
Connector actions let you add a client or project to a workspace and then add a task, tag or time. Plus, it allows you the ability to update any of them. When you need an Excel report detailing who did what and how much time was dedicated to a project, the connector lets you get clients, projects, times, tasks, tags, or the current user so you’ll be able to invoice customers or pay your staff leaving the heavy lifting to the connector.
Why Ghosts?
Reminding you of things you have forgotten to track or prodding you to work on a procrastinated task, Timeghost creators put it this way, “ghosts are experts in bringing back things of the past,” beside you when you need them and gone once you are done. For Office 365 users, this Power Automate connector has the potential to make your timekeeping tasks seem like a friendly ghost is watching out for you.
When you need help with a connector or you need a custom connector tailored for your needs, feel free to reach out to Reenhanced! We know lots about Power Automate connectors. Fill out our Contact Form with details about what you’re working on and we’ll be in touch!
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Meet the Newest Power Automate Connector: dotdigital Engagement Cloud
Power Automate launched a new connector over the weekend: dotdigital Engagement Cloud. Upon initial review, it’s easy to write this new addition off as “yet another marketing automation tool.” But read on to learn why we think this connector might make a big splash.
Who is dotdigital Engagement Cloud?Dotdigital Engagement Cloud targets a few industries: retail, travel, sports & leisure, higher education and arts & entertainment. They offer a wide variety of case studies in each industry. The company has 13 locations worldwide, including the UK (where their head office is), United States, Australia, Singapore, Germany, Amsterdam, South Africa, Belarus and Poland.
Dotdigital identifies it’s top competitors pretty quickly on their website, offering comparisons between ClickDimensions, Emarsys, Klaviyo and Mailchimp. The differentiator, according to their comparison charts, is the inclusion of SMS, social retargeting and push notifications that are done using 3rd parties with some of the other players. All include email, landing pages, forms and chat.
The Engagement Cloud connector in Power Automate has 6 actions:
- Send transaction email using triggered campaign
- Send SMS message
- Send email campaign
- Create program enrollment
- Create contact
- Create address book
Why is Marketing Automation ignoring Power Automate?While the market is absolutely saturated with Marketing Automation vendors, Power Automate remains surprisingly quiet. Out of the 358 connectors currently available in Power Automate, only four are focused on a Marketing Automation solution: Engagement Cloud, emfluence Marketing Platform, Infusionsoft and Marketo.
We aren’t sure why Marketing Automation hasn’t taken the leap into Power Automate yet, but this leaves a BIG opportunity for dotdigital and the other 3 players. There’s a huge market for Power Automate users, and only four options means a big piece of the pie is up for grabs! It will be interesting to see what happens next. Will companies choose to build their own custom connectors with a different Marketing Automation platform? Will other Marketing Automation vendors get on board and release their own connectors? One thing is for certain: Reenhanced will be staying tuned to find out!
Help is AvailableIf you need help with this or any other connector, feel free to reach out to Reenhanced! We know more about Power Automate connectors than anybody else. Reenhanced can also build you a custom connector. We’re here to help if you need us! Fill out our Contact Form with details about what you’re working on, or email me directly at heidi@reenhanced.com.
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Connect with new Office 365 Groups Mail
The new Office 365 Groups Mail connector for Power Automate is all about keeping groups communication organized.
Office 365 Groups MailWhile there are now 357 connectors available to tempt you, for cohesive development you might consider adopting Office 365 Groups connector to use for calendar scheduling as a companion this new mail connector.
How Can this Connector Help You?
Office 365 Groups Mail actions allow you to start a new group by creating a thread, to create a new conversation in a group, or a new thread in a specific conversation, and to delete those conversation threads when they are no longer needed.
You’ll be able to get a specific thread post, conversation thread, or the properties of a particular conversation. As you might expect, you can add or reply to a post, forward it, or post to a thread in a group conversation.
Lists available include conversations or threads of a group, all of the threads in a group conversation, posts to a specific conversation thread, or a list of attachments that belong to a post.
This connector triggers when a new email arrives to a group.
If you decide to use this connector in your work or need assistance to get rolling, we’d love to hear from you. CONTACT Reenhanced at +1 (215)-804-9408.
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Education Connector for Marketing Automation Lands When it’s Needed
For marketing automation, and in light of school closures during the pandemic, the Dutch creators at Eduframe probably asked a question.
