Automate Birthday Notifications in your Intranet

Birthdays! Some people love them, some people hate them... yet everyone is happier when they receive birthday wishes!  

This article shares an easy way for everyone to always be on track with coworkers' special day -  Get to know how to send email notifications through Outlook, using a combination of BindTuning Calendar and Microsoft Power Automate 
 

How it works 

Start by displaying employees’ birthdays in a good looking calendar, strategically added to the intranet home page – it's a neat and effective way to bring this data front and center, while managing it through a single source, a SharePoint Calendar List. 

Leveraging the BindTuning Calendar web part, you will be able not only to display events added to the SharePoint Calendar List in a friendlier way; you will also easily differentiate birthdays from coworkers in different departments (or teams) using color coded categories and category customizable icons.  

To make sure no birthday is missed, and because your data will be stored in a SharePoint Calendar List, you can use Power Automate to set daily email notifications. In today’s hectic work pace, people may appreciate an extra reminder!  

Tip! You can also choose to have these alert messages sent through MS Teams.  

Implementation 

Step 1) Install and add BT Calendar to a page

Our Office 365 Web Parts Installation Guide and SharePoint On Premises Web Parts Installation Guide are available for your consultation, to help you run a smooth web part installation. if further assistance is needed, please open a support ticket at support@bindtuning.com

Step 2) Configure your web part 

• • Create a SharePoint Calendar list app to store your data 

Go to “Site Contents” and choose ‘’New’’, then ‘’App’’  

Note: The SharePoint Apps creation experience has recently changed to align more closely with the Modern Experience. Make sure to revert to the classic experience to easily create a SharePoint Calendar. See GIF below: 

• • Add events to that list: 
    
    
    Make sure to: 
    • Create all birthdays as “All Day Events” and mark them as annually repeatable selecting “Recurrence = Yearly” 
    • Categorize each birthday based on department or team. This will later enable you to differentiate birthdays using color coding and custom icons  
    • If team members are spread among different subsidiaries, and if you want to display different calendars for each subsidiary site for example, make sure to also fill the “Location” field – when configuring BindTuning Calendar you will be able to filter calendar entries by category and location 
      
    • Connect the list to the web part
      
    • Customize categories with icons and colors:
      

    Step 3) Create a new Power Automate flow  (Type: Scheduled Cloud Flow) in Microsoft Power Automate, 
    Tips:  

    • Under  ‘’Initialize variable’’ » ‘’Value’’, choose an expression of the type “formatDateTime” and type:  formatDateTime(addDays(utcNow( ),0), 'yyyy-MM-dd') 
    • Under ‘’Get Items’’, type the name of the SharePoint calendar list manually 
    • Under ‘’Send an Email (V2)’’, use a distribution list email to reach a group or your entire organization 
      

    
    

    Step 4) Test your flow: 

    • Add a new birthday event to the SharePoint Calendar List for the present day  
    • From your flow edit page click on “Test”»”Automatically”  

     If working properly, an email will be sent to all employees whenever someone’s birthday comes up.  

    Starting today, no more missed birthdays!