Do you want your employees (or HR department) to receive automatic alerts that a valid certificate or entitlement is about to expire? Here’s how you can set it up using the power of Power Automate and Microsoft Dataverse:
- Prepare Dataverse (or a list in SharePoint)
- Make sure you store employee information in your data source (e.g., Microsoft Dataverse), including the expiration date of documents (e.g., health and safety permissions).
- It is worth having an “Expiration date” field and preferably a second logical field (e.g. “Notification sent”).
- Create a flow in Power Automate
- Start with a Scheduled cloud flow: e.g. weekly or even every day at a specific time.
- Add the “List records” action
- Select the table in Dataverse (or SharePoint) that contains data about employees and documents.
- Loop and condition
- Look at each record in the loop (For each) to see if it meets the criteria for sending the notification (e.g., if the notification has not already been sent this month, or if the expiration date has already passed).
- You can also use a condition that sets the “Notification sent” flag depending on the status of the document.
- Send Notification
- Use “Send an email (V2)” or “Microsoft Teams – Post a message” to automatically send an alert to an employee, department manager, or HR department.
- In the body of the email or Teams message, provide the most important information: the employee’s name, type of document, expiration date, and instructions on how to proceed.
- Update a record
- If you want to make sure that the notification isn’t sent multiple times, update the field in Dataverse (“Notification sent = True”).
- This lets the flow know that the notification has already gone and won’t send it again the following week.
With this configuration, the Power Platform-based app will automatically monitor the expiration dates of employee documents and provide the necessary alerts exactly when needed. Effect? No surprises in the form of lost permissions or administrative penalties, because the HR department and project managers always know that the deadline for the renewal of certificates or other documents is approaching.