Connectors in Power Automate
1. Connectors in Power Automate
Your first flow only used Power Automate itself. Now let's explore connectors, which enable flows to communicate with other services.2. What are connectors?
A connector is the bridge between Power Automate and a service such as Outlook, SharePoint, or Salesforce. It can be anything you'd want a flow to talk to. There are over 1,000 of them, covering email, file storage, databases, enterprise systems, and social platforms. The breadth of that catalog is the point. To use a connector in a flow, you add a step, search for the connector you want, and pick one of its trigger or action cards. The first time you use one, you sign in. A handful of connectors show a Create button instead, but the result is the same. After that, every flow with the same connector reuses the connection automatically.3. Standard vs. Premium
Connectors come in two tiers. Standard connectors are included with most Microsoft 365 plans, and these include Outlook, SharePoint, Teams, OneDrive, and Forms. They cover the bulk of day-to-day automation. Premium connectors need an extra Power Automate Premium license, and these include Salesforce, SAP, Dataverse, and any custom connectors an organization builds. In the gallery, you'll see a clear PREMIUM badge on the cards that need the extra license.4. The most common connectors
These are the five Standard connectors most flows reach for. Outlook V2 handles email, including sending, reading, and replying, while SharePoint handles lists, files, and document libraries. Microsoft Forms picks up form and survey responses, Office 365 Users gives you profile information about people in your tenant, and Microsoft Teams sends messages, posts in channels, and fires notifications. Each one does dozens of things, and you'll see one or two useful uses per connector rather than the full menu each one offers.5. Triggers vs. actions
Every connector exposes two things, triggers and actions. A trigger is how a flow starts. It's always the first step, and you get exactly one per flow. Actions are everything else, meaning what the flow does once it runs. You can chain as many as you need. A single connector usually offers both kinds. Let's see what that looks like in practice.6. Same connector, two roles
For example, the Outlook connector can trigger a flow when a new email arrives, and a completely different flow can use that same Outlook connector as an action to send an email. It's the same connector playing two different roles in two different flows.7. Adding a connector action
To add a connector to your flow, click the plus below any card. The action picker opens with a search bar at the top. You can filter by tier, and any long category list expands when you click See more.8. Polling vs. Push (Webhook) triggers
There are two ways a flow finds out something happened. Polling triggers check the service on a schedule, so there's a small delay between event and run. Premium plans poll faster than standard. The upside is that polling catches up on every missed event when the flow restarts. Webhook or push triggers work the other way: the service notifies Power Automate the instant something happens, so the flow fires immediately. The trade-off is that events from while the flow was off are lost when you turn it back on.9. Best practices
Three habits are worth building from day one. Rename every action, so a label like "Send approval email" tells you and your team what the step does, which reads much more clearly than the default "Send an email V2". Set the time zone on every Recurrence trigger, because the UTC default is a classic source of bugs where flows fire an hour earlier or later than expected. And test after every new action you add, since catching errors as you build is much easier than debugging a five-step flow that broke somewhere in the middle.10. Let's practice!
Now it's time to dig into triggers, actions, and connectors yourself.Create Your Free Account
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