Birthday Wishes — Microsoft Power Automate

A birthday is always a special occasion especially when it is cherished with your colleagues. But as the size of the team grows, the organization may start to lose track of employees’ birthdays and fail to send birthday emails.

Generally, the admins of the team tend to send out birthday emails, and it becomes a tedious task even for them as they have to compare the dates manually. In order to make the process simple Microsoft has offered a tool “Power Automate” which lets you schedule the birthday emails/messages to platforms like Teams, Mails, etc.

Microsoft Power Automate is a service that helps you create automated workflows between your favorite apps and services to synchronize files, get notifications, collect data, and more.

Birthday Automator — SharePoint + Flow

We are going to maintain our colleagues’ birthday in a SharePoint list, followed by creating a flow to automate the messages and emails.

In addition to the automation, the tool allows for a more inclusive approach of wishing everyone in the team on their birthday regardless of experience, race, gender, etc.

1. Open your SharePoint web page, and tap on “Create a new list”. Create columns as shown below and add your team’s details.

2. On the top of the ribbon, click on Integrate -> Power Automate -> Create a flow.

3. It shows you a wide variety of templates, and you can select “Send wishes to employees by email as per the birth date in SharePoint list”.

You can find the below template in this link.

4. It authorizes your credentials, and once its done click on “Continue”. It launches the Microsoft Power Automate.

5. It has few predefined settings like,

1. Recurrence — You can specify the time at which the flow has to be run at regular intervals.
2. Get items — Specify the SharePoint list address, so that data gets fed to the flow automatically.
3. Apply to each — Compares the birth date of the colleagues with today’s date and triggers the mail if both are the same. [excludes year during comparison]

This is the condition specified in the flow :

formatDateTime(outputs(‘Compose’), ‘MM-dd’) is equal to formatDateTime(utcNow(),’MM-dd’)

6. If both the date matches, you can click on “Add an action” -> “Send an email (V2)” and compose the mail with the respective fields.

7. Similar to composing a mail, you can also post messages in your Microsoft Teams channel with a custom message by adding “Post a message as the Flow bot to a channel” action to your flow.

8. Here is a sample of triggered Microsoft Teams message.

Sample of a teams message triggered by the flow

Hope this article helps, and this can be extended for work anniversaries and any other important events.