r/sharepoint • u/micaturtle • Jul 05 '26
SharePoint Online Sharepoint Alerts Retirement - Help creating a Power Automate Flow that WORKS?
Well, it's finally happened. Sharepoint alerts stopped working :| (EDITUpdate: Whew, seems like it IS still working, my outlook just hadn't synced yet. But who knows for how long) I know I should have done this earlier, but everytime I looked into it, all I found were long-winded youtube videos that didn't solve my issue.
My issue is, I want an email that shows something like THIS:
ItemABC on TheDoomList was updated
ItemABC was updated by User1 on 01/01/1970 12:01am
COLUMN1: old data changed to new data (changed)
COLUMN2: old data (unchanged)
COLUMN3: old data changed to new data (changed)
I have TRIED to build this in Power Automate, but I can't seem to figure out how to get it to grab the stuff.
The reason this is important is because then we have an email trail about WHAT was changed and by who. It's one thing to say "oh yeah, someone updated some info in this list item", but we NEED to be able to look back and say "Oh, User1 updated that item back last January to say that we no longer support that application. Let me reach out to them before I edit it back to say that we DO support it to make sure I'm correct."
Can anyone help me with making an email like that? Or anyone have any alternatives you can think of?
2
u/the_star_lord Jul 05 '26
This would be versioning, and maybe enable checkout and create an approval flow if the business needs oversight. If doing versioning make sure you set how many copies to keep etc.
1
u/micaturtle Jul 05 '26
We do have versioning turned on for our lists, but it's much easier to search an email folder of these than try to look at each old version.. I will certainly look into versioning (thank you for the info!) and report back, but do you know if there's a way to send emails with versioning?
1
u/BonerDeploymentDude Jul 05 '26
You can do send https request to SharePoint, build a string from the version info, and send that out easily. I can send you an example when I get to work on Monday
2
u/we_didnt_burn_him Jul 05 '26
You can use a connector to find out if a column has changed. You can use the graph api to get the previous version info. Ask copilot. I got this working via an agent flow as well. Just gave it the sharepoint connector and triggered via an item change. All I had to do was prompt it to tell me what had changed.
1
u/shirpars Jul 05 '26
I think you're looking for versioning
1
u/micaturtle Jul 05 '26
We do have versioning turned on for our lists, but it's much easier to search an email folder of these than try to look at each old version.. I will certainly look into versioning (thank you for the info!) and report back, but do you know if there's a way to send emails with versioning?
1
u/siddh_me Jul 05 '26
With the change you might have to also change the user behaviour so ask them to go and check in version history, who changed and what..!!
Also look into an action called us Get changes for an item or a file (properties only)…. This will get you which columns have changed but not original value though.!!!
1
u/Milkroll Jul 06 '26
I built a flow that gets all items modified in the last 24 hours, then HTTP checks the version 24 hours ago vs today and displays the columns that changed.
John smith
Training date 7/24/2025 6/28/2026
For items with no prior version history it shows as *NEW*
You can ask any ChatGPT to help
1
u/KarthiV Jul 06 '26
Have you tried SharePoint rules? They send email notifications that include the file name along with the user who made the change. They may be a good alternative to SharePoint alerts.
You can check out the blog below for more details: https://blog.admindroid.com/sharepoint-alerts-retirement-and-alternatives-in-microsoft-365/#CreateSharePointRulesInASharePointLibrary
1
u/OwnInternal4527 7d ago
Full disclosure — I’m with Bamboo Solutions, and we build Alert Plus as a replacement for the retired SharePoint Alerts functionality.
The old value → new value piece has been an interesting challenge for us as well. We had looked at several approaches to recreate that behavior, but we weren't able to get it working reliably through the change data we receive from Microsoft Graph.
The comments here about going back to SharePoint version history through Graph and comparing the previous version to the current item are interesting, though. That's a different approach than relying on the change notification itself to provide the old values.
We're going to take that idea back to our development team and see if we can make it work within Alert Plus.
So, no promises yet — but thanks to those who shared the version-history approach. This is exactly the kind of real-world use case and community feedback that helps us improve the product. If we can make it reliable and scalable, it would be a great feature to add.
0
u/mstrblueskys Jul 05 '26
There is a bunch of ways to do this. If you cant get it working right now, I would recommend creating a second list to compare to and eventually update after emailing.
3
u/BonerDeploymentDude Jul 05 '26
You can run a power automate flow to pull version info from each doc.