SharePoint Designer Reminder Email Workflow

I was asked to design a workflow to extend the out of the box functionality to email meeting attendees 2 weeks before the meeting is due to start. Firstly create a SharePoint calendar list called ‘Events’.

The out of the box editable calendar columns are displayed below:

For the workflow you need to create two additional columns for the events list:

• Calculated field called Reminder (Date and Time)
• Person or Group called Attendees

The calculated column settings can be seen below basically offsetting the Start Time by 14 days (2 weeks) as [Start Date] – 14.

Then create the Person or Group column as shown below making sure that the ‘Allow multiple selections’ option is set to ‘No’:

If you create a new event now you will see an additional field for the Person or Group

Notice that the calculated field does not appear here as this is not an editable field and will automatically calculate in the background.

Next step is to open SharePoint Designer and create a new workflow (I’m assuming if your reading this post you have some level of understanding of SPD and will not be covering this step for step).

You will need 2 steps for the workflow. The first is to check date and pause the workflow if the date is not equal to Start Time – 14. The second step is once the Start Time does equal 14 days before event then send the email.

On the new workflow set the values as shown below:

Step 1 – Check Date

So the above basically checks if Reminder (14 days before event) is equal to today. If not then it pauses until the Reminder does equal today.

Step 2 – Send Email

In this step the action is again to check for the Reminder date equals today. Then send the email.

The email is where another blog post of mine discovered an issue and can be read here. The  workflow sends an email to the the current items Attendees. The subject is also the title of that specific meeting. I also added some text to the main body where you could customise the email further by adding lookup references specific to that event such as start time etc.

Once you’ve created the 2 steps click finish and navigate to the event list and enter a new event 2 weeks away and make sure you set it for 5 minutes ahead so you have time to save the event.

NOTE: MAKE SURE YOU DO NOT CREATE THE TASKS AS A SYSTEM ACCOUNT OTHERWISE THE WORKFLOW WILL NOT WORK SEE KB ARTICLE: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/947284

(This is not my actual diary!)

If you select the new entry created and select workflows you should see:

And if you click on ‘InProgress’ this will show you that the workflow is paused for 5 minutes and will then send the email:

That's it job done and expect to see an email in your inbox reminding you.

Hope that's of some use!