I was asked recently how to setup an alert on a SharePoint blog so that the author of the blog would be notified when someone made a comment. Here is the solution, built with a SharePoint Designer workflow.

Before we begin, I’ll give a quick explanation of how the SharePoint blog is structured. SharePoint uses two lists to implement blogs and comments.

• Posts contains the blog post with details including the blog post text, author, date, number of comments and number of likes
• Comments contains the comment and is linked back to the Posts list via a lookup column

Building the workflow:

In SharePoint Designer, create a new Workflow on the Comments list in the blog site. Configure the workflow to run when a new item is created.

1. Create a workflow variable to store the Created By column of the blog post associated with the comment. This is done using a lookup field.

2. Create an email using the variable created in step 1 in the “To” field of the Workflow email template. You can also enter the name of the blog post.

That’s it! Now anytime someone makes a comment on the blog, the author of the blog will receive an email notification.

This solution will work for SharePoint 2010, 2013 and SharePoint Online.