Twilio Emergency Mass Notification

Overview

This solution broadcasts an emergency SMS alert via Twilio when an Emergency Alert row is created in Dataverse. It reads a recipient roster from a SharePoint list, sends each person an SMS (with automatic retry), writes a per-recipient delivery log row to Dataverse, marks the alert complete, and posts a live delivery summary to a Teams crisis channel.

Why it matters: In a crisis, email and app notifications are too slow or go unread. Mass SMS reaches people immediately, and the Dataverse delivery log gives an auditable record of who was contacted.

Built API-first. Ships Off - going live requires only connection authorization and env-var configuration.

Use Case

IT Admins / Executives need a reliable, trackable way to alert staff fast during incidents (outage, weather, safety event). Raising an alert is as simple as creating one Dataverse row; the flow handles roster lookup, throttled SMS broadcast, delivery logging, and a crisis-channel summary.

Flow Architecture

Environment Variables

Connectors & Connections

Connector	API name	Actions used
Microsoft Dataverse	shared_commondataserviceforapps	SubscribeWebhookTrigger CreateRecord UpdateRecord
SharePoint	shared_sharepointonline	GetItems
Twilio	shared_twilio	SendMessage
Microsoft Teams	shared_teams

Customization Guide

Almost every realistic variant of this flow can be implemented by changing environment variable values. A few cases require small edits inside the flow definition — those are called out explicitly below.

Geo / role targeting

Extend the SharePoint $filter (or roster columns) to scope alerts by location or role.

Batch throttling

Add an env var for batch size and a Do until to chunk very large rosters within carrier rate limits.

Two-way confirmation

Add a Twilio inbound Request webhook to collect SAFE/HELP replies for headcount.

Multi-channel fallback

Branch to Outlook email or a voice call for numbers that fail delivery.

Delivery callbacks

Configure Twilio status-callback URLs to a companion flow that updates each delivery-log row's Delivery Status.

Key Expressions

The flow is intentionally light on Power Fx / WDL gymnastics — the heaviest expressions are the branch-name concatenation and the approval outcome check. They are listed below in the order they appear in the flow.

@coalesce(triggerOutputs()?['body/flowlibs_correlationid'], guid())

@concat('[', variables('varSeverity'), ' ALERT] ', variables('varAlertTitle'), ': ', variables('varAlertMessage'))

@coalesce(items('Apply_to_each_Recipient')?['Phone'], items('Apply_to_each_Recipient')?['MobileNumber'], items('Apply_to_each_Recipient')?['Title'])

@triggerOutputs()?['body/flowlibs_emergencyalertid']

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