Continuing the documenting of my best practices learning in honor of the upcoming SharePoint Best Practices Conference, I figured I'd stick with the naming theme I touched on in yesterday's entry on metadata. Today's topic has to do with the naming of alerts.
Since I've only mentioned alerts in passing before, however, I realized I needed to start by saying that I learned how to create and manage alerts during my Power End User training from Mindsharp. As with many SharePoint tasks, creation and management of alerts is relatively easy to accomplish ... and once you know how to navigate to the proper location to accomplish these tasks, you're golden. Unless it's something you're accustomed to doing regularly, however, it's hardly second nature to determine where you should go in order to accomplish these tasks when you're faced with the layout of a typical SharePoint page.
If you want to create or manage an alert, you merely need to select the dropdown associated with the "welcome" message located in the upper right corner of your SharePoint site (as pictured at left), and choose the My Settings option. Once you've done this, you'll be presented with a display of your individual user information for the site, along with a link to edit that information, as well as hyperlinks to two additional areas: My Regional Settings, and My Alerts:
Selecting the My Alerts link will present you with a listing of all alerts to which you're currently subscribed on the site (if any). You'll also be presented with two options on that resulting page: Add Alert, and Delete Selected Alerts, both of which options are every bit as self-explanatory as they sound.
It's with the Add Alert (a.k.a., New Alert) option that brings us to the best practices recommendation I learned related to alerts. When you select the list or document library from your site that you want to create an alert for, you'll be presented with a variety to settings for the alert, including: the alert title; the distribution list; the type of changes you wish to be notified of; filtering options; and frequency of alerts.
The best practice recommendation that I learned (well, that I learned in addition to all of the above information about how one goes about creating an alert) has to do with the alert title when you're creating a new alert. By default, the Alert Title field will be populated with the name of the associated list or document library (or, as I've discovered, simply "Document" in some instances). Don't leave the title set to this default, but assign a title specific to your alert, while bearing the intended audience in mind. Your alert recipients will thank you for this simple consideration ... oh, and don't forget to thank yourself if you're creating an alert just for you.
If you'll forgive me for closing with a shameless plug, I wanted to mention that eagle-eyed readers may have noticed the My Alerts Organizer option in the My Settings dropdown image pictured above. I'll be (uncharacteristically) brief, and simply point out that Bamboo happens to offer a very fine Web Part which offers a great deal of Alerts management functionality that is not found in SharePoint out-of-the-box. Interested readers may learn all bout our My Alerts Organizer here.
Posted
Sep 03 2008, 05:40 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson is new to both Bamboo Solutions and to SharePoint, but he isn't new to online community. Having recently departed AOL, where he was a Programming Manager for that company's social media team, John is thrilled to have joined the Bamboo family as Manager of Content & Syndication. As a member of the Online Operations team, John takes great pride in helping shape the creation and direction of Bamboo Nation, our nascent SharePoint community. Within Bamboo Nation, John writes the blog SharePoint Blank, in which he (always candidly, sometimes humorously, and even occasionally informatively) documents his daily progress in learning SharePoint. John is also profoundly uncomfortable writing about himself in the third person and is going to stop now.