Microsoft retires SharePoint alerts forcing users to Power Automate flows
Microsoft ends SharePoint's classic alerts feature in July 2026. It blocked new alerts from January 2026. Existing alerts now expire every 30 days unless users manually extend them. The company points users to basic SharePoint Rules for simple notifications or Power Automate flows for anything advanced. No tool automates the switch, so people must rebuild each setup by hand. This change disrupts common workflows that send notices from SharePoint lists to Teams or Outlook. SharePoint Rules cannot handle digests or complex logic yet.
SharePoint alerts let anyone set up quick email notices for list changes since 2010, with no need for flows or permissions. They ran reliably enough for basic needs but expired without warning and lacked custom steps like Teams posts. Power Automate flows now take over, offering triggers on list changes and actions for targeted notifications. This demands learning the tool's interface but delivers lasting automations that do not auto-expire. Beginners gain a path to robust setups once past the initial hurdles.
Analysis
Forget scrambling to migrate everything – this retirement kills off alerts that failed silently anyway, handing you the push to build flows that actually stick around. Right now, open your SharePoint site, list every alert on your busiest lists like vendor submissions, and replace the top one with a 'When an item is created or modified' flow that posts to Teams using standard connectors and a 'Configure run after failed' step to email yourself on breaks.
Citation
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