Partially because I'll be leaving for a vacation at the end of the week, I was juggling a great many tasks on Monday when I wrote and published my Automated SharePoint Alerts Triggered by an Expiration Date post. I say that by way of beginning to explain why my first thought upon waking Tuesday morning was essentially, "What have I done? How could I?" And frankly, I'm surprised that no one has called me on my transgression.
Perhaps I should explain further.
You see, I treat it as an article of faith that if I have the ability to actually perform the SharePoint-related tasks about which I write in this blog (which is most of the time, by design), I will actually perform those tasks and blog the learning process. Some of you probably know where I'm going with this (and I'd bet money that after reading this, my boss will say to me something along the lines of "I meant to flog you for that, but hadn't gotten around to it yet"), but for the rest of you, this is the part where I enter the confessional. In my last entry, I wrote that Bamboo Alert Plus will allow users to generate automated email alerts based on an expiration date ... I even helpfully linked to existing use cases in our Online Application Notes ... but what I didn't do was actually use the Web Part to perform the expiration date-based task personally.
Mea culpa.
And so, in an effort to cleanse my soul of this stain, I set about doing my penance in the form of confessing my sin (see above), and actually using Alert Plus to generate an email based on an expiration date set to occur in the future (see below).
Alert Plus had already been installed as an available Web Part on our team's test server, so I added the Web Part to my test site, the default appearance of which is:
Clicking the New Item button, I started making educated guesses as to the correct settings required to accomplish the desired task, first setting up the items in the Event tab by choosing Tasks as the option for "Which List contains the items to alert on?," An item exists as the option for "What triggers the alert," and As soon as possible for "How often are e-mails sent?":
I confess to having encountered some confusion along the way, at which point I sought the counsel of Jeff Kozloff, the Patron Saint of SharePoint Blank. Jeff set me straight by letting me know that for a task of the sort I was undertaking, I would need to select Some Items (Advanced) from the "Which items in the List generate an alert?" options. Doing so opened the advanced CAML Query section of the Event form:
In the image above, I'd already made my decisions before taking the screenshot, selecting the following as the criteria for the CAML Query: Due Date as the Field Name; Is Approaching in for Comparison; and 30 Day(s) as the Value. Having made those selections, clicking the Copy Criteria to CAML Query Field button automatically populated the necessary code in the (blank in the image above) field on the form. The idea being that, once I'd completed the setup process, an email would automatically be generated 30 days from the expiration date I would be setting.
Next, for my test purposes, I simply chose Send to me as the desired option on the Recipient(s) tab:
On the Mail Format tab, I composed the Subject and Message for the test email I wanted to have sent automatically when the expiration date was 30 days out:
Finally, on the Admin Options tab, I manually chose the time of day to be notified (this step is not required, but was necessary for me to get the near-instant gratification I was hoping for). Once I'd finished the Alert setup, I clicked Save and Close.
Next I set about creating a task list including the task itself, and setting a due date of 30 days out (this being the "expiration date").
The time that I had entered for the email to be generated came and went though and, having not received the mail, I asked Jeff to take another look. In a matter of seconds, he pointed out that I hadn't configured the Web Part. (D'oh! I'd thought that since it was already on the server that it would have already been configured.)
Alas, after all of that, I'm afraid that I have to leave you hanging for a bit. Due to some unexpected issues on my test system, I'm still unable to reveal if my "educated guess" settings as detailed above have done the trick.
If it turns out that I had everything configured properly once I've resolved the test system issues, I'll simply update this post accordingly with the good word (probably tomorrow at this point). If, however, I made some grievous error in judgment and a quick update to this post just won't cut it, I reckon there will be a part 2 in my future.
UPDATE: It gives me great pleasure to report that as soon as my (email-related, as it turns out) test environment issues were resolved, the expected "Expiration Notification" email alert automatically appeared in my inbox a short while ago:
Posted
Jul 22 2009, 06:08 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.