Alerts are a feature within SharePoint to automatically notify you about new and/or updated information. Instead of having to keep checking to find out if content has changed, SharePoint will tell you when it happens.

You can create alerts on any list, library or even the results of a search query. For lists and libraries, the Alert option can be found under Actions:

For search results, it depends on how your results page has been configured. But the default settings all include the Alert link:

When creating a new alert, you choose what criteria will trigger an alert and how often you want to receive the alerts.

Check your email address is correct (the alert will automatically be set-up for the user you are logged in as – better use your own account for this! – and you’re done. Alerts will start to arrive in your inbox… provided your SharePoint environment has been configured to send email alerts. But that’s down to the IT department to sort out.

To manage all your alerts, there is an option within Outlook 2007*. Within Outlook, go to Tools Rules and Alerts, and click on the Manage Alerts tab. There you will see all your alerts within SharePoint and can delete any you no longer want to receive.

*Haven’t got Outlook 2003 running to check if it’s there too. In SharePoint Server 2003, alerts were managed differently.

Related blog post: SharePoint and RSS versus Alerts

Delicious tags: RSS Alerts

(This post is for those who use, or are thinking about using, SharePoint Server. I’m going to refer to RSS as ‘news feed’ as much as possible – it doesn’t matter what RSS stands for, what matters is that it is a technology that feeds you news updates.)

The next version of SharePoint (SharePoint Server 2007) will provide support for both alerts and RSS news feeds. Given their similarities – they both tell you when ‘stuff’ has changed or new content has been published – it could be easy to confuse the two terms for being the same thing. They aren’t.

Alerts are notifications – they tell you when something has changed. You can create an alert on just about anything in SharePoint Server, including search query terms (useful for being notified when new content you didn’t even know about gets indexed) and this is true for the current version (SharePoint Portal Server 2003) as well as the new one. Alerts can be received via email or viewed under your ‘MySite’ page in the portal. You can choose to receive an alert immediately when something is updated, or see an aggregated list on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It is wise to minimise how many alerts you choose to receive via email, to avoid swamping your inbox – ideally select it for important documents that you want to keep track of.

RSS is a news feed – it is designed for keeping track of content that is regularly updated. You can create an RSS news feed on just about anything that can be stored in a list in SharePoint Server 2007. That includes news lists, document libraries, wikis, blogs… RSS news feeds can be viewed under your ‘MySite’ page in the portal and can be sync’d to a folder in Outlook 2007. If you are thinking this sounds very similar to Alerts, you are right. In most situations, you could choose to either set up an Alert or an RSS feed to be notified about changes to some sort of content held in SharePoint. But there are subtle differences, more psychological than feature-driven.

An alert should be just that – it alerts you. Something has changed and you need (or want) to take notice of it, either immediately or at some point in the future.

A news feed is just that – it feeds you news. Content has changed and you may or may not choose to take notice and read it, usually depending on how busy you are.

For example, you may be working on a project that has its own web site within SharePoint with a list containing documents being produced. In this scenario, you may want to set up a news feed to keep track of all updates to content on the project. You could also set up an alert to notify you when documents you are actively involved in are updated. When you are busy, you probably won’t find the time to keep on top of everything that has been published (i.e. you won’t bother to check the folder containing the news feed), but you will want to keep track of your specific documents and alerts prodding you via email are more helpful than scanning through a news feed (unless you set up a rule that automatically moves them to a folder too!)

Related library topics: SharePoint and News feeds

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