The Retirement of SharePoint Alerts is a Pain in the Rear

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.”