Field Learnings: Automate alerts for updates from the Surface Blog for IT Pros

[SurfaceITProTeam]

First published on TECHNET on Mar 27, 2018
An important practice for success with Surface in your organization is to stay up to date with firmware and Surface news for IT Pros. The Surface Blog for IT Pros is your main source of latest updates and Surface firmware releases for managing Surface. To help make staying informed easier in this blog we cover how you can automate receiving an email summary for each new blog posted.

Introducing Microsoft Flow .

Flow is service that can be used with both personal Microsoft accounts and Office 365 organizational accounts to make repetitive tasks, such as checking for blog updates, easy with workflow automation. Best of all Microsoft Flow has a free tier, more details on pricing are available here .

Get automatic emails from the Surface IT Pro Blog in 4 clicks

1. Go to the public templates for Microsoft Flow related to Surface and click Get email update from the Surface IT Pro Blog :
   


2. Click Use this template .


3. Follow the steps to sign up or sign in with your Microsoft or Office 363 account, if you have not already done so.


4. Click Continue .


5. Click Create flow .
   

Create a customized Flow for a specific Surface model in your organization

The first process will configure Flow to send you an email summary for each new blog post. This next section is only if you want to limit the emails to a specific model of Surface. Start with the Surface IT Pro Blog and click a tag from either the Tags section at the bottom of each post or the Popular Tags section on the blog homepage that relates to the posts you want to be notified about. In this example we will use the tag Surface Pro 4 :

1. Now that you have the tag URL, to set up automatic Flow updates begin with steps 1-3 as before. Once you're on this screen instead click Edit under When a feed item is published :
   


2. Replace the URL with the URL from the tag you picked, such as the example:
   
   
   
   • Initial URL – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/surface/tag/surfacepro4
   
   
   
   


3. Important: add to the end of the URL the text /feed/ , such as in the example:
   
   
   
   • Complete URL – https://blogs.technet.microsoft.com/surface/tag/surfacepro4/feed/
     
   
   
   
   


4. Finally click Create flow .

Now you have an automatic workflow that will email you when the Surface Blog for IT Pros makes a post with the tag you selected.

This field learnings blog written by Dominic Williamson , Surface Technical Specialist in Australia.