Faculty, staff, and students can utilize Power Automate in order to save incoming email attachments to their SharePoint site. Power Automate is a Microsoft application just like SharePoint and OneDrive.
What will this automation do?
With Power Automate, every automation is completely customizable. Following this guide, you will create an automation that:
Saves the attachment of an incoming email from your department printer/scanner unit into a SharePoint site.
Deletes the email (this step is not required and can be removed).
Creating the automation
Conduct a scan from your networked scanner and send it to your UConn email address. This will give you information you will use in a later step.
Navigate to s.uconn.edu/powerautomate
Sign in with your Email address and NetID password if asked.
Click on Templates in the left-hand menu.
Search for “save email to sharepoint”
You will see some completed automations created by community members. Choose one that sounds good to you. For this guide, choose Save email attachments to SharePoint and delete the email.
Be sure that Power Automate recognizes your accounts by displaying your email address for the two flow connectors.
Click Continue.
Trigger
You must be specific in defining your trigger so that the automation only runs on the intended emails. If there is concern, you may remove the Deletion action that follows.
The top box on this new page is the “Trigger”. This is the action that triggers the automation. For this guide, the trigger is receiving a specific email in your personal inbox.
Click on the folder icon to view your inbox folder.
Choose your Inbox then click on Show advanced options.
This is where you will need to get specific so that this automation only triggers on emails from your network scanner.
Using the information you gathered from your test:
In the From field, enter the address that your printer/scanner unit sends you emails from.
In the Include Attachments field, select Yes.
In the Subject filter field, enter the Subject that your printer/scanner generates. See Note below.
In the Only with Attachments field, select Yes.
Pictured below is an example setup using the scanner in the Technology Support Center:
You will likely want to use a unique Subject for this email. The Subject line will dictate whether your scan will follow this automation or not. The default Subject line from the printer will likely resemble: “Scanned from a Xerox Multifunction Printer”.
Depending on which process you perform more often, you will need to choose whether the Printer’s default Subject should trigger the automation or not. If you’re more likely to need this automation, then the default Subject should trigger the automation. Then when it comes time to scan something that should not go through this automation, you will change the Subject line to anything other than the default.
If you’re more likely to not need the automation, then the opposite is true.
Action 1
This next box is an “Action” tool.
The first option already has “Attachments” filled in thanks to this template you are using.In the Create file box,
You may click on the Site Address field to see a list of your SharePoint sites, but you may find it easier to open a new browser tab and navigate to s.uconn.edu/sharepoint to visit your SharePoint site there. Then simply copy the URL from the address bar and paste it into the Site Address field in the Power Automation setup.
Once you have the SharePoint site field filled in, you may choose the folder in which you want the file to be deposited.
This folder will be the repository for all of your scans.Click on the folder icon and then choose the arrow next to Shared Documents to open that location.
Then continue until you find your desired folder and this time click on the folder name to choose it from the list.
The next two fields, File Name and File Content you will see preset values.
he File Name field contains a function that pulls the name of the email attachment and keeps that as the file name.
If you do not alter this field, each new scan will overwrite the last.
In this example, I will name the file “Scan - [time of scan].pdf
The time-of-scan will be the unique identifier that prevents the over-writing of files.
Click on the File Name field and clear it out. When you click on the field, a popup window will appear: click on the Expression tab of this window.
Copy and Paste the following text into the textbox:
formatDateTime(utcNow(),'yyyy-MM-ddTHH:mm:ssZ')Then click Update.
The dynamic text is now in the field. You make place your cursor at the front to add some static text.
You need to add
.pdfto the end of the name to maintain file integrity.
Leave the File Content field as it is.
Action 2
You can remove this Action if you do not want the email to be automatically deleted.
The last box on this page is another Action that deletes the email from your inbox.
Leave this box as is.
If you want to remove this action, click on the ellipsis and then choose Delete to remove this action.
Click Save to save this automation. It will take a few moments to save.
You will receive the following message when it has completed: Your flow is ready to go. We recommend you test it.
Optional: Set Computer to Automatically Download Scans
Using a funciton of the OneDrive App, you can set your computer to automatically download this SharePoint file to your computer. This may save you a few seconds for each scan.
Open File Explorer (Windows) or Finder (macOS).
Click on [Your Name] - University of Connecticut in the lefthand menu to open your OneDrive.
Open your SharePoint files and navigate to the folder that is receiving the scans but do not open the folder.
Right-click on the folder and choose Always keep on this device.
These steps are assuming that this folder is simply the repository of the scans, and the scans will be moved from this folder and distributed to other folders.