Automated Event Registration
Do you want the ability to send a form to people at Seattle University that allows them to sign up for an event/s and receive an instant calendar invite for their selection which is hosted on your group calendar? Use this how-to page to set up an automated event registration process using Microsoft O365 Tools. You will need to use Outlook, Forms, Excel, and Power Automate. This article also describes an optional additional step to create a shared master registration list in a SharePoint site. Follow the how-to article steps below.
Before you begin, please note this process is a productivity hack – it comes with some incredible time-saving benefits to significantly reduce the total time, eliminate most interruptions, and reduce potential for errors that are inherent with manual event registration; and there are also some imperfections you will need to decide if they are worth having. Ideally this setup will cost some dedicated initial setup time in exchange for greater freedom the rest of the quarter as the automation handles adding new registrants to the calendar invite automatically when the form is submitted.
Imperfections include: the initial invitation form users receive will include “FW:” in the subject line because it is technically an automatically “forwarded” invitation, the initial invitation form users receive is hard-coded as the snapshot of the invitation at the time you create the automation, users on Outlook Desktop (not web app) may not have the accept/decline option when they first receive the invitation from within their email reading pane (but the event will still appear on their calendar and they can accept/decline from the calendar view).
Section 1: Setting up your Outlook Events
Go into the Outlook web app. Outlook for Desktop does not have enough features to support the needs of this setup, so you need to be in Web Outlook.
In a shared calendar, set up the Outlook events you want form users to be able to register for. Using a shared calendar is a best practice for events because it provides the opportunity for backup support with team members and communicates that the event is more than a basic meeting from an individual.
For the event title, you will need to create a unique name so each calendar event is easier to isolate and identify later. In the Power Automate tool there are some screens where you will be limited to seeing only the first few words of an event title.
For example, if you are holding three open forums, name them in this way to retain uniqueness:
Feb 26 | Open Forum
Feb 28 | Open Forum
Mar 7 | Open Forum
Use Outlook Web app to specify settings for the event such as notifications and response options
Setup the meeting description with this important information in mind: the snapshot of how you create the meeting right now will always be the first invitation your form user receives. With this current version of the automation any changes you make to your meeting invite after you complete Section 4 of this how-to will not be seen by someone filling out the form for the first time. (Unless you redo all of the steps in Section 4 with the new version of the calendar invite).
Send each invite to someone. It does not matter who you send it to - we simply need outgoing mail in order to use the sent invite in our automation. I typically send this invite to my personal SU account.
In the Sent Items box of the shared calendar you are using, right click to create a new subfolder to isolate your sent invitation/s.
Section 2: Setting up your Microsoft Form
Set up the form by starting in a blank Excel first, NOT by going to Forms. When a form is created directly in the Forms app you will be limited to Excel export snapshot copies that do not update when new entries are submitted. When you create the Excel file first, you will be able to use one Excel file that dynamically updates each time a new entry is submitted.
If you create a form directly from the Forms app, you will not be able to “open results in Excel” and you will have limited functionality with downloaded snapshots.
It is recommended to create your new Excel document in a shared location that your teammates can access such as Teams or SharePoint folder (not in a personal OneDrive). This Excel document will dynamically update every time the Form is submitted, so you want it to be accessible by everyone who may need to view the form submission data as your teammates and/or your backup in the process. If using MS teams folder, please make sure you are in a “standard” channel, not a private or shared channel as these are not connected fully to the O365 ecosystem.
Open your new Excel document in the web app.
Click the “insert” menu ribbon, select “forms” then “+ New Form
You will now be routed to MS Forms, and your Form is synced to the excel sheet you started in. Proceed to set up your Form normally from this point - See Microsoft Forms Training guides here
When you get to your question about “Which event/s do you want to register for?” make sure that the title of each option includes unique text at the beginning. This will support you easily differentiating the events when you setup the automation later. For example:
Feb 26 | Open Forum
Feb 28 | Open Forum
Mar 7 | Open Forum
This automation requires that your form is left in the default setting of “only people in my organization can respond”
Go to “collect responses” and open up the form url to test. Send in a test submission of your form to check that the results are being captured as you expect in your Excel sheet.
You can make some edits in the Excel sheet, and there are a couple types of edits you need to avoid.
Do add formatting changes to make your excel sheet easier to read. For example, resize the columns, turn on “wrap text”, etc.
Do add new columns that can aid you in tracking your incoming submissions (a “status” column, for example).
Do Hide columns you prefer not to see (for example, “start time”)
DO NOT make text edits or delete content in the columns which are connected to your form. For example, do not type into any of the header or submissions cells, and do not delete any columns or rows from the document. This can break the sync between your form and the Excel sheet.
Section 3 - Optional: Set up your Master Registration List in SharePoint
If you would like to record registrants across all events in one central location, the following steps are recommended. You need to be an “owner” of the SharePoint site you are hosting this list in.
Go to the SharePoint site you want to host your master registration list in.
Note that every Microsoft Team includes a SharePoint site with it where files are hosted. If you need to get to your SharePoint site via Teams navigate to to Files, … , Open in SharePoint.
Go to Site Contents accessible via your left-hand navigation menu or via Settings (upper right), then select “Site Contents”
Select “+ New” then select “List”
Use “+ Add column” to create the columns you need. Recommended columns to start with are in the screenshot below:
In this example we renamed the main column from “Title” to “Name of Registrant”, we selected “Person” as the column type for “O365 Profile”, we used “choice” type for the Event column so we can sort or group the list by event easily, and the remaining columns are “text” type.
You can edit and update the columns in this list later if you learn something new in the process of section 4 that assists you in improving your list structure.
Section 4: Creating the Automation in Power Automate
Section 4A: Setup Trigger and Retrieve the Calendar Invitation Email ID
Go to Power Automate
Choose “+ create” then “Automated cloud flow”
Name your flow and choose the trigger “when a new response is submitted”, select “create”
Some bugs have been witnessed in the “new designer” mode of Power Automate. Turn this off in the upper right:
In the trigger step, select the form you created. The form title may appear in the drop down when you click into the empty field. If it does not, scroll to the bottom and select “enter custom value”. Enter the unique ID of your form. You can find your form ID by looking at the URL of your form. Copy the text after “id=”
Select “+ New Step”
Search for “get response details” and choose this action step. This step is almost always used when you have a form trigger, because this is the step which goes into the form submissions and retrieves the entered data.
For Form ID, follow step 5 above again. For Response ID you will use Dynamic Content. If the Dynamic Content box does not automatically appear to the right, open it with the small blue + sign. Select “Response Id”
Select “+ New Step”
Search for “get email” and select “get emails (V3)”
To be continued week of 3/18….
Section 4B: Setting up the Automation Steps
Section 5: Additional Best Practices
(Notes will be added to this section soon. E.g. how to add a co-owner to your Power Automate Flow for backup, setting up event automation for a second+ time by copying an old flow, a full walk-through video of the setup process, etc.)