I recently received a question in response to my how to create & manage SharePoint alerts post that touched on an area of alerts management with which I was unfamiliar. Regular readers can probably guess what this means. Yes, it's time for another exciting installment of what's becoming an increasing regular feature, one which I'm sorely tempted to dub SharePoint Blank Investigates. (As an ardent admirer of hardboiled detective fiction and film noir, I ask that you please indulge me this harmless flight of fancy.)
Today's question comes from Nate, who asks:
How do I view alerts for a single document? I can see that I am in My Alerts. I can't see the other 4 people I added to be alerted to changes in this document. I added them in and changed the document name, but the adds as far as I can tell didn't stick. I have admin privileges.
After donning the requisite trench coat and fedora, as befits any self-respecting investigator, I began my investigation by attempting to duplicate Nate's experience in my own MOSS environment. I did so by adding a new name to the Send Alerts To field on an existing document via the Alert Me feature that's available in the dropdown menu associated with the document itself (inside the document library in which it resides):
Having added a new name to the distribution list of alert recipients for the document, I then clicked through the other options associated with the document (as pictured above) to see if any of those options displayed a list of alert recipients. None of them did, but I did end up duplicating Nate's experience when, after clicking on the Alert Me button again, I noticed that the name I had added earlier was no longer appearing in that field. The plot thickens.
So it was on to the second phase of my investigation, or, as I might as well officially call it, the Google phase. Google rarely lets me down, and today was no exception: Right there on page one of the search results (though, curiously, not as high as you might think) was a link to the often helpful Microsoft Office Online site, with an article entitled Manage alerts settings.
The steps involved in viewing user alerts as described in that particular Office Online article happen to refer to SPS 2003, however, and my environment uses the 2007 model. Thankfully, as a trained investigator, the steps described therein were more than sufficient to point me in the right direction. And so it was that, in my environment, the path to successfully answering Nate's question began, as so many SharePoint processes to, with the Site Settings option under the Site Actions dropdown menu:
On the Resulting Site Settings page, the next step towards successfully closing my investigation was to click the User alerts hyperlink under the Site Administration heading:
The resulting User Alerts page provided the answers Nate sought, albeit possibly not in as easy-to-use a manner as he might've hoped. The out of the box functionality of SharePoint provides users with the ability to see which alerts a given user is currently subscribed to within an individual site, via the following dropdown menu:
Did you note my use of the ever-popular phrase, "out of the box" above? Do you suspect that I, in my position as a card-carrying representative of Bamboo Solutions, might have an, ahem, solution in mind that could make Nate's life as a SharePoint admin easier? If so, I shall commend you on your perspicacity, hand the mic over to our product team, and allow them to introduce you to the Bamboo Alerts Administrator:
Manage SharePoint alerts across sites and Site Collections from one location. No more drilling down, site by site, to find and manage user alerts across sites or Site Collections.
The Bamboo Alerts Administrator provides SharePoint Administrators with the ability to create, edit, delete, group, and filter SharePoint alerts for all users within a single Web Application from one location. Create multiple alerts for one or more users in one step as well as create an alert for an Active Directory distribution group. SharePoint Administrators can access the Bamboo Alerts Administrator from anywhere in SharePoint from the Site Actions drop-down menu.
Thus endeth the investigation (and the product placement).
Posted
Nov 24 2008, 06:28 PM
by
John Anderson
John Anderson joined Bamboo Solutions as Manager of Content & Syndication in May 2008 after a 12-year career at AOL. New to SharePoint at the time of his hiring, John was tasked with creating a new blog for the just-launched Bamboo Nation community in which he would document his daily SharePoint learning process. Thus was born the end user-centric SharePoint Blank, for which John authored 200 posts within a year, and which he continues to write today. Today, John writes SharePoint Blank in addition to his responsibilities as Managing Editor at Bamboo and, while he learned much about SharePoint in his first two years, he gleefully celebrates the release of SharePoint 2010 and the reset button that the new platform represents for SharePoint Blank.