Manage Rental Agreements – Renewal E-mail Workflow

A SharePoint Workflows tutorial by Peter Kalmström

In the previous article we showed how to create a reusable workflow that sets the rental agreement renewal date to two months before the end date of the agreement. On the renewal day, the responsible person should have an e-mail reminder about the renewal, and for that we will use another reusable workflow.

In the demo below Peter Kalmström, CEO and Systems Designer of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, shows how to create a reusable workflow that sends an e-mail to the responsible person on the rental agreement renewal day. He also shows how to create a table in Word and paste it into the e-mail body.

Peter has to create a SharePoint 2010 workflow, because SharePoint 2013 workflows cannot be connected to a specific content type, which is necessary for this workflow.

Create a reusable workflow that sends a renewal alert

Open the root site of the site collection in SharePoint Designer 2013.
Click on the Workflows link in the left panel.
Click on the Reusable Workflow button in the ribbon.
Create a new SharePoint 2010 workflow and give it a name. Connect the workflow to the rental agreements content type.
Select the Action 'Send an Email'.
For the e-mail To field, set a Workflow Lookup for a User to the Responsible Person and return it as an Email Address.
For the e-mail Subject field, type the text you want to use in the String Builder and add a lookup for the Title, which is used for the name of the location.
For the e-mail body, enter or paste the content you want to use. (Peter pastes a Word table and adds lookups for the current item's values in the content type columns.)
Add a link to the rental agreement item. Pick the link from the function guide. Choose the Data source 'Workflow Context' and the Field from source 'Current Item URL'.
Publish the workflow

Now the workflow must be connected to the content type used in the rental agreements lists. That is done once for the whole site collection. Then all lists that use the rental agreements content type will have the send renewal e-mail workflow.

Associate the workflow with the content type

Open the Site settings in the root site of the site collection and click on the Site content types link in the Web Designer Galleries group.
Select the content type group that contains the rental agreements content type and then the content type itself.
Click on the Workflow settings link and then on Add a workflow.
Select the reusable workflow you just created.
Give the workflow a name but don't set any start options. This will be done with a timer, which is the subject for next article.

As no start option is set, Peter cannot check the workflow by create or change a list item. Instead he clicks on the Workflows button under the ITEMS tab and starts the workflow manually, to make sure that it really sends the e-mail.

NOTE: this workflow is still not finished. It must be set to start on a specific date for each rental agreement. This date is defined in the Information Management Policy Settings; refer to the next article.