Email notifications to customers from public facing Office 365

Question

Here is what my end user wants. There's a list on the site of useful things (could be announcements, press releases, articles etc) and this list gets used to show people things all over the public facing site. Some readers (who are complete strangers to us, not members of the site, not in a group etc) might want to sign up to be notified when new items are added to that list.

So they fill out a small form, maybe as little as their email address. It gets added to something, presumably a list. When a new item is added to the list of useful things, there's maybe a workflow or whatever and all those people get an email that says "there's a new useful thing" and a link to it. The adding is done by a logged in authenticated user btw, not on the public side.

This seems to me like it's a common-as-dirt thing to want, yet it seems to be impossible. Sure, a workflow can get the email from a list, but it selects ONE ROW from that list and sends one email to that one person. What am I missing? And keep in mind I'm restricted to what can be done in Office 365.

Answer 1

I'm doing exactly the same thing as you describe. My scenario is that I have a list of about 400 subscribers and another list where new articles are created. To get the functionality you describe, use a SharePoint 2013 workflow and use the HTTP web service action to get the data from your subscriber list and iterate through.

I followed this article in the main: http://www.proactivespeaks.com/2013/08/08/looping-on-list-items-in-sharepoint-designer-workflow-2013/

But it doesn't explain everything fully such as initialising and incrementing the Index variable (integer). The Web SVC URL is in this format (this returns just the email field and only for active subscribers).

https://mysiteurl/_api/web/lists/getByTitle('Subscriptions')/items?$select=Email&$filter=Active eq '1'

Seems to do just what you want. Only issue is my environment not seeming to send out emails but that's not the fault of the solution I don't think.