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.
