Connectors are the bridge between your apps and your data—whether you’re building flows, apps, or Copilot agents. In this video, you’ll learn everything you need to know about Power Platform connectors for the PL-900 exam, including standard vs. premium, triggers vs. actions, and where to find the full connector reference.
This objective is part of the course: Power Platform Foundations: Power Platform Foundational Components
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Video Summary
- Connectors like SharePoint, OneDrive, and Salesforce have different triggers that can launch a flow or an agent. Triggers can be time-based, instant, or event-based, such as adding a new item in SharePoint.
- Actions involve interactions with data sources, such as getting information, adding, or updating data. Examples include starting an approval, getting a user’s manager, or sending an email.
- In Power Automate, the trigger is always at the top of the flow, followed by multiple actions. Actions can include starting an approval, sending an email, or copying a file.
- Besides actions, flows can include logic controls like conditions and loops, which help manage the flow’s behavior.
- In Power Apps, there are no triggers since the app opens when the user decides to open it. However, actions are used to interact with data sources, such as getting user information from Office 365 or creating items in a SharePoint list.
For more information, read the transcript blog below, or watch the video above!
Transcript
Let’s get started with our first Power Platform shared component, which is connectors. Imagine connectors, also sometimes referred to as data connectors, as a bridge from your data source to your app or workflow. They enable you to interact with data sources without any technical knowledge or coding. The Power Platform has over 1,000 connectors, including those for applications internal to Microsoft, such as SharePoint, OneDrive, or Outlook, as well as external systems like Adobe, Mailchimp, and Salesforce. From a licensing point of view, there are two types of connectors: standard and premium. We won’t go deep into licensing in this course because Power Platform licensing could have its own dedicated course, but in a few seconds, we will look at how to find out if a connector is standard or premium.
From a technical point of view, connectors are simply a wrapper around an API, allowing users to perform create, read, update, and delete operations on other systems and services from a beautiful interface without needing to know what an API is. Remember when I said there are over 1,000 connectors? If there’s one place you can find all of them, it’s in the Power Platform connector reference overview. This is the documentation for all the different connectors you will find, and you don’t even need to go into the Power Platform product to find them. This is available on the web, and you’ll have the link in the exercise files when you download them at the end of this course. From here, you can see all the different connectors, and we also have filters for standard or premium connectors. If you only want to see standard connectors, you can filter them by product as well as by publisher.
For example, let’s search for Adobe. You will see multiple Adobe connectors right away. If you see the little diamond at the end, it means it’s a premium connector. For Adobe Acrobat Sign, you will see that for Logic Apps, Power Automate, and Power Apps, it’s a standard connector. If you are in a sovereign cloud, such as GCC, GCC High, or similar, you can see that for Power Automate, this connector is not available in GCC High, China Cloud, or the DoD tenant. For most of you in a public cloud tenant, this will not affect you, but if you are in a GCC, GCC High, or higher tenant, make sure to check this out because you might not see it. The documentation provides information about the connector, such as throttling limits, actions, and triggers.
Inside Power Automate, you can see all connectors directly in the product. Premium connectors are marked with the premium connector label. Some connectors are also from the community, such as the Star Wars connector, which comes from an independent publisher. This connector allows you to see all the data from the Star Wars universe. We also have connectors by independent publishers or community members who went through the approval process to get approved. Towards the end of this module, we will talk about custom connectors.
Now that we have seen how to find over a thousand connectors inside the Power Platform, let’s head back to the slides and learn about the types of operations we can do. There are two types of operations with connectors: triggers and actions. Triggers are used in Power Automate flows and Copilot Studio agents, while actions are used in Power Apps, Power Automate, and Copilot Studio. A trigger is the event that starts a flow in Power Automate or an autonomous agent in Copilot Studio. This can be an event from another system, such as a new item added in a SharePoint list, a new file added in a OneDrive folder, or a new opportunity added in Salesforce. Triggers can also be time-based, such as every day at 5:00 a.m., or instant, such as selecting an item in SharePoint and starting an approval on it right away.
Actions are any type of interaction with your data source, whether that’s getting information, adding, or updating data. Sample actions include starting an approval, getting a user’s manager, or sending an email from any Power Platform solution. In Power Automate Cloudflow, the trigger is always at the top of the flow, followed by multiple actions. Actions can include starting an approval, sending an email, copying a file, and more. Flows can also include logic controls such as conditions and loops.
In Power Apps, there are no triggers since the app opens whenever the user decides to open it, but actions are used to interact with data sources. For example, the Office 365 users connector can get the picture, name, and title of the person currently using the app, while the SharePoint connector can show information from a SharePoint list or create information in that list. In Power Automate, the trigger is always at the top, followed by actions such as getting the manager, creating an approval, and posting an adaptive card in Microsoft Teams. One connector can have multiple actions, and there are different types of triggers, including automated, instant, and scheduled.
In Power Apps, connectors can get information, edit information, create new items, or delete items. The trigger for Power Apps is the user opening the app, and actions are used to interact with data sources.
