Recently, I’ve been asked if there was a simple way to provide birthday reminders on a SharePoint intranet without any customizations. Well, after looking at some of the options available in SharePoint Modern sites, it’s possible (with the help from Delve and Microsoft Flow).
In this article, I demonstrate how to showcase the names of people who have a birthday today. I have not included the year or age as most of us don’t age beyond 25 anyways. One thing that I really like about this approach is that the birth date is set in Delve and give each user the choice whether to share it with others or not. If not, then their name will not appear on the SharePoint site. Other items that this solution can be extended to is to use the hire date and highlight specific anniversary milestones.
Setting the Birthday in Delve
As I’ve mentioned above, one of the first steps was to set the birthdays in Delve. To set your birthday, click the Update profile button when you first visit your profile page. This will take you to a page that looks like the one below. Each user can do this themselves.
What is important is that the icon on the right should show a globe to indicate that everyone can see the birthday. If it’s set to a lock, then only the user themselves can see it.
That’s all you need to do in order for your birthday to show up in SharePoint. You can also use the employee's Hire Date to display work anniversaries. To edit a user's hire date,
- Navigate to the SharePoint admin center (https://<your domain>-admin.sharepoint.com/_layouts/15/tenantprofileadmin/manageuserprofileserviceapplication.aspx)
- Select Manage User Profiles
- Using the Find profiles, edit search for a user who's hire date you want to set or change
- Hover on top of the name of the user you want to change and from the drop-down, select Edit My Profile
-
Scroll down and select a date for Hire Date. Make sure that Everyone is selected in the drop-down beside the date.
NB: Now that you know my birthday, I expect at least a birthday card or like on this article on that day 😊
Creating the Celebrations web part in SharePoint and List
As I decided to go with a no-code solution, I had to stick with one of the out of the box web parts that would provide a decent look. So, I actually chose an events list. I created a new list called Celebrations, which is an out of the box Calendar list and linked it to the Events web part as shown on the right side of the page.
The flow ensures that only users who have entered their birthdays and have a birthday on a specific day show up in the list that day. I also uploaded an image called confetti.png onto my site to be used as a banner image for the events.
Building the Flow
The flow is somewhat straight forward and is broken down into three parts
- Daily timer trigger to kick-off the workflow
- Delete all existing celebrations in the Celebrations list
- Add users who’s birth day and month match today’s date into the Celebrations list
Trigger
The Flow begins with a trigger being set to kick-off the flow each day at midnight. Make sure to set your time zone, otherwise you may have birthdays start and end time wrapping a calendar day.
Delete Items
Nothing fancy here. Just a loop that iterates through the Celebrations list and deletes all the items found
Add Celebrations
This is where the good stuff happens. The action starts by searching all Office 365 users that match a given term by display name, given name, surname, mail, mail nickname or user principal name. To keep it simple, I’ve included the search term com, which appears in everyone’s email.
Next, I use a comparison between today's date and a date that is available in the user's profile. As I've mentioned earlier, I have the user's birthday and hire date that I can set and to no surprise, the same fields are available as dynamic content from the Get user profile (V2) action.
In this article, I check to see if the birth day and month are today and that the birth year is not 0001, which indicates that the user didn’t provide a birthday in their Delve profile. To do so, I’ve used the following expression
@and(equals(substring(body('Get_user_profile_(V2)')?['birthday'], 5, 5) , substring(utcnow(),5,5)), not(equals(int(substring(body('Get_user_profile_(V2)')?['birthday'],0,4)), 0001)))
And finally, I add an item for each match into the Celebrations list. For the Start Time and End Time, I set them to go from midnight until just before midnight the next day
Start Time
concat(substring(utcnow(),0,10),'T00:00:00Z')
End Time
concat(substring(utcnow(),0,10),'T23:59:59Z')
Remember the confetti.jpg image I uploaded into the document library? You can see it being referenced in the Banner URL field. This image appears at the top of each celebration event created.
Limitations
With the modern Events web part, when there are no celebrations on a day, it shows the three default events, which is not ideal. I’d rather the entire webs part be hidden in that case. As well, the Flow action does not allow to specify full-day events, requiring you to enter a start and end time.
