It has happened: since July 2026 SharePoint alerts are retired and no longer fire. Your lists are still there exactly as you know them, but the heads-up you used to get when something changed or a date drew near no longer arrives.
Only noticing now? That makes sense. A warning that fails to arrive does not stand out, because nothing happens. Most teams find out at the worst possible moment: when a contract has already expired.
What you lost
Alerts were the way to make a SharePoint list say something back. An email when an item changed, or a reminder around an expiry date. Without those alerts your list is a silent table again: the information is there, but it is up to you to keep remembering to check. Exactly the dates you don't want to miss are the ones that slip through the cracks.
What Microsoft offers instead
The official alternative is Power Automate. It works, but it is a different kind of work: you build a flow per list, you maintain it, and someone has to understand what it does when it breaks a year from now. For a team that simply wants to be warned in time about a handful of expiry dates, that is a heavy answer to a small question.
Your list stays, your heads-ups come back
You don't have to move or retype your SharePoint list. In OwndUp you link the list directly, and we mirror it read-only. You can only link lists you're allowed to see in SharePoint yourself, because Microsoft keeps guarding access. The list in SharePoint stays the source and doesn't change.
On that mirrored list you then put reminders. You attach a heads-up to a date column and decide how many days in advance you want to be warned, for example 30 days before an expiry date. All open notifications come together on one page, so you can see at a glance what's coming up.
A few things teams keep watching this way:
- Contracts and licences with a hard expiry date in SharePoint.
- Certificates and inspections that need to be renewed on time.
- Agreements that would otherwise roll over silently.
There is one difference from the old alerts worth having. A SharePoint alert went to a mailbox, and after that nobody knew what had become of it. In OwndUp every list has exactly one owner, and the log shows who got the heads-up and who acted on it. Sent is not the same as handled.
Owned by OwndUp, so it's safe
The reminder you set in OwndUp belongs to OwndUp, not to SharePoint. We write nothing back to your SharePoint list and change nothing there. If you unlink it later, your SharePoint list stays exactly as it was. You get your heads-ups back without giving anything up.
What to do now
- Check which lists used to have an alert. They are still there, they have just gone quiet.
- Look at which dates in those lists have passed since July without anyone hearing about it.
- Link the list once and put the reminder on the date column.
The alerts are gone, but the dates matter just as much as they did before.