Via Microsoft Power Automate, you can automate content to be imported from your SharePoint to Smarp to ensure that all important content that you create in your SharePoint will automatically import to Smarp as well.
Microsoft Power Automate is a paid feature of Microsoft's but it is also part of a few Microsoft packages. Ask your company Microsoft administrator if Power Automate is included in your Microsoft package to ensure that you can create a flow from SharePoint to Smarp.
You can find Smarp's connector profile with information regarding the flows you can create to Smarp here.
1. Create a flow
After logging into Microsoft Power Automate, select Create from the left-side menu to start creating a new flow. There are three ways to create a flow to Smarp:
- Automated flow – each time a specified event happens a post is created in Smarp. The event can be, for example, when new content is created in a List of a selected Site in your SharePoint. This will ensure that each time content is created in your SharePoint it is also created in Smarp.
- Instant flow – create one post based on one content piece in your SharePoint. This can be used if you just want to manually share one post in Smarp at a time and not automate the process.
- Scheduled flow – new content is fetched at a specified time.
Once you have selected your preferred flow type, you can name your flow and choose your flow's trigger. The trigger refers to which event will begin the flow process of creating automated content in Smarp. If you select 'When an item is created', this means that each time a new item is added to your SharePoint, a new post will also be created in Smarp.
Click Create to create your flow.
2. Enter SharePoint site and event details
Once you have successfully named your flow and selected the trigger, you will be prompted to input your SharePoint site address and the correct list name. List name refers to the page in your SharePoint from where content will be imported to Smarp. If you wanted to import content from multiple lists, you can create multiple flows.
Once your SharePoint details have been entered, you will be prompted to choose the action that your selected event will do. Smarp offers two actions in Power Automate, Create Post or Retrieve Channel List. If you want to create a new post in Smarp from your Sharepoint, select Create Post as the action. (Please note that if you do not have the right package to create a Premium flow in Power Automate, a pop-up window will appear telling you that you cannot create a flow to Smarp without a license.)
3. Connect to Smarp
For the flow to be successfully created, you will need to have an active Smarp account with a Company admin role. To create your flow, you will need to log in to authenticate that you have a Smarp account. Click the 'Sign in' button and verify your account.
4. Map the correct fields
In the last step, map out the proper fields so that your new post in Smarp is created correctly. You will have to select the Channel(s) where you want the content to be published in Smarp. The drop-down menu will give you all the channels listed in your company Smarp domain. You can select multiple channels whereby the content is published in all selected channels.
You can also map out other fields to determine how your post is displayed in Smarp. When you click on any of the fields, a Dynamic content window will appear where you can easily select the correct dynamic content to map that field. Normally you would want to map the following:
- Post Body: what text will be displayed in the Article body of the post in Smarp. Here choose Description from the Dynamic content window. This will copy the description from your content on SharePoint to the body field in Smarp.
- ImageURL: what image will be displayed in the post in Smarp. Here choose Image from the Dynamic content window. This will copy the image from your content on SharePoint to the image field in Smarp.
- Post status: will the post appear in the Published or Proposed feed in Smarp.
- Selecting Yes will mean that it will automatically be created in the Proposed feed. An Admin will then need to approve the content for it to appear in the Published feed in Smarp.
- Selecting No will mean that it will be automatically published to the Smarp feed without needing an Admin's approval.
- Post shareable status: whether the post will be for External sharing or Internal reading in Smarp.
- Selecting Yes will make it for External sharing and users can share it externally to social media.
- Selecting No will make it for Internal reading in Smarp only.
- Title: what title will be displayed in the title field of the post in Smarp. Here choose Title from the Dynamic content window. This will copy the title from your content on SharePoint to the title field in Smarp.
- Post URL: what URL/link will be embedded as the link in the post in Smarp, whereby if users click 'View original' in the post in Smarp they will be taken to the original SharePoint content. Here choose Link to item from the Dynamic content window. This will copy the image from your content on SharePoint to the image field in Smarp. (Please note that if a URL is used for the content, Smarp will use the image from this source instead of the image from the original content.)
After you have finished with the mapping process, click the Save-button on the bottom of the page to save your flow.
5. Test your flow
Now that your flow has been successfully created, you can test it by clicking the Test-button on the top right-hand corner of the screen.
You will see two different options to test your flow:
- I'll perform the trigger action means that you will test the integration by manually creating a new item in your SharePoint. After the item is successfully created, the item will also be created in Smarp.
- Using data from previous runs is available if you have been testing the connection before and it will allow you to use previously created items to test your flow.
Once the flow has run successfully, you can check the channel and feed in Smarp where you selected the post to be created to see if the post has been created successfully.
(Please note that the flow creator will be listed as the person who created the post, regardless of created the SharePoint item. If multiple people have created a similar flow, the new post will be fetched for all of them.)
Now your flow is set up and ready! Once the flow is active, any new items that are created in the selected SharePoint list will also automatically be created in Smarp. If you need to make any changes, you can always go to My flows and edit your flow.