Microsoft maintains a set of Connectors that work with their Power Platform (Power Automate etc.) with two notable areas. One is for “Certified Connectors” maintained by the software vendor (SyncroMSP for instance) and the other is for “Independent Publisher Connectors” that are:
The independent-publisher-connectors folder contains connectors that are submitted by publishers (MVPs, developers, and companies) that do not own the underlying service behind their connector. These connectors are deployed and available out-of-box within the Power Platform as premium connectors. Anyone can submit a new connector to this folder, add functionality to connectors in this folder, and resolve issues related to the connectors in this folder. The folder is managed by the Independent Publisher Connector Community, which includes Independent Publishers and Project Coordinators. The master branch is maintained by the Microsoft Connector Certification Team, who ensures that the connector version is identical to that deployed in the Power Platform. The dev branch is maintained by the connector maintainer(s) and the Microsoft Connector Certification Team to allow community development of the connector prior to certification and deployment of a version. Click here to view the Independent Publisher Connector Manifesto.
I have built a fairly complete custom connector for Syncro using my limited Swagger knowledge and am using several API calls for some automation with Syncro. So far all of the calls I have needed actually work. However, I don’t doubt for a second that others of you are more knowledgeable with REST/API etc. than I am and was wondering if a few of us wanted to team up to build out a proper connector and publish it to Microsoft’s PowerPlatformConnectors GitHub.
Hey Jeremy. Not sure if you’re still pursuing this but I would definitely be interested in collaborating on this if you’re still up for it. I’m by no means an expert, but I am fairly fluent with Power Automate and working with APIs. We used Power Automate to automate nearly our entire onboarding processes (Docusign, OCR, SharePoint, ITG, Syncro, QB, etc.). It looks like we went down a similar path with the Syncro API. We built out a custom Syncro connector as well. It was the easiest way to reuse the API definitions, makes it very modular. It’s super refreshing to see we’re not the only ones that had this idea. lol
I’d love to see the kind of calls you’re using for Syncro. I’m looking to sync Office 365 accounts to Syncro to keep the contacts in Syncro up-to-date but would love to lean more into Power Automate for other items. I’m having trouble tracking down examples that let me know how powerful it can be.
I know what I’d like to be able to do, but I’m basically trial-and-erroring my way through it.
You bet! If you want, I think I can export my custom connector to JSON file and ship it your way. Will that give you something to look at? (For the actual Automate Flows, I’m sure how to ship those over… Perhaps a summary of what they do would be helpful?)
I’m pulling from Syncro into Exchange contacts. I haven’t worked at it enough to get an “incremental” of any kind, and currently Shift-Delete all my contacts with the “Cient Import” category and then running the Power Automate flow to re-add them.
Sure thing. I can compare our two connectors and merge the two together if there are any discrepancies between them. As for the flows, was there a way for us to publish those as well? I looked through the github briefly but it looked like the dev branch was just for the connectors. If we could publish the flows too that would be great!
Presently Power Automate handles a large chunk of our onboarding processes. It extracts all the pertinent info from the contract at signing, uses that info to populate IT Glue, SharePoint, and Syncro (Customer, Contacts, Contracts, Creating a Prorated Invoice, Emailing the prorated invoice, creating products, and creating the scheduled invoicing). We also use Power Automate to poll Syncro’s API in real time to produce custom reporting in Power BI.
Power Automate is a lot of fun but it’ll also test your patience. lol
Feel free to DM me if you’d like to setup some time to discuss. It’s much easier to answer hypotheticals and questions in a call than via forum sometimes. lol
This is pretty much what I’m wanting to do - automate the onboarding/termination process.
Too many manual corrections necessary throughout the month between HR system, Syncro customer and contacts, and 365. Right now I’m attempting to do a lot of this manually. I only recently discovered Power Automate and it seems like it will really help free up time.
My biggest obstacle here appears to be that I’m using Syncro for internal IT (Just me managing IT for 1000+ employees, multiple locations that operate as separate companies under 1 larger company and the same 365 tenant), so I don’t have access to Partner API that would help me through some of this. If my experience and needs can help build something that will help others, I’m all in!
I’m still pretty new to swagger, but I’ve made my own custom connector for a PowerApps mobile ticketing app. I would love to compare notes sometime! I’m still trying to figure out how to reference the total time logged on a ticket per agent. But there’s always more ways to integrate, which is part of what makes APIs fun!
I really haven’t gotten to mess with Power Automate/BI much yet, can you actually pull data directly into power bi or are you actually doing a real time sync of data into some sort of SharePoint storage that PowerBi is connected to?
Yes. We store historical months in a CSV in SharePoint. PowerBI pulls from the CSV for previous months and polls the Syncro API in real time for the current month.
Been a busy last week or so here. Today’s not any better thanks to a big windstorm in our area last night taking out power and Internet. Sigh. I’ll dive back into this later this week “if the Good Lord is willing the creek don’t rise.”
This isn’t totally related to the Power Platform Connector for Syncro but it is related to Power Automate.
I expanded on our Power Automate/Syncro integration and put together something really neat for automating the deployment of Intune and the importing of hardware hashes for Autopilot.
Managed to piece together a script to do unattended Intune enrollment that can be pushed out via Syncro. Updates two reg keys that affect enrollment and creates a scheduled task to reach out to Intune for provisioning. This works on devices that are Azure AD Joined.
Managed to get Syncro to capture the Autopilot Hardware Hash with a single line of powershell script and send it to Power Automate where the hash is captured, a JSON payload is generated, and a POST call is made to the Microsoft Graph API to import the hardware hash as an Autopilot Device.
It’s certainly not the first Intune/Autopilot deployment this community has seen, but I thought it was a unique method for automating the deployment. I still need to document the Azure App permissions and the Graph API Endpoints I used but after that I’ll create a post to cover the deployment in case it can be useful to someone else.
Excited to see what else Syncro and Power Automate can do together.
I’ve been waiting for a ‘slow day’ to work on scheduling something with the few here to discuss. I think I’ll just poke a hole in next week somewhere and make the space. Any votes for day/time/timeframe?
