{"id":953,"date":"2019-04-30T06:58:00","date_gmt":"2019-04-30T13:58:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/building-an-ecosystem-of-open-source-connectors\/"},"modified":"2019-04-30T06:58:00","modified_gmt":"2019-04-30T13:58:00","slug":"building-an-ecosystem-of-open-source-connectors","status":"publish","type":"power-automate","link":"https:\/\/www.microsoft.com\/en-us\/power-platform\/blog\/power-automate\/building-an-ecosystem-of-open-source-connectors\/","title":{"rendered":"Building an ecosystem of open source connectors"},"content":{"rendered":"

Over the last few months, we have released a lot of connectors for Microsoft PowerApps and Microsoft Flow<\/a> taking the number of connectors available to over 250. These connectors drive growth and adoption of the platform by enabling our customers to get started quickly building their apps and flows. \u00a0It is also worth noting that all these connectors are built by partners \u2013 both internal partners within Microsoft and external partners. We have a process to certify these connectors<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Very often though, we get requests and feedback from our customers and community around features and gaps in many of these connectors. These could be as simple as the connector not providing a certain field\/property to complex new triggers and actions that they would like to see. These feedbacks are usually captured in our forum ideas<\/a>, and then we go about triaging and fixing the connectors. Sometimes, based on support tickets, we end up updating the connectors. But, like any feature, it takes time and we are limited by resources. We often end up recommending our customers to build a custom connector<\/a> or use the HTTP connector to call the underlying API directly.<\/p>\n

Open source connectors<\/h2>\n

As the number of connectors grow, we would like to empower the wider community. With that, I would like to announce that we are starting a new journey to open-source our connectors. Through an open sourced connector strategy, we hope to get more community developers involved in maintaining a large set of high-quality connectors. You can see how these connectors are authored, and try them out yourself. And, you should be able to fork these connectors to augment any feature gaps and bug fixes. In return, developers can submit those changes back so that the larger community can benefit.<\/p>\n

As with any other feature, we like to make small but concrete steps. You can find out open source connector repository on GitHub<\/a>. Today, we have a small set of connectors, but we are fully committed to add more connectors in the coming months. I would also like to state that we are going through an open-source by default strategy. All new connectors will be put up for open sourcing by default. While the ultimate decision to open source a connector lies with the owner of the connector, we strongly encourage all our partners to open source their connectors.<\/p>\n

The repository also provides sample connectors to help developers get started. This is something that we would like to see your contributions as well. If you have built interesting custom connectors, we would like you to share your custom connector as a sample.\u00a0 In addition, we have updated our documentation as well with some new topics.<\/p>\n

There are 2 platform features that enable us to open source our connectors. It will also highlight some of the challenge we have around open sourcing some of the connectors we have today.<\/p>\n