Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 15: Configuring Windows SharePoint Services 363
Because websites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services are meant
to help groups of users work together, they tend to grow quickly and change often.
Keeping up with these changes can be difficult for users, especially if they aren’t
checking on the site every day. To help users stay in touch with changes on a site,
Windows SharePoint Services includes a feature called Alerts, an e-mail notification
service. (They will also appear in the My Alerts when this Web Part is present on site
pages.) When documents, lists, or items in a list on a server running Windows Share-
Point Services are created, modified, or deleted, users who sign up for alerts receive
messages informing them that changes have been made.
Note Before alerts can work for a particular site, the e-mail server settings
must be configured at the server or virtual server level. In SharePoint
Team Services v1.0 from Microsoft, alerts were called Web subscriptions.
Users can create alerts to track items within a site, such as:
■ Lists. Users are notified of changes to the list, such as when an item is added,
deleted, or changed in a list.
■ List items. Users are notified of changes to a particular item in a list.
■ Document libraries. Users are notified of changes to the document library,
such as when a document in a document library is added, deleted, or changed,
or when Web discussions are added, changed, deleted, closed, or activated for
a document.
■ Documents. Users are notified of changes in a particular document or
when Web discussions are added, changed, deleted, closed, or activated for
a document.
When a user creates an alert for one of these items, she can specify what types
of events will trigger an alert. Alerts can be generated whenever a document or list
item is added, updated, or deleted in a document library or list, or when a Web discussion
on a document or list changes. A user can specify one of these events or
select all of them to be notified whenever anything changes on the list, list item,
document, or document library they want to track.
Users also have the ability to decide how often they want to receive alerts:
immediately, daily, or weekly. Immediate alerts are sent as individual e-mail messages,
and daily or weekly alerts are combined into summary messages for the entire
website.
Users can change their alerts by using the My Alerts On This Site link on the
Site Settings page of their website.