Forum Discussion
The Retirement of SharePoint Alerts is a Pain in the Rear
I’ve used a SharePoint alert to create an emailed daily digest of changes made to files in a document library for seven years. Microsoft plans to retire SharePoint Alerts in July 2026, and the race is on to find a replacement. Regretfully, neither Power Automate nor SharePoint Rules seem capable of generating an equivalent daily digest, perhaps because these solutions don’t handle the number of file versions created by AutoSave well.
https://office365itpros.com/2026/03/27/sharepoint-alerts-replacement/
2 Replies
This is the gap I keep coming back to as well. “Use Rules” or “use Power Automate” sounds reasonable until the actual use case is a daily digest of meaningful document-library changes.
Classic SharePoint alerts had a few boring-but-important qualities that are easy to underestimate:
- users could configure them without becoming flow builders
- daily/weekly summaries were built in
- folder or item-specific scenarios were straightforward
- the alert email was already shaped around SharePoint change activity
- ownership did not depend on someone’s personal flow continuing to run forever
Power Automate can technically recreate pieces of this, but recreating a reliable digest across document versions, AutoSave noise, folders, permissions, and formatting is not a simple replacement. SharePoint Rules are easier, but they appear too limited for several of the scenarios people actually used Alert Me for.
Disclosure: I’m connected with Bamboo Solutions. This is one of the reasons we’ve been working on Alert Plus as a replacement path for organizations that need the old alert/digest experience without pushing every user into Power Automate. I do not think every organization needs a third-party tool, but for daily/weekly digests and folder-specific alerting, I think Microsoft needs either a clearer first-party migration story or customers will have to evaluate alternatives.
At minimum, it would help if Microsoft published a feature-by-feature replacement guide: classic alert behavior, Rules equivalent if any, Power Automate pattern if any, and known gaps. Right now the answer feels too much like “the old thing is retiring; the new things are more powerful,” which is not the same as “the old use cases still work.”
It is interesting that Microsoft has not created videos showing how people can replace the old 'Alert Me' system. Probably because there is not a good replacement. My BIGGEST issue with the 'Rules' system is that you CANNOT select specific folders. And when you are connected to a SharePoint with a thousand subfolders and files in each folder, and the notifications setup through 'Rules' send you notifications for any and ALL changes in the SharePoint, that is a headache. I just do not understand why they could not have asked users how they use the 'Alert Me' system to ensure that nothing of value was lost. Microsoft, please fix this or show us how your new system replaces the old one. Thanks.
