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.

#1: Date Based Alerts

“It’s Jenny’s Birthday tomorrow”

“Your meeting starts in 10 Minutes.”

“Your expenses claim Submission is now overdue.”

How handy would this be?  You could do all of this in Outlook. But it’s just not how SharePoint Alerts work.  They don’t recognise or react to dates.

SharePoint Reminder web part however, is a different story.

As you can see, with Reminder you have the flexibility to send due soon and overdue emails for all of your tasks and events.  And you have a great deal of flexibility in terms of choosing the timescales that you wish to work on with setting for everything from months to minutes.

#2: Customize Alert Emails.

SharePoint sends out standardized alert emails which you can’t edit. Here’s one that has been sent out on a staff absence list to a line manager who needs to approve a requested absence:

Maybe it’s just me, but from this email I would find it very hard to figure out exactly what it is I am meant to do.  And there is no way to edit the email set up without getting into coding.

The email below on the other hand has been generated by SharePoint Reminder web part, triggered by the addition of the same item to the same list:

OK, now I know what I am supposed to be doing with this!  It’s an email addressed to me, with a meaningful subject line, a relevant selection of data from the list, free text that tells me what I should be doing with it and even color and bolding to highlight important points.  All this is achieved from within a simple WYSIWYG text editor.

For full details on customizing your alert emails check out the manual.

#3 Choose who you send alert email to

With SharePoint out of the box alerts, unless you are set up as a SharePoint site owner, the only person you can send alerts to is yourself.

So this means for example that if I have a list for absence requests and I want line managers to receive an alert every time a new staff absence request is added, I have to get each of the managers to turn on those alerts themselves, or get the SharePoint administrator to do it.

With SharePoint Reminder on the other hand, I have huge flexibility in terms of who I send my alerts to:

I can email to any email address in a column in my list.  So in this case I can choose to send my absence request emails to the line manager who needs to authorize that absence.  If the people I want to send my email to are part of my SharePoint installation – registered SharePoint users – the relevant column only needs to contain the person’s name and SharePoint will select the relevant email address.

But it gets even better.  I can choose to send email to people outside of SharePoint and outside of my company.  So for example if I had an order status list with included a column for customers email addresses I could choose to have Reminder send the customer when an email when their order has been dispatched.

Reminder has even more options for who you can send your alert emails to – check out the manual to see all the possibilities.

#4: Send Alerts to People Even if They Don’t Want Them

You know the kind of situation  – department managers really need to know every time there is a new customer complaint relating to their department – but actually some managers would rather not here about it,  With SharePoint’s Alert Me feature each user manages their own Alerts.  So the department manager who really doesn’t care how hacked off customers are with him and his team can just choose to switch off these Alerts.

So any one of your department managers can choose to just opt out of receiving alerts from the list, and you, as the Customer Complaints Manager will never be any the wiser.

With Reminder, you as the Customer Complaints Manager are the owner of the Alert, you set it up to go to whoever you want it to go to. A combination of permissions and visibility of the web part page make it much more difficult for anyone other than you to tamper with the setup.

The key difference is that whilst out of the box Alert Me lets you manage your own alerts, Reminder can be much more effective as “the office nag” – setting up alerts and reminders for relevant groups based around your business processes.

#5: Reply to a Real Person

How often have your replied to an email only to have your response bounce back  – telling you that the address you are writing to is a “no reply” address? This is very likely what will happen if you ever try to reply to a SharePoint “Alert Me” email.  SharePoint is set up so that replies to emails it generates can only go to one address, for the whole web application (that will usually be your whole organization, or site).  So organizations often set this up as a “no reply” address, or some sort of a dump box address, as it is likely to get so many emails that it will become completely unmanageable.

Clearly there are lots of occasions where this will not be ideal – the customer orders scenario we talked about above for example.  You clearly wouldn’t want an email from your customer, telling you that their order still hasn’t arrived, to bounce back, or just disappear into a black hole.

With Reminder you can choose who responses to each alert go to:

Replies can go to someone named in one of your list fields (the Account Manager perhaps?) or you can manually enter an email address for all replies to a particular alert to go to.  Either way you have the ability to ensure that a reply to an alert email will be received by a real person who can act on it.

So these are my top 5 things I always thought I should be able to do with SharePoint Alerts – what are yours?

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner part 4 – create an absence approval workflow SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner part 4 shows you how to...
2. Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items. This post shows you how to set up a filter...
3. SharePoint Alerts not working? This is one of the most common questions posed...

