Conditional Formatting on SCOM notifications

Dashboard Server
, ,
1

Currently, our SCOM notifications are via PowerShell with colour coding in the message body, but I’d like to make the message subject colour coded within the mail client view so that you can see at a glance whether it’s a new critical alert (red), or a closed alert (green).

Any ideas if it’s possible to have something like Outlook’s conditional formatting applied to SCOM notifications on an organisation wide scale, or would users have to configure it themselves? I’ve read that you can’t push out Outlook conditional formatting via GPO so is there a way I could use the current PS script?

1 Like
2

As an idea, you might get some mileage from creating a script that creates an outlook rule that actions on incoming messages. Not sure if you can change colour of subject lines though - have a play.

https://www.codetwo.com/admins-blog/managing-outlook-rules-powershell/

1 Like
3

What about using emoji’s? I was just experimenting with putting a :warning: in the subject line.

You could have a channel for ‘new’ alerts and a channel for ‘closed’ alerts and use different emoji’s.

Not quite the conditional formatting you needed, but is an alternative idea.

Huge list of them here you could use.

https://emojipedia.org/warning-sign/

I Sometimes “theme” my (visio) dashboards around Christmas, Easter, Star Wars Day, etc. Tempted to do it in Alert emails now… :slight_smile: ? ?

1 Like
4

I´m afraid that conditional formatting is not in the scope for Outlook Rules (Exchange rules). You only have the options that you get when logged in via Outlook Webapp. And the only thing you can do then is to set a category for the email.

5

Not sure if you’ve seen it, but this might be helpful (?) https://squaredup.com/blog/live-webinar-enabling-html-email-notifications/

6

I had no idea you could do this! I’m going to mark this as the answer just because I can now send poo emojis ? to everyone in the GAL ?

7

hahaha. I should use that emoji on my SCOM reminder emails when they are in the ?box

8

Thanks again for the suggestion Darren - I’m completely reworking my notifications to move away from PowerShell notifications (sometimes killed the management server during alert storms) and going to SqUp HTML emails. Using emojis was a masterstroke, especially on a mobile device that respects the colour of the emojis ?

9

That’s fantastic to hear Peter! I’ll eventually get time to rework mine to have the same. :slight_smile: