Creating a Weekly Summary Reminder Email workflow in SharePoint Designer 2013?

Question

I recently started a new job (intern) where I am in charge of my team's SharePoints. I have been tasked with creating a workflow that sends weekly emails reminding people of their incomplete tasks that are past their due date. My boss wants the emails formatted so that once a week (for example, every Friday) a user receives ONE email that includes ALL of their tasks that are past their due date (all tasks are in one list).

I have managed to set up other workflows that send reminders to users when an item is about to be due or when an item is past due, but I am stuck with how to send an email that includes ALL the tasks that are past due in a list. Is this possible? I only have access to SharePoint and Designer 2013. No coding experience and this is my first experience using SharePoint.

I can provide more info if necessary. Any advice or guidance would be greatly appreciated! Thank you!

Answer 1

Workflows are triggered by an event on a item. In your case this would be a task item and the event would be item created or item modified. If you are using SharePoint 2013 style workflows then you can call a web service to get all of the of the open tasks for that user. The problem is that if the user has 12 tasks, they could get 12 emails each week with the same summery. To work around that, your workflow would need to check another list to see if the weekly reminder has already been sent.

The workflow logic might look like this:

• start of loop
• Sleep for seven days (actually, sleep until the next Monday morning).
• Check the "Workflow Notices for Tasks" list to see if the email has been sent. If no email sent then:
  • Add a new entry to the "Workflow Notices for Tasks" list with the user name and this week's starting date.
  • Get the current user's ID from the AssignedTo column (needed for the web service call).
  • Call a web service to get a list of all incomplete tasks for the current user.
  • Generate an email with the list of incomplete tasks.
• Loop

This is not the ideal first workflow! Do you have any workflow resources in your organization that you can call on?

This workflow gets more complicated if you have multiple assigned to a single task!

The REST call might look like this:

https://yourServer/sites/yourSite/_api/web/lists/getbytitle('Tasks')/items?$filter=AssignedToId eq 12

Another, and probably a simpler, solution might be a PowerShell script created by an administrator that runs on a weekly schedule.