Looks like Eduframe delivered a new connector that answers the question and fulfills the need. So what’s the question?
“Wouldn’t it be great if there was a connector that could reach students through enrollment and allow educational institutions to offer their courses online?”
A full-featured management system, Eduframe connector integrates users, accounts, invoices, courses, and categories into flows with seamless integration to Canvas LMS.
Eduframe’s new connector brings the total number of available Power Automate connectors to 352!
What does it mean for education?
If you’re not in the field of education or someone who has school age kids, you may not know that Canvas LMS is a popularly used online educational software program for both K-12 and college level learning. Plus, with over 30 million users worldwide, lots of institutions rely on Canvas software for their classrooms. Eduframe’s connector syncing with Canvas LMS helps bring classroom learning from brick and mortar schools to the online world.
As a marketing automation connector, Eduframe helps educational institutions automatically publish to a storefront on their website with course listings, registration forms, pricing and online payment. This avails the opportunity for follow-up in Eduframe or from among a handful of the prominent mailing list hubs they may already be using. And it can integrate to the CRM or accounting software that many schools use now.
How does this automation impact the user?
We liked the idea that the Eduframe integration with Canvas allows students a single sign-on to both apps. And meetings planned in Eduframe for face-to-face or hybrid courses can sync to the Canvas calendar so students have a complete overview of what’s happening.
At Reenhanced, we work hard to stay on top of the most recent Power Automate connectors to keep you up-to-date. If you have questions about our service, CONTACT US. We’re happy to talk with you about your project.
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Deep Dive Into the Yeelight Power Automate Connector
At Reenhanced, we strive to be the first to know when new Power Automate connectors are added and when big changes are made. When I saw the Yeelight connector, I was immediately intrigued and decided to contact their team to learn more. A quick internet search on Yeelight showed me that they specialize in smart lighting, and I was curious how this could fit in with the business-focused Power Automate connectors we generally highlight.
Yeelight is the world-leading smart lighting brand, with in-depth exploration in smart interaction, industrial design and lighting experience.
Yeelight provides smart lighting solutions for homes and businesses. I virtually sat down with Victoria Wang, Business Development Manager for Yeelight, and to be honest, I had never even considered some of these use cases. I think some are brilliant!
Why did Yeelight decide to create a Power Automate connector?
“Yeelight is dedicated to bringing users the ultimate convenience. Over the years, Yeelight has integrated into major third-party platforms to offer users more control options. The Yeelight Power Automate connector offers simple but powerful functionality to increase office efficiency.”
How can Yeelight help existing Microsoft 365 customers?
“Light can be a useful signal in an office. Our connector uses customize light effects to indicate project status or certain events. For example, you can set the light red automatically when the conference room is in use. I personally like to set my Yeelight desk lamp to blink when receiving email from business partners.”
Do you have any examples of Flows that you or your customers have created since you have launched the connector?
“There are two major kinds of flow we use:
- To suggest status.
- To indicate events.
As mentioned above, green and red could be used to indicate conference room availability. Different brightness levels could indicate project process. Users can also use light to indicate events. For example, you can set a lamp to blink when a Twitter message is received. Or you can set a light to change when a new schedule item is about to start.”
What can Microsoft 365 customers look forward to in terms of future improvements to this connector?
“We want our connector to be simple and easy to use. We have no plans right now to change this connector.”
Will Yeelight be adding any additional Power Automate connectors in the future?
“Yeelight Pro, Yeelight’s commercial product line will be launched this year. Yeelight Pro offers lighting solutions for buildings and offices, and we hope to add a Yeelight Pro connector to help manage office lighting systems.”
Need Help?
Thank you so much to Victoria for letting us learn more about their connector and sharing so much with Reenhanced! We cannot wait to see the new Yeelight Pro connector in the future.
Reenhanced is a Power Platform Partner who can help you get up and running with this and other connectors today! If you need help, please reach out to us by emailing heidi@reenhanced.com or fill out our Contact Us form.
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New in Power Automate: Tilkee and Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT
On Friday, in addition to the other changes mentioned we saw the addition of two new Power Automate connectors: Tilkee and Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT. This brings the total number of connectors to 347. Both of these new connectors bring more external functionality to Power Automate, Power Apps, and Logic Apps.
