With the SharePoint Birthdays app you can show current and upcoming birthdays of for example students or employees on your display.
Easily turn a simple SharePoint list into a good looking birthday list in Lumicast. The SharePoint list needs to have at least two columns: a name and a date.
Creating a SharePoint Birthdays app
- Go to ‘Apps > App store’ or ‘Content > New > App’ and search for the SharePoint Birthdays app;
- Click on the app to start creating a new app. You will see the following screen:
- Enter an app name, this can be anything you can recognize it by later;
- Setup an App Registration in Azure to let Lumicast access the SharePoint site. This is explained below.
- The Tenant ID and Client ID can be found on the overview page of the app registration.
- The site hostname is the unique name of your SharePoint environment. This can for example look like: lumicast.sharepoint.com
- The client secret is the value of the secret you created in step 4.
- If the details are correct, you should see your SharePoint lists in the “List name” dropdown field. Here you can select your birthdays list. It may take a few seconds for the list to load.
- In the Name and Date field, fill in the exact column names of the list.
- Finish the app by clicking ‘Create app’
Setting up an App Registration in Azure
- Go to the Azure portal on https://portal.azure.com.
- Go to the Microsoft Entra ID service.
- Under the “Manage” section, click on “App registrations”.
- Click on “New registration”. Give the registration a name, for example “Lumicast connection”. The other settings can be left as they are by default.
- After creating the app registration, it needs to have permissions to read the SharePoint data. Go to the API permissions tab to do this.
- Click the “Add a permission” button and select “SharePoint”.
- Choose the “Application permissions” type.
- Select the “Sites.Read.All” permission and add this permission. This will allow Lumicast to only read the data from your SharePoint site.
- Add another permission and select “Microsoft Graph”.
- Choose the “Application permissions” type.
- Select the “Sites.Read.All” permission and add it.
- In order to activate the permissions, click on the “Grant admin consent for …” button.
- Go to the “Certificates & secrets” tab to create a secret key for Lumicast to access the Site data with.
- Click on “New client secret” and give it a name and an expiry data. Keep in mind that you will need to update the secret once it has expired.
- Store the secret in the “Value” field, because it will not be shown again.
Data update frequency
Lumicast checks your sharepoint data every minute. If you don’t see a new birthday that you just added, the reason could be that we have not picked it up yet. Please wait at least one minute.
All configuration options
Setting | Explanation | Required |
App name | A recognizable (descriptive) name for you, which will show in your content library. | Yes |
Tenant ID | The App Registration tenant ID, found on the overview page of your App Registration. | Yes |
Site hostname | The hostname of your SharePoint site. This could for example look like lumicast.sharepoint.com | Yes |
Client ID | The App Registration Client ID, found on the overview page of your App Registration. | Yes |
Client Secret | The value of the secret within your App Registration. | Yes |
SharePoint Site | The site that contains the list you want to use. | Yes |
List name | The SharePoint list that contains birthday data. | Yes |
Name field | The column name of the field that should be displayed as name. | Yes |
Date field | The column name of the field that should be used for the birthdate. | Yes |
Language | The language of the month names. | Yes |
Days to show in advance | Specified how many days in advance should a birthday be displayed on the display. | Yes |
Color when it’s someone’s birthday | The background color of the row when a birthday is today. | Yes |
Color when it’s not someone’s birthday | The background color of the row when a birthday is not today. | Yes |
Color of the text | The color of the text within the rows. | Yes |
Text to show when it’s someone’s birthday | The text to display in the row when it is someone’s birthday. | Yes |
Text to show when there is no upcoming birthday | If there are no birthdays in the lookahead window, this text is shown. | Yes |
Font | Font family to use. | No |
Background image | Specify a custom image to be displayed behind the birthday rows. | No |
Hide background image | Completely hide the background image. Useful when for example using this app in a page. | No |