Creating an Outlook "Sharing Message" Email to a specific Task from Workflow

Question

We have a task list which I wanted to send out daily reminders when tasks are coming due. I created 2 workflows, one that uses the pause until time feature so it will run everyday and another to actually send the reminders if the due date is within a week.

This works fine; however, the email reminder just has a recap of the task that is due. When you create an alert in Sharepoint, you get an email which is a "Sharing Message" type in Outlook. This not only has all the details of the task; but also has links to the site; task list; mobile view; etc all integrated right in Outlook. It is a better experience.

I want to combine the two. I essentially want to convert my outgoing email from my workflow above to look like/act like the normal alerts (sharing messages) from sharepoint.

Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

The workflow emails handle HTML. So you can always create an HTML email that looks similar to the alert generated email and merge in the appropriate list data where needed. A word of advise when constructing HTML emails in SharePoint Designer, elimintate all white space in the markup or you'll get really bad looking emails.

You can view the alert template files on the server at %ProgramFiles%\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions(12 or 14 depending on your version)\Template\XML and start looking over the HTML output.