With the release of ShareGate 12.0, you can automatically export your reports to SharePoint. Here’s how to configure Microsoft Flow to make reporting even easier.
The problem with information is that sometimes it’s not accessible to everyone—or at least, not always easily.
That’s a challenge that we, here at ShareGate, have been trying to solve over the years. Reporting has been a part of ShareGate almost since its beginning. After that, we added scheduling capabilities. And now we can automatically export reports to a SharePoint library.
This opens a lot of doors to easily share information. We can automatically feed a Power BI Dashboard, or even better, we can automatically send weekly reports to someone by setting up Microsoft Flow.
Let’s see how it goes.
Jump to:
Scheduling the report in ShareGate
First, we need to setup and schedule the report in ShareGate.
In this scenario, I’ll set up a weekly Permissions matrix report—and of course I’ll make sure the report is automatically exported to the SharePoint library of my choice.
Then, I’ll schedule the report to run on a weekly basis.
Configuring Microsoft Flow
Now, let’s say I want to send an email notification to myself when the report is ready. In this scenario, we’ll use a pre-built template that can send an email automatically when a file is added to a SharePoint Library.
As you will see, this flow is very straightforward. It includes 3 actions:
- The trigger, which is when an item is added to a SharePoint library
- Then, an action to automatically retrieve my own email address
- And finally, the email notification itself
All you need to do is select the right site address and the library name you previously selected to automatically export the report. You can modify the subject and body of the email, but otherwise, that’s it!
Et voilà!
Easy, right?
Configuring a flow from scratch
Let’s complicate things a little now.
This time, I want the email notification to be sent to someone else. But I want to notify that person only when the Permissions matrix report is uploaded to the SharePoint library—not every time a file is uploaded!
We’ll do this by creating a flow from scratch. In flow we’ll click the Create button and select the Automated flow option. From there I’m going to give my flow a name and use the “When a file is created (Properties only)” trigger from the SharePoint connector.
The first part will feel very similar to our first flow because we’re using the same trigger we used earlier.
We simply need to select the site and library where we already configured the export of our report, and then click on the + Next step button. There, we’ll add a condition to our flow to filter out only our Permissions matrix reports. I’ll do this by filtering files using their name. Something like this:
Then, we’ll fill out the If yes part of our condition so that if the file name added or created in the library contains the words Permission matrix report, it will send a report to my colleague Michelle.
That’s it! Michelle will now receive her weekly PMR, all thanks to some ShareGate and Microsoft Flow magic.
