One of the missing features in Office 365 is the possibility to schedule SharePoint Workflows. This was one of the many features Nintex offered in their Workflow for SharePoint Product, which is not available in Office 365, yet.
It’s good to see that Nintex has it marked as planned in their UserVoice, but well that’s already for over a year. https://nintex.uservoice.com/forums/218291-3-nintex-workflow-for-office-365/suggestions/6352529-schedule-site-workflow
While they have a post on their community site showing a workaround using a workflow with a pause action, this option has some flaws. One of them being a long running workflow. https://community.nintex.com/community/tech-blog/blog/2014/09/23/scheduled-workflows-in-office-365
So I was looking for other solutions to this common problem. There is already tooling on the market for exactly this scenario, but well they cost and you are dependent on the vendor.
And then I remembered that Microsoft just introduced Azure Logic Apps: Workflows in Azure. This just seemed to bring the solution my problem.
Azure Logic Apps know triggers and actions. And there are already more than enough different connectors available, just to name a few:
Check the full list here: https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/documentation/articles/app-service-logic-connectors-list/
But let’s get back to our problem of scheduling SharePoint Workflows:
By using the SharePoint Online Connector you can insert an item into a list. And let that trigger a regular List Workflow. This List Workflow can then fulfil the logic, or it can trigger a Site Workflow. By adding a recurrence trigger to your Logic App, you can configure it to run daily.
Daily means than once it has run, it will run 24 hours later again. If you want to specify the hour of the day it should run, you can edit the Recurrence Trigger in Code view and add a startTime
To get an overview of all possible parameters check: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn948511.aspx
You can also use functions within the actions, like I used the current date as the title of the list item to be created.
For a full list of possibilities check: https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/azure/dn948512.aspx
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