Managing SharePoint Alerts with the Bamboo Alerts Administrator

Having now mentioned the Bamboo Alerts Administrator twice (in two days, no less) while answering SharePoint alerts-related questions that had been submitted by readers, I figured I should probably spend some quality time with the Web Part.  As a result, this will be the first entry in what may very well become a semi-regular feature of SharePoint Blank, providing me the opportunity to approach Bamboo products from the same angle that I approach SharePoint in general ... as an inquisitive end user who's looking to gauge both the ease of use and relative usefulness of included features.

Once it's been installed on your site, the Alerts Administrator is available to all users with admin permissions, and is conveniently available from any page in a site which features the Site Actions dropdown menu:

Selecting its menu item from the dropdown menu will render the Alerts Administrator page, which includes a complete list of the alerts that currently exist for all site users.  Here's what the default view of the Alerts Administrator currently looks like for the Online Operations team (affectionately referred to as the "OOps team") here at Bamboo:

Taking the features from the top, you'll notice the quick hits toolbar, with its Add, Delete, and Toggle options:

The Delete button will, naturally, delete selected alerts from the site (after a confirmation popup).  Come to think of it, since I need to clean up the extraneous alert I signed my colleague Chris Dooley up for in the course of writing yesterday's blog entry, I'm going to use the delete feature to zap that sucker from the site right now.

Toggle allows you to disable selected alerts without deleting them (conversely, as its name implies, Toggle also allows you to enable selected alerts which had previously been disabled).  As you would expect, disabling an alert switches its status to Off in the Status field of the Alerts Administrator.

The Add button will refresh the page with a view of every object on the site that qualifies for an alert, divided by default into categories, as you can see below with the categories represented by Discussion Boards, Document Libraries, and Lists:

Clicking the Category bar allows you to reverse the alphabetical order of the categories and the objects within them, and the grouped categories can be ungrouped simply by dragging the Category header out of the blue bar.  Placing a check next to one of the items in its checkbox and clicking the Next button will render the familiar SharePoint New Alert page, with all of its attendant functionality.

As you can see, the bar immediately beneath the toolbar in the default view instructs that you may Drag a column header and drop it here to group by that column:

I'm going to do just that, and group my alerts by User for a more manageable UI:

Having done so, you can see that User now appears in the bar beneath the toolbar.  This User field behaves just as the Category bar did in the Add UI as described above.  As such, clicking the User field will rearrange the alphabetization of the groups and their contents (reversing ascending to descending or vice versa), and dragging the User field out of the bar will ungroup the list contents.

Continuing our top-down look at the Alerts Administrator, our next stop is the columns header bar:

The checkbox in the upper left is a select all option, and the contents of the columns themselves (User, Site, Title, Alert Type, Event Type, Alert Frequency, and Status) can each be filtered thusly:

Moving on to the main event, the alerts list, you'll note that each column is auto-populated according to its contents for each instance of an alert:            

As you can see, each column is collapsible via the button at the extreme left (next to User in my example).  Under the User bar, you can see the checkbox which will enable you to select a specific alert.  To the right of the checkbox is an additional Toggle switch, which allows you to toggle a specific alert without having first selected its checkbox.  Needless to say, green equals on, and toggling an alert to off will switch the associated toggle icon to red.  The X you see to the immediate right of the Toggle switch  is another means of deleting an alert.  In this case, the associated checkbox must be selected before the X/Delete button becomes enabled. 

The Edit icon, which is just to the right of the X, is the final icon of our tour, and this may very well be my favorite feature of the Alerts Administrator since it provides extremely useful functionality which, as I discovered yesterday, simply doesn't exist out of the box in SharePoint.  Which is to say, it provides the ability to not only modify an existing alert, but it allows you to do so easily by auto-creating a dropdown menu for any alert instance, like so:

Since it's entirely possible that I missed some functionality in my tour of the Alerts Administrator, I invite you to check out the dedicated Bamboo Alerts Administrator page in our storefront for additional information.