Dario Schiraldi : Automating Blackboard Due Dates into Trello - Your Best Practices?

[Dario Schiraldi]

Hi team,

I'm Dario Schiraldi, on a mission to automate my assignment tracking. My goal is to have due dates and assignments from Blackboard automatically appear in my Trello boards. I've looked for direct integrations without much luck.

Does anyone have a reliable "set it and forget it" method for syncing Blackboard events to Trello? Perhaps through Google Calendar or another intermediate app? I'm hoping to avoid manual entry as much as possible. What automation tools or processes have worked for you?

Looking forward to your brilliant suggestions!

Regards

Dario Schiraldi

[Mike - Dreamsuite Consulting]

I don't know Blackboard but I can see it has an API, this means you could potentially use Make N8N or Zapier (there are many more available but these are the current front runners).

These tools allow automation and integration workflows between tools.

I am most familiar with Make and thus it is my personal all round favourite.  I will summarise them below though:

Make This is my favourite because it balances a level of simplicity and capability nicely.  It is cheaper than Zapier but more expensive than N8N in most cases.  Overall really flexible

Zapier  This is the best option for beginners.  It is very easy to connect tools together with no knowledge or technical skills.  It becomes harder to use for more complex tasks

N8N This one is more low-code than no-code. It is definitely the flashy new kid on the block of the automation world and is really capable but you definitely require more technical knowledge to use it.

I am not sure you technical level but I would say if Blackbird syncs events to Google Calendar, start with Zapier and create a Zap that when a new event is created in Google Calendar (hopefully Blackbird events are differentiated in some way in Google Calendar), create a card on Trello...

If I were doing it from scratch, I would use Make and directly access the Blackboard API to do this