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Email notification from a resource calendar

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Posted on by DaveMNCPA

I would like to use Flow to create a notification of a reserved resource in the resource calendar. We have several spare computers for staff to reserve and use and would like to receive a 24 hour email notification prior to the reservation date. How do I go about doing this? I haven't seen anything that will check for the existence of an item in a resource calendar 24 hours in advance and then if it exists, send an email to me or another person. Please be specific if you have an idea using Flow that would work. I'm open to any other method besides Flow to accomplish this.

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Community Power Pla... on at

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It seems there isn't a trigger for resources. At least I can't find one.

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v-micsh-msft on at

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Hi @DaveMNCPA,

Could you please explain a bit regarding the resource calendar here?

Is this an Outlook Calendar?

Currently filtering for special Events under the Outlook (Office 365 Outlook)Get Events Action is not supported.

For the Calendar settings, would this be available to configure with the Calendar settings?

Calendar settings

If I have any misunderstandings, please feel free to let me know.

Regards

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DaveMNCPA 65 on at

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Yes, they are Outlook calendars. We have an Outlook calendar for each of our spare computers. Just like one would have Outlook calendars for reserving rooms for meetings, we have the same thing for spare computers, projectors and other equipment. These are all setup under the resources tab, in the recipients section in Exchange for O365. These are setup as "Equipment" mailboxes, which are free. We want to have an email sent to one or more I.T. staff alerting them to an upcoming reservation in order to prep and have the equipment ready to go 24 hours in advance.

If there is a way to have notification sent, via email or other method by manipulating the equipment calendar settings, I would like to know how that could be accomplished. Since the calendars aren't owned by the people who would get the notifications, I'm not seeing a way to do it through the calendar itself, but I could be missing something. Any method that would accomplish this goal, I would be interested in knowing about, provided it's not overly complicated to setup or maintain.

It seems like this type of thing would be perfect for Flow, and would be useful to lots of people. If it currently doesn't support something like this, and there isn't another way to easily to this, could this be put in as a feature request?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Is it possible to make something like this?

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Community Power Pla... on at

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Is it possible to make something like this?

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DaveMNCPA 65 on at

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I have tried this, but so far have not been able to get it to work. Part of the issue is I don't know what the time measurement number stands for. Is it minutes, hours, or days? I'm guessing it is minutes. When something doesn't work, I'm not sure how to go about finding out what is wrong. Maybe it doesn't like the Calendar ID or can't get access to it. How does one troubleshoot a Flow?

I just received an error from my Flow, I think it's telling me it doesn't like what I used for the Calendar ID. How do I find what I need to use for the Calendar ID? I used the name of the Calendar as it shows up in Outlook. Below is the error I received from the first step which is "When an Event is Starting Soon".

Code
BadRequest
Inputs
Calendar id
Meeting Room 1
Look ahead time
30
Outputs
Headers
{ "Pragma": "no-cache", "x-ms-request-id": "3f50f6c1-8fbe-4399-af66-84379fada637", "X-Content-Type-Options": "nosniff", "Cache-Control": "no-cache", "Date": "Tue, 21 Feb 2017 15:42:09 GMT", "Set-Cookie": "ARRAffinity=9aa4ec7cde11ebfc3dbc510a623358e31318a9ac25f6d4874c39ba5a9feadd0e;Path=/;Domain=127.0.0.1", "Server": "Microsoft-IIS/8.0,Microsoft-HTTPAPI/2.0", "X-AspNet-Version": "4.0.30319", "X-Powered-By": "ASP.NET", "Content-Length": "64", "Content-Type": "application/json; charset=utf-8", "Expires": "-1" }
Body
{ "status": 400, "message": "Id is malformed.", "source": "127.0.0.1" }

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DaveMNCPA 65 on at

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After further trial and error trying GUID, Alias, email name and a few othe things for the calendar ID, I've come to the theory that this flow only works for you own calendar. Everything I have tried for Calendar ID in this flow to access a shared resource has failed. I don't think it's smart enough to check to see if you have permissions to other calendars even if I could find the correct Calendar ID to use. There is another thread in this forum that has other people asking what to use for a Calendar ID when accessing a calendar not their own and there has been no accepted answer. Many other people have this same problem of finding the Calendar ID.

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DaveMNCPA 65 on at

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Checking back to see if anyone has an answer my initial post or templates that may have been created that can access another calendar and generate an email from an item on that calendar. I have searched for calendar templates and still fail to find something. There is another similar post in this forum about actually finding the calendar ID for a shared calendar, but it has received no answers.

The other post is titled
"Easiuest way to get calendar_id for the Office 365 Calendar connector"

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Community Power Pla... on at

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I believe I have come up with a work around for something similar, hope it can work for your needs!

I created a flow with a trigger from an my outlook calendar When event is coming soon. I then specified the calendar name that i wanted flow to look. It asks for how long in advance in minutes, and since I wanted it to look 2 weeks in advance to start the flow, I put 20160 (which is the 14 days in minutes). I then had it send email and specified my email address for it to notify. In the subject I used dynamic content of "subject" of the calendar event. In the body of the email I used dynamic content "body preview" which is the description from the event.

My flow was for due dates for multiple people and multiple documents in our organization. I needed flow to send an approval email (well email with options) to the person associated with the document without having separate calendars for each individual. I could not get flow to pull the email address of "attendee" without having to send each person an invite for due dates months in advance (each person would have received at least 30 invites). So i found a work around that didn't require me to send an invite. On My outlook calendar for the event subject I used the employees email address and put the content of the event in the body or description part. That way I could make flow pull the "subject" of the event when creating an email instead of trying to make it locate attendees. It looks awkward on my calendar but it does the job. I also used a switch case to route the responses to my email and set the subject of the emails coming to me as "userResponse" "body preview" I was then able to duplicate each step and add a Delay 7 days, which to resend the same optional email to each for follow up which also sent me the responses.

Hope that made some sense? But the key was to put the email address of the person you want to pull the calendar event from in the subject line of the event and have flow send email with "subject" dynamic content in the "To:" section of the flow email action.

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DaveMNCPA 65 on at

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Hi Thernandezp3,
I’m not sure I totally understand your solution. My main problem is trying to access or work with dates stored on a shared resource calendar. We have spare computers that staff can reserve and we want a notification to be sent to the I.T. department 2 days in advance so we can prep and update the laptop with the latest patches. I’ve found no way to access a shared resource calendar so I can trigger an email based on a up coming date. See this forum with many people with the same issue.

Re: Easiuest way to get calendar_id for the Office 365 Calendar connector

It’s not clear from your email how you identify and access a shared resource calendar from within Flow. As in the discussion forum link above, I’ve tried numerous things to access a shared calendar, which all failed.

Did you create your own custom flow or use one of the templated Flows? If you have found away to access a shared resource calendar with a templated Flow or a custom Flow, could you provide exactly how you access info from a shared calendar?

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