Microsoft Sharepoint Products and Technologies Resource Kit eBook

Chapter 16: Windows SharePoint Services Site Administration 441
This page will also show you the amount of disk space used by the content in
the site collection as well as the total number of users who have been added to the
site collection.
Managing Alerts
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. When documents, lists, or items in a list on a server running Windows
SharePoint 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 from Microsoft, alerts were called Web subscriptions, but the
functionality has not changed significantly.
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 is added, deleted, or changed in a document library
or when Web discussions are added, changed, deleted, or closed.
■ Documents. Users are notified of changes in a particular document or when
Web discussions are added, changed, deleted, or closed.
When a user creates an alert for one of these items, he 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. Users 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