MicrosoftBertJansen. One thing to clarify is that SharePoint Alerts currently only require the user to have Read permissions as a minimum (not Contribute as mentioned so far). So, even if Microsoft reduces Rules from Edit to Contribute, it still won’t give us an option on replacing all the alerts we have set up by users with just Read access. Unfortunately, the Microsoft Assessment Tool that provides us a list of all the alerts in our tenant doesn’t include any information on User permissions – so we have zero visibility on impact in that respect. Microsoft – what options will you be providing to resolve this in particular?
Below is a comparison between Alerts and Rules from some further investigation.
Description | Alerts | Rules |
Role required to create and manage alerts. Certain rules might ok to require Contribute, but if we are using rules to replace alerts then they should still be configurable with minimum Read (as Alerts are now) | Read (limited) Contribute (all) | Edit |
Number of alerts per list/library | Unlimited | 15 |
Send notification immediately (every change) | Yes | Yes (only option) |
Send a daily summary (including time the email is sent) | Yes | No |
Send a weekly summary (including the day and time the email is sent) | Yes | No |
Ability for users to manage their own alerts | Yes | No |
Configure for All Changes (create, update, and delete) in a single alert | Yes | No (would require three rules to be created) |
Number of emails per alert | Unlimited | 10 |
Changes to items created by [me] | Yes | No (or at least not dynamic Me – need to hard code a name which won’t work if you’re adding a rule for multiple users) |
Configure alert for single item/document? | Yes | No |
Configure alert with condition on specific column changes | No | Yes (one thing rules have that alerts don't) |
Notification when alert is created with link to manage the alert | Yes | No |
Email displays summary of item properties | Yes | No |
Email displays link to item | Yes | To item properties using the Microsoft Lists view in the Site |
Email displays link to manage alert | Yes | No |
Email displays link to the list/library | Yes | No |
Our most pressing requirement is to have a daily and weekly summary of all changes and grouped by document (all changes for the document listed beneath that document). Plus, the ability to set up an alert for a specific item/document - not just the complete list/library.
Real life scenario: I just caught up with one of our users (a Project manager) who has approx. 300 alerts (one for each project library). He gets a daily summary of all changes so he can get a quick view of each project. If we had to convert to rules, he would have to create 3 x rules for each library to cater for create, update, and delete (instead of 1 for all changes) which would be 900 rules, and instead of getting a daily summary he would get an email for every create, update, and delete immediately. For one of his emails for a project we looked at this would have gone from 1 daily summary email to 78 individual emails – and that’s just for one day for one project.
Attempting to build this in Power Automate would be an absolute nightmare (not a viable option) as the daily summary currently lists each item/document and a list of who and what was created, modified, deleted within that item/document. I don’t believe there is a template that Microsoft could provide that would achieve this easily. And managing 300 flows in Power Automate scattered across the default Power Platform environment would be an absolute mess. If you wanted to configure the flow to send to multiple users, it gets even worse (the flow would be running under the account of the user that created the flow, and individual users wouldn’t be able to manage the flow or even have visibility of them, etc.).
Note that we have thousands of alerts across thousands of lists/libraries that we need to convert, which is not a small feat.
The only viable option we see is that SharePoint Rules gets a significant upgrade to ensure it’s up to an acceptable level to replace Alerts. We don’t see Power Automate as an option in the replacement of Alerts.