Tilkee – A File Sharing Platform
Upload files into projects and track views and accesses. Tilkee is a web-based file sharing platform. Use it to share documents and files and track access to each item. It appears the developers of this app use English as a second language. Additionally, there was no response to our contact request for more information. Keep this in mind if you’re looking to use Tilkee as a file sharing platform.
What can you do with this connector?
This connector offers both triggers and actions, which means there are some interesting applications you can do:
- Trigger an automation when a project is signed – Use this trigger to kick off other business processes when your project gets a sign-off.
- Trigger an automation to followup after a user accesses your project – Example, you can use this to automatically send a sales follow-up email after a contact views the files you shared with them. Since it can happen so close to when the files are viewed, you’d be more likely to get a response.
- Automatically add files to a shared folder for a user – You can use the upload information action to keep a shared file repository up-to-date based on other actions that happen outside of Tilkee.
Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT
Blackbaud’s Raisers Edge NXT is a wonderfully mature platform that provides donor management software for non-profits and charitable organizations. We found this connector to be extraordinarily well documented with a robust application platform to support further customization. With a whopping 97 actions available, this connector offers one of the widest scopes of any in the Power Platform.
Sadly, there are no triggers for this at this time. This means that any automations you build with this will either be time-based or pushed from other Power Platform triggers.
What can you do with Blackbaud Raisers Edge NXT?
Since this connector, despite its wide scope, offers only actions you will have to be creative with how to get a full-featured automation. Here are some of our ideas for what you can build.
- Use a web-form or other trigger to add a constituent to your database – When triggered from a web-form or email, you could user Power Automate to automatically expand your constituent list.
- Build a custom Power App – The huge number of actions for this connector makes it ideally suited for a Canvas App (Power App) that allows you to deploy custom mobile apps quickly across your organization without needing to hire a developer.
- Extend your gift giving process – Since the connector allows you to get gift information, you could build an automation to attach other actions to your gift giving. For example, a survey or any other action across the Power Platform.
Are you building with these connectors?We would love to know what you’re building and are standing by to help if you run into any problems. Our talented Power Platform specialists are happy to discuss what you’re building or help you come up with ideas on how you might be able to connect these to other connectors in the Power Platform. No one else knows the Power Platform like our team, so let’s build something amazing, together.
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Updated in Power Automate: A big day for Teams and Azure
We’ve seen this before, but now we know enough to say for certain. Friday is a big day for Power Automate updates. Today we see the release of 2 new connectors and more importantly a fresh batch of new and updated actions for Microsoft Teams and Azure Container Instance. With this StaffHub and Power Automate are effectively done.
Microsoft StaffHub connector is now fully deprecatedAlthough previously announced, the work required to move the StaffHub capabilities into Microsoft Teams looks to be complete. If you are using this connector in your flows, you should expect the StaffHub connection to go away at some point potentially without any further warning.
☠ What are your options now that StaffHub is effectively dead?
The marking of the last of StaffHub’s actions as deprecated has been accompanied by the following new actions within Microsoft Teams:
- Microsoft Teams: Get a team – Somehow there was no way to get Team details into your Flow/Logic App before today. This gap is now closed and you can get team details if you have its ID.
- Microsoft Teams: Shifts: Approve/Deny * – Various actions have been added allowing you to approve or deny Swap Shifts, Time Off, Shift Offers, Open Shifts.
- Microsoft Teams: Shifts: Get open shift – Previously you could get a shift by ID, but the new action added today allows you to refine your query so that if your shift is not open, your query will return no results.
- Microsoft Teams: Shifts: Get scheduling group – Now you can get a scheduling group, which you couldn’t do before today
- Microsoft Teams: Shifts: List Time Off requests/Swap Shift Requests/Shifts/Scheduling Groups/Open Shifts/Open Shift requests/Offer Shift requests – All of these new actions allow you to get more information about your shifts that previously wasn’t even available in StaffHub. These new actions will allow for far more granularity in your Flows.
? What can you do with the new actions?
A number of the actions above offer net-new functionality which means your flows can be far more powerful. Prior to today, building a scheduling app in Power Apps (or through Power Automate) was a far more difficult task. Here are a few Power App ideas we can think of that use today’s new functionality:
- Allow managers to approve or deny shift requests from a mobile device. You can do this in about 20 minutes if you’re managing shifts in Teams.
- Allow employees to view and manage their own shifts from a mobile device. It’s now simple to build a Power App that puts shift management (to the desired degree) in the hands of the employees. Power Apps makes this possible WITH NO CODE!
