Flow to send email reminders when calendar date approaches

[Anonymous]

I'm still pretty new to Flow and apologize if this question has already been addressed, I couldn't find anything when searching.

We have a Shared calendar for the IT department so that we can schedule who is on-call from week to week.  One schedule for the Infrastructure Team (currently 4 people on a 4 week rotation) and one for the Service Desk Team (Currently 2 people on a 2 week rotation).  People seem to forget who is and isn't on-call so my manager has asked us to send an email every week stating that they are on call, nor do they seem to care about adding an alert to at least remind themselves. It's been a few weeks already and no one is sending the email so I would like to Automate this somehow.

I know I can setup a flow to send an email every week on a specific day (our rotation switches on Tuesdays).  However, I'm not sure how to get this scheduled email to look at the shared calendar and see what the schedule is and populate that information into the Body of an email so that each week on Tuesday an email gets sent to The Infrastruture and Service Desk team (and CC our manager) with a simple Subject say "Weekly On-Call Contacts" and then in the Body grab the information for the service desk rotation and the Infrastructure team rotation.  The subject of those calendar events are fairly similar where one says "INFRASTRUCTURE ON-CALL - [techs name and cell phone number]" or "SERVICE DESK ON-CALL - [techs name and cell number]".  If i could grab each one of those pieces of info and put that in the body on the email that should suffice.

My original plan was to use a SharePoint calendar for the on-call rotation, but SharePoint online can't handle a reoccuring event that spans 7 days, it breaks it out into 7 seperate events, and that makes things difficult when we make changes to the rotation due to time-off or whatever.

[Anonymous]

I have experimented with similar processes. If I understand your goal correctly, I think your flow needs the following steps:

1. Recurrence

2. Get items (Use the SharePoint step, you may need to enter the name of the calendar manually)

3. Send an Email

In the "Send an Email" step, you will see options under "Dynamic Content" that you can use to reference information from the SharePoint calendar. The information you select really depends on what you want to include in the email.

Let me know if this helps!

[v-xida-msft · Accepted solution]

Hi @Anonymous,

Do you create your Shared calendar for IT department within SharePoint?

I agree with @Anonymous's thought almost, I have made a test on my side and please take a try with the following workaround:

• Add a "Recurrence" trigger, Interval set to 1, Frequency set to Week and On these days set to Tuesday.
• Add a "Get items" action, specify Site Address and List Name set to your shared SharePoint calendar event.
• Add a "Filter array" action to filter the events on Tuesday, From set to output of "Get items" action, click "Edit in advanced mode", type the following formula:

• @equals(dayOfWeek(item()?['EventDate']), 2)

  Add a "Apply to each" action, input parameter set to output of "Filter array" action.
• Within "Apply to each", add a "Send an email" action.

Image reference:

Note: Within Body of "Send an email" action, type the formula as below:

item()?['EventDate']

The EventDate is a property of your SharePoint calendar, if you want to use other property, please follow up the following formula:

item()?['PropertyName']

If there is a space within the property name, pleae use "_x0020_" instead of the space. For example, the Due Date is a property of your SharePoint calendar, please reference the proper with the following formula:

item()?['Due_x0020_Date']

In addition, these properties of SharePoint calendar displayed as dynamic content of "Get items" action.

The flow works successfully as below:

Best regards,

Kris

[Anonymous]

This worked nicely.  It's not sending me the emails, however, it's sending 2 per calendar item.  Currently I just made two one day events.  One for Infrastructure and one for Service Desk, and I'm getting 2 emails for each one.  I'll keep playing around with it and see if I can figure it out, I certainly wouldn't have figured out the Filter Array portion of the Apply to Each portion without your help though, so I should be able to backtrack through it and figure it out from here, but if you have any suggestions, I'll gladly take them.  I'm also planning on adding in a conditional statement to check for "On-Call" on the event so it only sends emails for those events, in the event that other IT related items get added to the calendar at some point in the future.

Thanks so much!!!

-Tyler

[EricDeferm]

Hi @v-xida-msft tx for sharing the solution as a whole, it's a great help. In our case we want to send a reminder 7 days upfront an event is scheduled in a SP team calendar. The main challenge was to define the right equation for comparing 2 date values and make sure that both dates were evaluated in exactly the same format. I don't know why, but the only working combination was the (CASE Sensitive) format string 'dd-MM-yyyy', other format strings (like 'dd-mm-yyyy' or 'DD-MM-YYYY') didn't return the expected value and hence no results after filtering.

@equals(formatDateTime(item()?['EventDate'], 'dd-MM-yyyy'), addDays(utcNow(), 7, 'dd-MM-yyyy'))

[Anonymous]

This project got put on the backburner for a little bit and I'm back to working on it again.  I've gone through and added in the On-Call schedule for everyone from now moving foward.  However, it seems this flow is sending me an email for each person for each Tuesday of the month.  Before when I was testing I just had one day filled out, but now with the calendar populated like this:

When the flow runs, I get an email for each person listed here (6 emails in all one for each individual name) and not just for the two individuals on the current Tuesday (20th in the image).  I would ideally like to have a single email with both individuals listed in it, but if it can only be a single email for each person that would be fine too.

[jbryson]

I am hitting a roadblock with using the EventDate attribute.  In my application, I have a sharepoint process calendar that I have setup various recurring calendar events.  In flow, I have the Recurrence trigger daily at 9 am and get the items from the calendar.  I check to see if EventDate is equal to Current Date and if it is, I generate an email based on the event title and body which goes to team members with process reminder at certain parts of month.  This works on the first one.  When the next date in the calendar arrives, the EventDate is holding the orignal series start date and my email does not get triggered.  I know this topic has been discussed, but any thoughts on a workaround?

[Anonymous]

I spent two hours on a MS support call regarding this exact scenario. I provided the tech access to my screen share and he tinkered with it for quite a while and couldn't get it to work. The call ended when he stated, "Not sure what the problem is, this works for me."

[jbryson]

They may not have tested correctly.  It works fine with a single calendar event.  The problem is when there is an event series.  The Event Date that is being passed is really the Start Date of the series.  It works great if you have a single calendar event.  However, once you put a recurring series in, an event date that matches the subsequent dates in the series is never passed.  The Event Date stays equal to the Start Date of the series.  Works on the first one.  Irritating.