Meet Priya, the operations manager at a 40-person marketing agency running client work through SharePoint Online. Every account team had its own project library, and over several years, account managers and designers had quietly set up personal alerts on client folders: "notify me when the client uploads a new brief," "tell me when the final asset lands in the approved folder." Nobody owned this list of notifications. Nobody had audited it. It had simply grown, one "Alert Me" click at a time, since the agency moved to SharePoint Online in 2021.
When Priya read the retirement notice for classic SharePoint Alerts, her first reaction was that it probably would not affect much. Her second reaction, after actually going looking, was that she had no idea how many alerts were quietly running across the agency's client libraries, or who was relying on them.
The Discovery Problem
Classic alerts are configured per user, per list, with no tenant-wide admin view. Priya's first attempt, asking each account team lead to check their own libraries, produced patchy answers within a day and nothing from two of the six teams by the end of the week. The manual approach did not scale, and client deadlines do not pause for an internal audit.
She switched to a scripted inventory using PnP PowerShell's Get-PnPAlert command, looping across every site collection tied to an active client. The result surprised her: 214 individual alerts spread across 34 libraries, more than half configured by people who had since changed roles or left specific accounts entirely.
"I assumed we had maybe thirty alerts total. We had over two hundred, and a third of them belonged to accounts we had not worked on in over a year."
Prioritising What Actually Mattered
Not every alert deserved the same urgency. Priya split the inventory into three tiers: active client accounts with live deliverables, dormant accounts kept for record-keeping only, and alerts clearly tied to someone no longer on that account. The dormant and orphaned tiers, roughly 90 alerts combined, were simply removed. That alone cut the migration workload by more than a third before any Power Automate work began.
For the remaining active-account alerts, she grouped them by pattern rather than migrating one by one. Most fell into two buckets: "notify the account lead when a client uploads to the Briefs folder" and "notify the whole team when a file lands in Final Approved." Two flow templates, built once each and parameterised by site and folder, covered roughly 80% of the remaining alerts.
Building the Replacement Flows
Working from the guide on replacing SharePoint alerts with Power Automate, the team mapped each alert's trigger type to the matching SharePoint connector event, added a filter condition for folder scope, and routed notifications to a Teams channel per account rather than individual emails. This was a deliberate upgrade over the original alerts: a channel notification is visible to the whole account team, not buried in one person's inbox.
- Immediate "file uploaded" alerts became a single triggered flow per client folder pattern
- Weekly digest alerts, previously used by two account leads for a Friday status summary, became a scheduled flow querying changes since the last run
- Notifications moved from personal email to a shared Teams channel per account, closing the "only one person knows" gap the old system had quietly created
Running Parallel and Decommissioning
Each replacement flow ran alongside its original alert for ten days. During that window, one flow was found to be missing a subfolder the original alert had covered, caught because an account lead noticed a Teams notification arrive a day later than expected from the parallel email. That single overlap week likely prevented a live client miss. Once every flow was confirmed correct, Priya removed the corresponding classic alerts and sent a short note to each account team explaining where notifications would now appear.
What Changed for the Agency
| Before | After |
|---|---|
| 214 personal alerts, no central owner or record | 2 flow templates covering 34 client libraries, owned by operations |
| Notifications went to one inbox each, invisible to the rest of the team | Notifications post to a shared Teams channel per account |
| No visibility into which accounts still had active alerts | Full inventory retained as a spreadsheet, refreshed quarterly |
The migration took three weeks from initial inventory to full decommission, most of it spent on discovery and prioritisation rather than actually building flows. Priya's advice to other agencies facing the same July 2026 deadline: assume the real number of active alerts is higher than anyone expects, and use the audit as an opportunity to clean up dormant accounts rather than migrating every alert as-is.
For agencies managing many client sites, Report Master can generate a per-site activity export that helps prioritise which libraries carry the most active traffic before committing to a full alert migration.