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Automated Hackathon Email Notifications with Power Pages, Dataverse & Power Automate

Hackathons move fast. Agendas change, sessions start on time (or at least try to), and participants don’t always remember when things are happening. To solve this, I built a fully automated notification flow using Power Pages, Dataverse, SharePoint, and Power Automate.

The goal?

Automatically email registered external users when a hackathon activity is about to start without manual work.

Architecture

[ Power Pages ]
      |
      v
[ Dataverse ]
(Registered users & emails)
      |
      v
[ Power Automate ]
(Scheduled every minute)
      |
      v
[ SharePoint List ]
(Hackathon agenda)
      |
      v
[ Email Notification ]

[ Power Pages ]
      |
      v
[ Dataverse ]
(Registered users & emails)
      |
      v
[ Power Automate ]
(Scheduled every minute)
      |
      v
[ SharePoint List ]
(Hackathon agenda)
      |
      v
[ Email Notification ]

Step 1: User Registration with Power Pages & Dataverse

External users register for the hackathon through a Power Pages site.

  • The registration form collects email addresses
  • All users are stored in a Dataverse table
  • This table acts as the single source of truth for who should receive notifications

This makes it secure, scalable, and easy to reuse the user data later.

Step 2: Hackathon Agenda Stored in SharePoint

The hackathon agenda is maintained in a SharePoint list.

Each item in the list represents one activity and contains:

  • Activity name
  • Date
  • Time
  • A “processed” indicator (implemented using the Title field)

Why SharePoint?

  • Easy to edit
  • Non-technical users can maintain the agenda
  • Perfect for structured, time-based data

Step 3: Scheduled Power Automate Flow (Every Minute)

A scheduled Power Automate flow runs every minute to keep everything in sync.

What it does:

  1. Reads all agenda items from the SharePoint list
  2. Checks if:
    • The current time is greater than or equal to the activity time
    • The activity has not been processed yet
  3. If both conditions are true → action time

Step 4: Smart “Processed” Logic (No Duplicate Emails)

To prevent duplicate notifications:

  • The flow appends “processed” to the Title field after sending emails
  • Future runs of the flow ignore already processed items

Simple, effective, and transparent no extra columns required.

Step 5: Email Notifications to Registered Users

When an activity is due:

  • The flow retrieves all email addresses from the Dataverse table
  • Sends an email notification to all registered users
  • Emails are only sent once per activity

Final Thoughts

This solution is a great example of how low-code tools can be combined to solve real-world event challenges in a clean and scalable way. It’s flexible enough to reuse for webinars, conferences, or internal events just swap the agenda and registration page.

Power Pages

email reminder

Dataverse list of users that started using the Agenda service elaborated in order to help all the people in the hackaton.

PixelPoint and TINT teams are using the solution, please refer to the image above, it is the email address of the people register in Dataverse.