easily send emails/notifications from communication sites

Iron Contributor

we did not implement public office 365 groups when we migrated to sharepoint because there wasn't really a benefit. now, several years later, we still don't see a benefit because they dont function like they should. we want them to function the same as private groups - someone finds a comms/public site and wants to join as a member to receive notifications, emails about news posts, etc. we have employee resource groups and community involvement teams that use comms sites to post information, events, blogs, etc. but there's no way for anyone to be alerted to those updates. we suggested using collab sites, but the information isn't 'private' and people don't need to be approved to view it. they want it to be public so anyone can see what they're up to, but people who are active members of those ERGs and CITs need a way to receive the info. as much as we try to 'get out of our inbox', our company (and i assume many others) is still heavily reliant on emails (surveys we conduct tell us this). people don't check a sharepoint site daily to see what's been added. they want to receive an email or some sort of notification so they're aware and don't have to spend time checking various sites to hunt for updates. and following a site is pointless as all it does is essentially create a bookmark. 

 

we need a way for comms site owners to get information in the hands of people who want it. this seems like an obvious capability that has been overlooked for years. 

3 Replies

@Kate Bowling in our company whenever a news story is published on our intranet we publish it to our all-company Teams team and our all-company Yammer group. This is done with a JSON-formatted button in a column on the Site Pages library that triggers a flow in Power Automate. We deliberately don't send it by email as a) we are trying to reduce the reliance on email and b) when staff switch on their laptops in the morning the homepage of our intranet comes up by default with the news web part at the top.

 

postButton.png

 

The JSON column formatting looks like this:

 

{
  "$schema": "https://developer.microsoft.com/json-schemas/sp/v2/column-formatting.schema.json",
  "elmType": "button",
  "txtContent": "Publish to Teams & Yammer",
  "customRowAction": {
    "action": "executeFlow",
    "actionParams": "{\"id\": \"021ec4e0-8f85-46b3-a557-a4456960a4eb\",\"headerText\":\"All Things REI\",\"runFlowButtonText\":\"Publish Now\"}"
  },
  "style": {
    "background-color": "#468259",
    "color": "white",
    "visibility": "=if(([$PublishedToTeams] == 'Yes'),'hidden','visible')"
  }
}

 


The end result in Teams:
adaptiveCard.png

 

and in Yammer it looks like this:

yammerPost.png

 

So you might want to investigate a similar solution. Come back with any questions about this.

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User.

@RobElliott  thanks for this suggestion. we dont have an all company teams because with nearly 70,000 employees, it would become a nightmare (i assume - i dont know because we've never had it). and since we only use private groups, teams groups are only available for collab sites. the yammer idea isnt bad, but yammer adoption is low at our company as well. additionally, we dont want to 'spam' or clutter users' feed with posts for groups they dont belong to or dont care about. for example, if a CIT group in our indianapolis headquarters has an upcoming event, it's only relevant to the few hundred people who participate. yet, it would be in the All Company yammer page for our 70,000 employees. we want to try to target the messages as best as we can to avoid overcommunicating to employees who don't want the info. 

 

i will definitely run your idea by my IT partners as well (i'm in corporate communications so i'm not an expert in configuartions). thank you!!

@Kate Bowling  we're a similar size at 65,000 people. If you've got specific groups whom you wat to send the targeted emails to then a flow in Power Automate can do this automatically whenever a new news story is published. But you'd probably need to have a column for the group involved and change the page details so that it only sends it to that group. Do-able but with that number of staff you don't really want to be sending vast numbers of emails.

 

Rob
Los Gallardos
Microsoft Power Automate Community Super User