Shhhhh! Be vewy, vewy quiet. I'm hunting SharePoint Alerts.

We here at Bamboo truly believe in creating useful products. I personally love doing my job for that reason alone. Many of our products come directly from our own experience with SharePoint over the years as well as the vast amount of customer feedback and suggestions we receive daily. In the case of SharePoint Alerts, we created a couple of products out of pure necessity as SharePoint users ourselves that truly improve the usability of SharePoint Alerts. Read on to see if you think so too. 

With the release of MOSS 2007, I was kind of expecting a major improvement in how SharePoint handles alerts. While there was some improvement, overall, there really wasn't much to speak of. So you're probably asking yourself, "What kind of improvement are you talking about, Dani?" Well let me tell you...

If you're like our company at all, then you probably have many, many department and project sites that have been created in an attempt to provide some order to the chaos. This is one of the things I love most about SharePoint. But as you are surfing through the seemingly endless waves of information literally at your fingertips, you quickly realize that there is too much information and you really need a way to manage what information gets pushed to you. One way to do this is through SharePoint Alerts. Seems simple enough really. Just go to a list, click the Actions button and select 'Alert Me'. So easy. I can set up when to get the alert (immediately, daily, weekly) and indicate the events that take place on the list to trigger an alert. Perfect. Except for one thing - I have a million of these alerts set up all over our portal, on various sites, for millions of lists and discussion boards. So if I need to modify an alert or delete an alert, I have to go drilling down to each site. And as it turns out, I don't have that kind of time in my day. So a new product was born - My Alerts Organizer.

I love this product! Not only does it allow me to manage all of my alerts from one location, I can also view, edit, disable/enable, and add alerts on any site within the site collection.

And I can access My Alerts Organizer from my personal menu. So no matter what site I am on within the site collection, I can always access and manage my alerts across sites from one location. Sweet.

So My Alerts Organizer helps out the end user, but what about SharePoint Administrators? What about the people who have to take thousands of emails and requests from their users to help them locate, modify, delete or create alerts? Anyone whose ever taken on the role of just a Site Administrator - let alone a Site Collection Administrator, knows how tedious these requests are. And depending on the size of the company, a person's entire day could be easily filled with mumbling curse words to yourself as you go hunting for user alerts. Just having an employee leave your company, leaving you to clean up all of their alerts - wherever they may be, is enough to send someone straight to the kitchen for a very long coffee break.

So with that in mind, Alerts Administrator was created. This tool helps SharePoint Administrators manage user alerts for an entire Web Application. You can see user alerts within AND across site collections. And you can create multiple alerts for users in one step. So if you need to create alerts for a user who wants to be alerted on 3 different Task Lists, 2 Project Tasks Lists and 4 Document Libraries, you can select all of these lists and libraries in the Add Alert wizard and Alerts Administrator creates each alert separately for you. I really dig this feature because it eliminates the mind numbingly repetative task of creating each alert over and over again.

You can access Alerts Administrator from anywhere on a SharePoint site from the Site Actions menu. Sweet again.

Like the My Alerts Organizer, you can enable/disable user alerts right from the grid by clicking on the Toggle icon  as well as group alerts by one or more column headings by just dragging and dropping the column heading to the grouping bar just below the toolbar. You can also filter by one or more columns using comparison opertators (i.e. Site is equal to Dani Test Site) to quickly get to the information you want. (SharePoint out-of-the-box doesn't let you use comparison operators to create the filter you want.) You really start taking these small organizational tools for granted until you don't have them!

So there you have it. No more hunting for SharePoint Alerts. Now if we could just make a Web Part that randomly chooses where to go to lunch each day, we could save thousands of dollars by eliminating the time it takes to say the phrase, "I dunno. Where do you want to eat?" over and over again.

If you're interested in learning more about these products or downloading a trial to test for yourself, visit the My Alerts Organizer and Alerts Administrator pages on our storefront.