How To Create an Alert Repository

If you have an announcement to make, sometimes it’s easier if you display a message in one central place that everyone visits, instead of sending emails for everyone or leaving it on a chat to get lost. With BindTuning Alerts, you can create that sweet spot that will gather all the pop-up announcements you add to your intranet making them easy to pick up later if required.  

The Challenge

When using BindTuning Alerts, there are two different ways to display content: 

1. as a notification, that will appear every time you open the site or  
2. as a banner, which will appear on the section you choose to have the web part on

However, you may want the same content to appear in two different ways at the same time, creating a notification for the most recent message and an alert repository for the remaining. You can do that too, by simply creating just one entry into on the list and have the second one automatically created in a second list by a Power Automate Flow. Let me show you how. 

Solution Overview

You need to have 2 different lists for the same web part: 

• one will be the list you create the notification alert on, and for which you define “Notification Style » Template: Notification” 
• the other will be a list with the same “Notification Content” but defined as “Notification Style » Template: Default”.
   

Instead of duplicating content manually, you can have this alert content created automatically in the second list., using Power Automate. 

Implementation 

1. Configuring alert messages using BindTuning Alerts
   • Start by creating two lists for your webpart :
     • List 1: “Alerts Notification”
     • List 2: “Alerts Repository”.
   • Add content to List 1: Alerts Notification

   2. Create a Power Automate flow to automate content duplication across the 2 lists

• Go over to Power Automate and create a New Flow choosing the “Automated Cloud Flow“ option.

• A window will pop up to choose the name of your flow and  the first trigger to start your flow.  In this scenario, the first trigger will be “When an item is created”.  Choose it and hit “Create”.

   3. Start working on your flow:

• Choose the site collection where you want to have the flow running
• Choose the list to which you will be adding content to (it will be the list you have defined as “Notification Style » Template: Notification”) 

• Click on “+ New step” and choose the second trigger:  “Get item”
• Map it the same way that the first trigger. 

• Click again on “+ New step” and choose the trigger “Create item”.
• Map the fields with  the corresponding column titles, per the screenshot below:
  • 2 fields need to be set up manually with no mapping as we want the value to always be the same
    • Template Value needs to be always set as “Default”(so that the list entry that power automate creates is always defined as a static banner and not as a pop up notification) 
    • Placement Value needs to be “None” (see image below). 
• Hit save and test your flow to see if everything is working properly!

!Note: Do not map the field Target Users Claims, it is not necessary! 

Conclusion 

Have your alerts pop up to users while making sure they stay on a dedicated spot on the page when the notification window is closed. Centralize content ,improve content management efficiency, and stop information spread between email and chat. Use BindTuning Alerts to display critical, time sensitive messages in different layouts, leveraging Microsoft’s Power Automate to speed up the process.