Tag: alerts

Push Notifications For RSS Feeds with iOS

AJ

Background

In the growing age of Software as a Service (SaaS) applications it’s critical to monitor outages and service degradation. Most SaaS companies have a status page you can check, some offer ways to sign up for alerts to email or txt messages. Personally, I prefer RSS feed because I can centralize all my feeds into one place. Let’s take a look at a way to get push notifications for RSS feeds.

Feedly and IFTTT

When Google Reader met it’s demise I searched around for a few different RSS apps and came across Feedly. I’ve been hooked ever since! Along with Feedly is an automation service IFTTT – short for If This Then That. It’s a great way to automate actions between account services.

Setup

  1. In order to do everything below you will want to create accounts in both Feedly and IFTTT.
  2. In Feedly you will want to “Create a new Feed” and call it something like RSS Notifications. This will act as a category to subscribe to all your RSS feeds.
  3. Now go to “Add Content” and paste in the URL for the RSS feed you want to subscribe to. Add to your RSS Notifications feed category. For example: https://status.slack.com/
  4. After adding the RSS feeds you want let’s go to IFTTT, there is a specific applet already created you can use called Feedly iOS Push Notifications – connect this to the Feedly category you created and you should be good to go!

Summary

I hope these push notifications for RSS feeds help you stay on top of the services you have and know when to inform others that they should expect possible issues. Communication is key for any team or business!

Create a List in Office 365 for Email reminders

AJ

Overview

Have you missed an item that needed renewed and caused the whole world to crash down? OK, maybe not the whole word but I’m sure you’ve felt the stress of, “Oh no, that certificate just expired and everyone is getting warned it’s an unsafe site!” Over the years I’ve heard lots of well intended ideas by people, “Let’s keep all of these in your IT asset management system, or you can use our contract system, or enter it as a financial renewal in our ERP system.” Time and time again, those are very cumbersome and expensive when all I needed was a simple list that could email my a notification. Say no more, let’s create a list in Office 365 and a Flow to get email alerts.

Setup

If you haven’t used an Office 365 Group yet it’s a collection of collaboration services all tied to a single group of people. All the permissions are set at the Group level and all users get access to things like a Shared Mailbox with email address, OneDrive document library, SharePoint site, etc. Let’s create a list and customize for what we want to keep track of.

  1. Create an Office 365 Group or go to an existing Group you have access to.
  2. Go to SharePoint app to see your Group – Click the New dropdown >
  3. Create a List
  4. Customize your list – add items – organize columns – etc.
  5. Add an item to your list

There you go! Now once you have an item added you can click the Flow drop down and you should see Set a reminder > Date Due. Since I added a column with a date, SharePoint was smart enough to create a built in Flow for a reminder based on the due date.

Summary

That’s it! Now sit back and wait for the reminders to renew your items. Flow is a built in app from Microsoft that can be used all over Office 365. Create a list in Office 365 is just one quick example of what it can do. Learn more about Flow here.

So why Office 365 and Lists? If you use Microsoft Office 365 for all of your core business collaboration solutions then it’s probably never going away. Seems like a pretty simple solution to me. Give it a try and let me know how it goes or if you any other tips.