Event Reminder Flow

A SharePoint Flows tutorial by Peter Kalmström

Sometimes you want to get a reminder when a contract has to be re-negotiated, an important event needs to be remembered or a subscription needs to be renewed. All such reminders can be automated through Microsoft Flow.

SharePoint calendar lists have an alert feature that sends an e-mail reminder, but it gives no link to the event. In this tutorial, Peter Kalmström, CEO and Systems Designer of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, shows how a flow can send reminders with a event links.

In Power Automate, times are automatically converted to Coordinated Universal Time (UTC). Therefore, Peter needs to set the local time in two places in the flow, for the calendar and for Outlook. This is often the same time zone, but it is not always so.

Steps to create a Reminder flow:

Start with a 'Scheduled from blank' flow.
Set the frequency and time for when the flow should run.
Set the time zone in the trigger
Add the action 'SharePoint, Get items', which will get all the items from the SharePoint calendar.
Add the action 'Apply to each' which will run through each item in the calendar list.
Insert the output 'value'.
Add a condition to discern the items that have the appropriate date.
In the first condition field, add the expression substring(item()?['EventDate'], 0, 10)

Here ‘item()’ refers to the current item of the list and ‘[‘EventDate’]’ is the column that should be checked. The condition will be true for “Today’s Date”.
Keep the 'is equal to' and add a new expression in the second condition field: utcnow('yyyy-MM-dd').
To send an e-mail when the condition is true, add the action 'Send an email (V2)'.
In the 'To' field, enter the user(s) who will get a reminder e-mail when the condition is true.
For the e-mail subject, type some general text and add the dynamic content 'Title'.
Insert the e-mail body text. You can make it dynamic by using the available parameters of the flow.
Save and test the flow.