Boost Meeting Efficiency with PowerAutomate: An Automated Reminder Flow Walkthrough

Introduction: Keeping external participants informed about upcoming meetings is crucial for effective collaboration. Forgetting to send these reminders can lead to miscommunications, no-shows, or under-prepared attendees. To solve this, I created a PowerAutomate flow that automatically sends meeting reminders to external participants one day before the event.

For those unfamiliar, PowerAutomate is a free automation platform from Microsoft that helps you streamline repetitive tasks. In this article, I’ll walk you through each block in this flow so you can import it, customize it, and start automating reminders for your own meetings.

Why Automate Meeting Reminders?

When schedules get packed, manually sending reminders to external participants can be overlooked. This flow ensures that no meeting reminder gets missed, helping to:

• Save time: No need to remember or manually send reminders.
• Improve communication: Keeps external participants informed, reducing no-shows and miscommunication.
• Increase consistency: Ensures reminders go out daily and reliably, regardless of your workload.

The PowerAutomate Flow: Step-by-Step Breakdown

Each part of this flow has a specific function. Here’s a detailed breakdown of how it works:

1. Trigger: Daily Recurrence

The flow starts with a daily trigger at 8 a.m., prompting PowerAutomate to check for any meetings scheduled for the following business day. Setting it up as a recurring trigger keeps everything running without manual intervention.

2. Initialize Variable for Days to Add

To ensure reminders go out on the next business day and account for weekends, this block calculates the upcoming business day by checking today’s day of the week:

• If today is Friday, it sets the reminder for Monday.
• If today is Saturday, it sets the reminder for Monday as well.
• For all other weekdays, it moves to the next day.

3. Calculate Next Business Day

This block uses the Compose action to apply the business day calculation and determine the exact date for the next business day. It’s essential for identifying which day’s meetings to pull from the calendar.

4. Retrieve Calendar Events for the Next Business Day

The flow now checks your calendar for meetings scheduled on the calculated business day. This action gathers all relevant meetings and sends them to the next block for further processing.

5. Retrieve Organizer Information

To ensure reminders are only sent from your account, the flow verifies if you are the organizer of each meeting. This is essential to avoid sending reminders for meetings where you are simply an attendee.

6. Compose: Extract Domain from Email

This block extracts the domain from your email, storing it as DomainFromEmail and making the flow adaptable for any domain.

7. Initialize Variables for Attendees

This step prepares two key variables:

• ExternalAttendeeFound: Tracks if any external participants are identified.
• ExternalAttendeeEmails: Stores email addresses of all external attendees.

These variables keep the flow efficient by ensuring that only meetings with external attendees are processed for reminders.

8. Extract and Combine Attendee Emails

This block retrieves and combines emails of both required and optional attendees using Compose to concatenate the lists, creating a full list of all invitees.

9. Split Attendees into Individual Emails

The flow then splits the concatenated email string into individual emails, which allows it to process each attendee separately and apply the necessary filtering.

10. Loop Through Attendees and Filter for External Participants

Within this loop:

• Each attendee’s email is trimmed to remove any extra spaces.
• The flow checks if the email is external by filtering out any email that contains your email domain, dynamically sourced from the DomainFromEmail variable.

If an email address meets both criteria (external and non-empty), it sets ExternalAttendeeFound to true and appends the email to the ExternalAttendeeEmails variable, ensuring only external participants receive reminders.

11. Reset the External Attendee Email Variable

Before processing each new event, this step clears the list of external emails, ensuring that each event’s participants are processed separately.

12. Unique Email Validation

The flow performs a union operation on the ExternalAttendeeEmails array. This eliminates duplicate emails, ensuring each external participant only receives one reminder per meeting.

13. Initialize Variable for SendEmails (True/False)

The SendEmails variable controls whether emails are actually sent or if the flow should run in test mode. Setting it to false allows you to test the flow without sending any emails. Once you’re confident it’s working as expected, set SendEmails to true to start live reminders.

14. Send Reminder Emails to External Attendees

In the final stage, if:

• ExternalAttendeeFound is true, and
• SendEmails is set to true,

then the flow sends an email to external attendees with a customized message:

• The email includes the meeting subject and start date.
• It uses conditional formatting to display "tomorrow" if the meeting is the next day or the specific date if further in the future.
• The email is friendly and professional, reminding participants of the meeting and encouraging them to reach out with any questions or agenda items.

How to Download and Import the Flow

If you’d like to try out this flow, you can download the template and import it into PowerAutomate by following these steps:

1. Download the Flow File: Download the flow here.
2. Open PowerAutomate: Go to PowerAutomate and log in with your Microsoft account.
3. Import the Flow: In PowerAutomate, select My flows from the left sidebar. Click on Import in the top-right corner. Upload the .zip file you downloaded, then follow the prompts to assign necessary connections (such as Office 365) and update any permissions.
4. Customize the Flow: Once imported, open the flow to make adjustments like updating the reminder message, modifying the trigger time, or changing the email format.
5. Run in Test Mode (Optional): Set SendEmails to False to test the flow without sending actual emails. Once you’re satisfied, switch SendEmails to True to start sending reminders.

Benefits of Automating Meeting Reminders with PowerAutomate

By automating reminders, you:

• Save time by removing repetitive manual tasks.
• Enhance professionalism by ensuring external attendees are prepared and informed.
• Create consistency in your communication, reducing the chance of missed meetings or misunderstandings.

Conclusion

PowerAutomate isn’t just for tech experts; it’s a versatile tool that can streamline even the simplest daily tasks, like sending meeting reminders. If you’re looking to boost efficiency and improve external communication, I highly recommend exploring PowerAutomate. Feel free to reach out if you’d like more insights or assistance in setting up a flow for your needs.