We hope you’re as excited about the new potential as we are. We’re a few weeks late, but for some of you this is certainly a Good Friday!
Azure Container Instance connector gets more usefulWe recently did an internal review of the Azure Container Instance connector and found it wasn’t very useful. Today, all of that changes. The following new actions bring exciting possibilities for managing your Azure containers.
- Create or Update a container group – We love the “Create or update” style of connector because you no longer have to worry about the creation state of the object. Use this in your Flow to update attributes of a container group without worrying about duplication. (How it matches an existing container group sadly is not documented.)
- Get Cached Images – Use this list to specify a valid container image you want to use when updating or creating a new container. Useful to ensure you always have a valid value for image.
- Get Capabilities – This will give you a list of CPU/Memory/GPU capabilities in a region. Also useful for constructing a valid container.
- Get current usage – Finally! Now you can get details about your subscription usage in a flow. With this you can automate some cost control measures and connect it to resource usage outside of Azure. This may be today’s most important update.
- Start/Stop containers in a container group – Starting or stopping the containers will impact compute resource usage which ties directly into cost control. We like the possibilities granted with this and the potential to save resource spend.
- Update a container group location or tags – This provides some functionality that was somehow missing before. Yay. Now you can update tags and location.
? What can you do with the new actions?
Call us geeks, but we love the business capabilities exposed here. While you already have some built-in cost control measures in Azure, today’s update expands this to Power Automate which means you can start to tie your cost control work to resources outside of the Azure ecosystem.
Here are a few ideas of how you can utilize the exciting features above in Power Automate or Power Apps:
- Stop container usage when an external event happens. Use any trigger as a basis for shutting down a set of containers. The potential here is frankly exciting.
- Conditionally build new containers based on current usage combined with external information. Make your external data (for example, the number of orders placed required upcoming fulfillment) help you scale out additional resources ahead of time but only if current usage is below some pre-set limit.
While much more nuanced than the container above, if you have a large spend with Azure, this one has the potential to be far more exciting. Power Automate is a great place for this to live because by its very nature it allows a wider set of staff to manage which can be important when it comes to cost control measures.
Are you as excited about today’s updates as we are?We are falling more in love with the Power Platform and are happy to be the first to provide you with new and updated information on everything that’s changing.
Do you feel like you could make better use of the Power Platform? Want a hand, or just want to talk over some ideas about how to use the platform? Hit the button below to get in touch with me or another one of our friendly Power Platform specialists.
We know you can do even more when you use the tools available to their fullest possible potential.
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New in Power Automate: Cloudmersive Barcode
Today, one new connector was added to Power Automate: Cloudmersive Barcode. This brings the total count of Power Automate connectors to 345. Cloudmersive continues to innovate and add new connectors to Power Automate. On March 24, we wrote about Cloudmersive’s connector Cloudmersive PDF.
Cloudmersive now has six connectors:
- Data Validation
- Document Conversion
- Image Processing
- Virus Scan
- Barcode
If you look at the full list of Power Automate connectors, there are only two companies who offer more connectors than Cloudmersive: Microsoft and Azure. What do we like about the Cloudmersive connectors? Their simplicity. Each connector has a clear, concise job. The company offers excellent documentation, both business facing and technical. They’re easy to get started with.
Cloudmersive’s newest connector focuses on Barcodes. What is Cloudmersive Barcode?
Cloudmersive Barcode has a simple job: it can scan an image for a barcode and return the result, and it can generate several barcode types.
The connector itself has seven actions:
- Generate a EAN-13 code barcode as PNG file
- Generate a EAN-8 code barcode as PNG file
- Generate a QR code barcode as PNG file
- Generate a UPC-A code barcode as PNG file
- Generate a UPC-E code barcode as PNG file
- Lookup EAN barcode value, return product data
- Scan, recognize image for a barcode
This connector gets five stars from Reenhanced! Need Help?
If you’re an organization who relies on barcode use, this connector can really add to your automation plans. We are here to help if you want to get started with this or any other Power Automate connector. Click the button below to contact one of our friendly automation specialists.
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New in Power Automate: Industrial App Store
This new connector provides prepackaged apps on top of your data Today, we have a single new Power Automate connector which brings the total to 344 Connectors. Today’s connector is Industrial App Store which offers an interesting approach to enhancing your data.
