The BindTuning Alerts Web Part is great for catching your users' attention with important notifications. However, sometimes you need more than just a pop-up on a SharePoint page; you also need an email notification. This article will show you how to combine BindTuning with Microsoft Power Platform to make sure your alerts reach everyone's inbox.
This article utilizes several distinctive technologies:
BindTuning Alerts Web Part, allowing you to display a notification-like popup and/or container populated with important information;
We leverage Microsoft's Power Automate, due to it being a low-code platform and its vast range of pre-existent connectors.
We make use of Microsoft 365 Groups as a way to control the users we will be sending notifications to.
Create and set up your BindTuning Alerts Web Part
The first step consists of adding and configuring your Alerts Web Part.
To do so, follow the steps below:
Add a BindTuning Alerts Web Part to your SharePoint page;
Select Configure (or click the pencil icon) and, from the menu select Create new BT Alerts List;
The list has been successfully associated with the Alerts Web Part. After completing this same procedure, we're free to start adding our own content, by mousing over the Web Part and clicking on the plus (+) icon on the Web Part zone.
This will open the Web Part form, through which you'll be able to create your new alert. Below follows an exemplificative alert:
After creating the alert, you'll see it displayed as a pop-up or an entry in the Web Part zone.
Create and set up your Power Automate Flow
Considering our Alerts Web Part to have been configured, we can now move to creating a Power Automate Flow, which will send an email to the pertinent users, as soon as a new Alerts entry is created and/or modified.
To do so, follow the steps below:
Access your Power Automate area and select Create;
Under Start from Blank, select Automated cloud flow;
When prompted, give your flow a name and select the trigger When an item is created or modified;
Hit Create;
You'll be redirected to the flow maker area, where we will be able to further configure our flow. On your When an item is created or modified, pass the values for:
Site Address - The Site Collection where you have added the Alerts Web part;
List Name - The list you have created on the Alerts Web Part (i.e, BT-Alerts).
After configuring our first step:
Click on: + New Step
Search for List group members
Here, we will pass the O365 group, to whom we want to send email notifications, as soon as a new alert is created.
After adding your group:
Select + New Step and search for Send an email, under the Office 365 Outlook Action.
Under To select Add dynamic content and pass Mail, retrieved from the step above (this step will automatically create a section called Apply to each);
Under Subject, pass the value you wish to display with on the email. In this particular scenario, we will be passing the Title associated with the previously created Alerts list;
Under Body, we can create our email template, where we will be passing the following information:
The Display Name of the user we are sending the email to;
The Alert content we had configured previously.
Note that all the above-mentioned elements can be automatically retrieved when selecting Add dynamic content.
After all the steps have been completed, you should have something similar to the model below:
Once you complete the steps above, users will receive the configured email template whenever an alert is added or modified in the Alerts web part.
