Aug 17, 2016

Work more efficiently in Microsoft SharePoint by sending periodical document review email notifications to users.

You can set email reminders to users to notify them that a document needs reviewing by using Information Management Policies. What you need to do is create a simple workflow that emails a message to users, and then nominate this workflow to be run periodically by the Information Management Policies.

Here’s a breakdown of the steps:

1. From the List tab of the document library, select the Workflows drop down and select Create a workflow in SharePoint Designer.


2. In SharePoint Designer, name the workflow, for example "EmailUsers" and click on OK.


3. From the tab, click on Actions and select Send an Email.


4. Click on the users link, specify the users in the To box and type up your email message. To create a link to the document in the body of the email you can click on the Add or Change Lookup button and, from the second drop down, choose a column that has the text (linked to item with edit menu) in front of it – usually "Title".


5. Click on Publish from the tab.


6. Back in SharePoint, go to the Library Settings and click on Information Management Policies settings.


7. Click on Document Content Type.


8. Tick Enable Retention and then click on Add a retention stage.


9. Select the period that you want the review to happen and from :Action: select start a workflow and then select EmailUsers workflow.


10. Tick "Repeat this stage’s action until the next stage is activated and specify period of recurrences" and click OK.

And that’s it! SharePoint will now periodically run the workflow when a document in this library is due, which of course means that users will receive emails about reviewing the document.

For more information, take a look at our SharePoint training courses.

Hope this has helped.

Cyrus Mohseni.