Archive for the ‘SharePoint Alert’ Category

5 Things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Alerts

Date:July 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas, SharePoint Reminder Comments:1 ;

We often hear that communication is key to the success of any enterprise or organization. Making people aware of “what’s going on” is an essential.  So for a collaboration platform like SharePoint tools for telling people what’s happening are a central part of the setup.

SharePoint has it’s built in “Alert Me” feature.  New users seeing this often expect it to deliver functionality similar to that which comes as standard in MS Outlook.  But that isn’t what SharePoint Alerts do.  They tell you when something is added or changed.  This is great for document or content management, but not so good for managing calendars or tasks or projects – when you might prefer to be alerted when something is about to happen, or is overdue – or you might actually want to alert someone else, not yourself.

So here’s a little look at some of the things you might expect to be able to do with SharePoint Alerts but can’t.  And some suggestions as to how you might get round these shortcomings.

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Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself

Date:April 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , , ,
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

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SharePoint Alerts not working?

Date:December 2nd, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:1 ;

This is one of the most common questions posed in SharePoint forums.

SharePoint built in Alerts are one of the best used features of the system – but also one of the most problematic. There are just so many different ways they can go wrong! And when they do go wrong the internet advice available on how to put them right is very fragmented and often confusing. All manner of suggestions come up – many of then not appropriate to the particular problem the user is having.

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Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

Date:October 16th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: , , , ,
Category: Filter, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Victor from New York asked

Is there a way to configure a Reminder webpart to send an email when task item status in the task list is set to “completed”?

Sure there is!

In this case the trick is to use a SharePoint Views to filter out the tasks you are interested in.

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Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items.

Date:October 16th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: , , ,
Category: Filter, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

There are some scenarios where you could setup Reminder to generate emails alerts in a simple workflow scenario such as such as when a Task is completed,  a helpdesk ticket is closed, a company announcement is made, a vacation request or expenses claim is approved and so on.

When you first set up this kind of reminder, an email alert for any records already in this state (e.g. completed tasks) will also be sent and some of these could be quite old, so you could end up sending quite a lot of “old” reminder emails.

If you want to avoid sending emails for these old records you have 2 options:


  • Use the Redirect Emails function to redirect the emails to yourself the first time its ran, delete these and then remove the redirect

This also gives you the opportunity to double check that everything is setup correctly.

  • Use a view to filter out old records

For example you could filter to show only records with an ID > a recent ID.

Or you could add filter to show only records Created after a certain date.

Tip – All records in SharePoint have an ID and its sequential and automatically generated. To find the id you can show the ID column in your view or see the ID in the URL in your browser address bar.

Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder Webpart v1.6 – now supporting Sharepoint recurring events

Date:September 17th, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: , , , ,
Category: SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Have you every tried to use any of the SharePoint Reminder or Alert web parts on the market – including ours – with Recurring Events in SharePoint Calendar lists?  They just don’t work do they? If you want to send out Alert/Reminder emails about a regular event you have to set up each and every instance of the event as an individual list item in your SharePoint calendar list. Annoying isn’t it?

That’s what our customers have been telling us – and with the latest version of SharePoint Reminder Webpart we have introduced functionality which will allow you to use Reminder with SharePoint’s handy recurring events feature.

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Extend and customise SharePoint Task lists

Date:October 26th, 2008 Author:Ryan Category: Filter, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:5 ;

Introduction

One great feature of SharePoint is the ability to extend and customise the built in List types (such as Announcements, Contacts, Issues and Tasks) to meet your requirements. In this series of articles we will give you some ideas on how you can modify a task list to meet the needs of business processes you have in your organisation.

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