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?

Wrong!

What we want to do is “not send alerts to me, for items assigned to me, when I have created or amended an item myself”

So, lets have a look at a Task List first:

OK, so that’s fine, just select “Alert Me “  from the “List Actions” drop down and then from “Send me an alert when”  we need to select the “Someone else changes an item assigned to me” option.  Nice and easy.

So now lets look at a Project Tasks list:

Oh dear, the option we need “Send Alert when Someone else changes an item assigned to me” simply doesn’t exist.  Even though there is an “assigned to” column in the list.

It’s the same story with any other list – there is no simply one click mechanism to turn off alerts to yourself.

So how do we do this then?

Well you need to set up a filtered view.

Call it something like; “My Items, Modified by others”.

Set up the filter so the Assigned to” column is equal to [Me] and the “Modified by” column is not equal to [Me].  Like this:

Then, when you go to set up your Alert you get this option:

So, it’s do-able, but its a bit of a hassle.  In order to simply switch off alerts to yourself, for items assigned to you that you have just created or amended you need to create a filtered view which you wouldn’t really need for any other reason. And the alert will have to be set up individually for each user of the list who needs this functionality.

This annoying little glitch doesn’t just apply to SharePoint out of the box alerts, as far as we are aware you will also have the same problem in all the 3rd party alert enhancement tools on the market.

So for our Reminder we decided to eliminate the problem:

Ticking the “Don’t email the last modifier” box will solve the problem in one click, for everyone on the list.  We hope it makes you working day just a little bit easier.

This feature comes with newly released Reminder v1.7.6.

Related posts:

1. Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed This post shows you how to set up a SharePoint...
2. 5 Things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Alerts SharePoint Alerts: an overview of capabilities, limitations and enhancements offered...
3. SharePoint Alerts not working? This is one of the most common questions posed...

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.

So, we have had it in mind for a while now to put together a comprehensive guide to trouble shooting Alerts.  Something with a logical flow – which hopefully has all the information you need to solve the problem set out clearly in one place.  Producing this has turned out to be quite a mammoth task – but now we think we are there – and the trouble shooting guide is the centrepiece of the new www.sharepointalert.info website.

Over the years we also have amassed quite a store of hints and tips on how to make best use of SharePoints built in Alerts, as well as a good knowledge of the alert enhancement products on the market – so this is all on the site as well.

The site is a work in progress, but already includes:

• a comprehensive guide to troubleshooting alerts

• third party alert enhancement and administration tool listing – with space for your reviews and comments.

• a “Getting Started” guide for new users

• and Tips and Tricks for Power users.

We want the site to be interactive – so there is space on every page for comments-we hope you will let us have your feedback, or even contribute an article!

N.B. SharePointAlert.info is an information site for SharePoint’s built in “Alert Me” feature.  If you are looking for information on Pentalogic Reminder – you should still visit our on-line manual, or get in touch for free telephone and email support.

Related posts:

1. Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself How annoying is it when you have just created...
2. 5 Things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Alerts SharePoint Alerts: an overview of capabilities, limitations and enhancements offered...
3. Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns This post shows you how to work with weekdays and...

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.

It hasn’t been easy. A SharePoint recurring event is actually just one list item – so it’s difficult to get the web part to interpret the recurrence specifications correctly.  There can be problems with things like getting the web part to send Reminder emails for overdue recurring events, and well as “due soon” events. Also we needed to make sure that if one item in a series of events changes – for example if you change your Monday morning meeting to a Tuesday on one week – the web part picks that change up and amends the Reminder emails it sends accordingly.

The new version has been through beta testing and we have had some very positive feedback:

“That little ‘Expanded Recurrences’ check box is a dream come true (I know, I need better dreams!)”

Toby Flowers, Delphi Global Technology

Existing clients can upgrade free of charge at out website, or if you are a new customer you might like to try our 30 day free evaluation trial.

For a quick introduction to the new feature take a look at our video.

Or for a full breakdown on how Reminder measures up to the competition see our SharePoint Alert enhancement software product comparison chart.

And if you have any questions or comments please do get in touch.

Related posts:

1. New SharePoint Reminder v1.7 now with Rich Text Editor v1.7 of SharePoint Reminder webpart now includes rich text editing....
2. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available New version 1.7.8 of SharePoint Reminder webpart is now available...
3. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time This post gives 3 different methods for setting a variable...