What is Industrial App Store?I reached out to Jason Cook, Business Development Manager of Intelligent Plant who helped me understand how this new connector works. Industrial App Store offers a collection of apps that enhance data stored in existing data silos.
To use it, you’ll install App Store Connect and setup you data stores from there. The App Store offers various industrial system apps, such as a Flow measurement app for pumps or other industrial controls. Once you have the App Store Connect installed, you’ll be able to purchase, setup and install various prepackaged apps available to you. These are not limited to apps by Intelligent Plant.
Think of the apps as small software components used by a variety industrial plants to measure and analyze data from various hardware systems. Instead of developing control systems, plant managers can use and choose from a variety of apps by other vendors through the app store while avoiding expensive custom software solutions.
The Power Automate connector then allows these systems to be read by processes triggered through some other way. This connector offers read-only access to the data from the Industrial App Store and has no triggers to kick off a Power Automate process.
Here’s an example of how to use this connector:
We recommend watching this at at least 1.5x speed Need Help?For all questions related to this new connector, we recommend you reach out to Intelligent Plant: info@intelligentplant.com.
For all your Power Automate questions, smack the button below and one of our Power Automate Specialists will be happy to give you a hand.
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Deep-Dive into the Documents CorePack Power Automate Connector
At Reenhanced, we are big fans of the mscrm-addons products, especially Documents CorePack. The product has provided an excellent fit for many of or clients who rely on their professional document generation in Dynamics 365. When we heard that they were launching their first Power Automate connector, we were thrilled and started planning out the ways it can help our clients. Plus, this gives Power Automate users the ability to leverage Documents CorePack functionality without even having a Dynamics 365 environment. There are so many applications to this connector, for instance:
- Create documents automatically.
- Attach documents to emails & send either internally or externally.
- Attach documents automatically to notes in a Dynamics 365 record.
- Concatenate two files (one of the actions included in this connector!).
We virtually sat down with Patrick O’Donnell, VP Business Development for mscrm-addons.com to talk about their new connector.
Why did mscrm-addons decide to create a Documents CorePack connector in Power Automate?
There are many reasons why we decided to create a DocumentsCorePack connector for Power Automate. First and foremost is our commitment to being a leader in the Dynamics 365 community. This continues to update our add-on solutions to utilize and stay current with the most recent advances in Microsoft technologies.
For DocumentsCorePack, we saw Power Automate as a great opportunity to quickly expand our current DocumentsCorePack capabilities. Along with making automated document generation and processing even easier, it allows us to:
- Generate documents from any application using CDS and CDM! DocumentsCorePack It is no longer just for Dynamics 365 CE. This really opens up who can now use it.
- Generate documents using PowerApps Customers are quickly beginning to use PowerApps with PowerAutomate as a way to create a simplified, tailored interface for many of their users. And our integration with PowerAutomate simplifies document generation from these custom apps.
- Trigger Document Generation and Processing from External Sources PowerAutomate allows a wide variety of triggers from different external sources that can now be used to generate and process documents when needed (i.e. Outlook, Twitter, etc.)
How will this connector help existing Documents CorePack customers already using Power Automate?
Our existing customers are steadily moving from legacy Dynamics 365 workflows to Power Automate, and were eager to re-create their existing automated processes using this newer technology. We continue to see our existing customers come up with new ways to further streamline their standard work processes using Power Automate and PowerApps. They use it not only generate and process documents, but to also take additional steps and actions once the document generation is completed.
What additional resources do you have that may help current or future customers to better understand your connector?
We have two recent blog articles that describe how to setup and work with the new DocumentsCorePack custom connectors we built for Power Automate.
- How to work with the new DocumentsCorePack custom connector for Power Automate (Microsoft Flow). This step-by-step tutorial outlines how to create a document and attach it to an email using the connector.
- How To: Set up the DocumentsCorePack custom connector for PowerApps & Microsoft Flow. This article shows how to create a DocumentsCorePack custom connector for Power Automate, enabling users to utilize the document generation and processing capabilities within their Flows and Canvas Apps.
Need Help?
Thank you so much to Patrick for letting us learn more about their connector and sharing so much with Reenhanced! We cannot wait to see what other mscrmadd-ons products get connectors in the near future.
Reenhanced is a mscrm-addons partner who can help you get up and running with automated document generation today! If you need help, please reach out to us by emailing heidi@reenhanced.com or fill out our Contact Us form.