Month: April 2019

Create a List in Office 365 for Email reminders

AJ

Overview

Have you missed an item that needed renewed and caused the whole world to crash down? OK, maybe not the whole word but I’m sure you’ve felt the stress of, “Oh no, that certificate just expired and everyone is getting warned it’s an unsafe site!” Over the years I’ve heard lots of well intended ideas by people, “Let’s keep all of these in your IT asset management system, or you can use our contract system, or enter it as a financial renewal in our ERP system.” Time and time again, those are very cumbersome and expensive when all I needed was a simple list that could email my a notification. Say no more, let’s create a list in Office 365 and a Flow to get email alerts.

Setup

If you haven’t used an Office 365 Group yet it’s a collection of collaboration services all tied to a single group of people. All the permissions are set at the Group level and all users get access to things like a Shared Mailbox with email address, OneDrive document library, SharePoint site, etc. Let’s create a list and customize for what we want to keep track of.

  1. Create an Office 365 Group or go to an existing Group you have access to.
  2. Go to SharePoint app to see your Group – Click the New dropdown >
  3. Create a List
  4. Customize your list – add items – organize columns – etc.
  5. Add an item to your list

There you go! Now once you have an item added you can click the Flow drop down and you should see Set a reminder > Date Due. Since I added a column with a date, SharePoint was smart enough to create a built in Flow for a reminder based on the due date.

Summary

That’s it! Now sit back and wait for the reminders to renew your items. Flow is a built in app from Microsoft that can be used all over Office 365. Create a list in Office 365 is just one quick example of what it can do. Learn more about Flow here.

So why Office 365 and Lists? If you use Microsoft Office 365 for all of your core business collaboration solutions then it’s probably never going away. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me. Give it a try and let me know how it goes or if you any other tips.