Alerts and Notifications
Demonstration and Training Site

One of the most difficult obstacles encountered in the business world is knowing when information changes. Fedintel Web sites based on Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services are meant to help groups of users work together, they tend to grow quickly and change often. Keeping up with these changes can be difficult for users, especially if they aren't checking on the site every day. To help users stay in touch with changes on a site, Windows SharePoint Services includes a feature called Alerts, an e-mail notification service. When documents, lists, or items in a list on a server running Windows SharePoint Services are created, modified, or deleted, users who sign up for alerts receive messages informing them that changes have been made.

Users can create alerts to track items within a site, such as:

• Lists — Users are notified of changes to the list, such as when an item is added, deleted, or changed in a list.

• List items — Users are notified of changes to a particular item in a list.

• Document libraries — Users are notified of changes to the document library, such as when a document is added, deleted, or changed in a document library or when Web discussion are added, changed, deleted, closed, or activated for a document.

• Documents — Users are notified of changes in a particular document or when Web discussions are added, changed, deleted, closed, or activated for a document.

  When a user creates an alert for one of these items, he or she can specify what types of events will trigger an alert. Alerts can be generated whenever a document or list item is added, updated, or deleted in a document library or list, or when a Web discussion on a document or list changes. A user can specify one of these events, or select all of them to be notified whenever anything changes on the list, list item, document, or document library they want to track.

  Users also have the ability to decide how often they want to receive alerts: immediately, daily, or weekly. Immediate alerts are sent as individual e-mail messages, and daily or weekly alerts are combined into summary messages for the entire Web site.                                                                                                   Alerts and Notifications include: Alert management; alert filtering; task notifications; workflow integrated alerting; RSS feeds; and dynamic search results.