Send Notification Mail On a SharePoint List Item Added Event Using Microsoft Flow

The general availability of Microsoft Flow was announced on Oct 31 by Stephen Siciliano in this blog . Flow makes it easier to automate the business processes and Microsoft is investing a great amount of time in developing PowerApps and Flow, as it is going to play a huge role in the future, which is stated by the official product update.

Microsoft Flow is a Cloud-based Service that makes it simple to automate common tasks and business processes across your applications and services, such as Office 365, Slack, Dropbox, SalesForce.com, Dynamics 365 and many more.

You can visit the Microsoft Flow site to get first hand experience of Flow.



In this article we will see how to use Microsoft Flow in response to SharePoint events like item added. We will define a flow that will send out a notification mail in response to an item added event in SharePoint List.

Create Flow in SharePoint

As a prerequisite, let’s create a new SharePoint List named Budget on which we will be creating the Flow.



Once the list is created, select Create a flow option from the drop down.



This will open up the Window, which will show the available templates that we can use. Select the first template and send a customized E-mail when a new SharePoint list item is added.



This will take us to the Microsoft Flow site.



Click on Sign in for each of the components listed below. Only after you have signed in to all of them, will the Continue button become visible.



Click Continue to proceed.



This will open up the page, where we can define the Flow. By default, the steps available in Flow are shown below.



Select each step and assign the values to the required fields. In the When a new item is created specify the Site url and List name.



The Get my profile step does not need any additional configuration. In the Send Email step, there will be the default values assigned to the fields but we can customize the body field with the relevant information.



We can also add extra actions on top of the default actions to the existing Flow. Once Flow is designed, click Create Flow to complete the creation of Flow.



This will create Flow, which we can use with SharePoint Online List.



Test the Flow

Now, let’s go ahead and test the created Flow by creating a SharePoint List Item.



Once you click Save, it will create the item and should ideally trigger Flow and send out a notification mail. We can go to the Mail app and see if the E-mail has come up.



As defined, the notification mail has been delivered with the details about the created SharePoint List Item.



In Microsoft Flow site, we can manage our existing Flow. We can choose to turn off Flow, if not in use. We can also see the version histories of Flow by clicking on the inverted exclamation mark option.



The versions are available with the detailed information. You can click on the arrow to see the detailed internal implementation.



Once the Flow is created and if we have to add more conditions and actions at a later point, we can edit the workflow and click Update Flow to modify Flow.



Summary

Thus, we have seen how we can create a Flow in response to a SharePoint item added List event.