In this day and age we don’t expect users to crawl through all of the sites and lists in a company intranet or website. We are naturally going to give the user a way to get updated on changes they are interested in.
SharePoint has 2 ways to receive updates on changes or new additions to a list.
RSS feed:
RSS is short for Really Simple Syndication (somewhat debated), and is a web standard on how to receive updates on new blog posts, news etc.
Microsoft has embraced this is SharePoint as well, and every list, be it document library, picture library, accouncement list etc will automatically create an RSS feed everyone can subscribe to.
By subscribing to the lists RSS feed, you will be able to get new documents, list items, pictures etc directly in your favorite feedreader.
This feedreader could be Feedburner or just Outlook or Internet Explorer.
Please note that this will only send you the information once. If any changes are made to the original document, listitem etc, then you will not receive any news on the update.
You will not receive “Live” news. There is a delay to getting feeds as the feedreaders don’t query SharePoint very often. It can take several hours before you see the newly published announcement in your feed reader.
Alerts:
Alerts is a very easy way to get swift updates on whatever you wish in SharePoint. You can set up alerts for document libraries, custom lists, picture libraries etc, but you are also able to subscribe to individual items in lists which you are not able to cia RSS feeds. Another good thing about alerts is that you get the alert within 5 minutes, and you will receive it in an email.
This closes the gap in what you can’t get from RSS feeds.
What updates to get and when
You have a lot of freedom to what you wish to get updates about. I will sum it up below.
You are able to choose what type of change to be informed of:
All changes
New items
Modified items
Deleted item
Web discussion updates
See only changes made by:
For these changes:
Anything changes
Someone else changes a document
Someone else changes a document created by me
Someone else changes a document last modified by me
When to send:
Send e-mail immediately
Send a daily summary (what time of day as well)
Send a weekly summary (time of day and weekday can be specified)
Subscribe to alerts for an entire list:
To get alerts for an entire list, open up the list, and choose Alert Me in the Actions menu.
Choose what to get updated on and click OK and you are set.
To get alerts on individual documents place the mouse over the items title and open the menu for the item by clicking the little triangle that appears.
You are only able to specify the “Send alerts for these changes” (who changed it and is it your document), and not the type.
How to edit / modify an existing alert
Changing the settings of an existing alert is a bit strange.
To do that you need to either open the menu for list or listitem alerts and then click on the “View my existing alerts on this site”.
A new page appears where you can click existing alerts and edit them. If you use the normal “Alert Me” menuitem from the Actions menu, og the item context menu you are actually creating a new alert.
In my opinion there should be a menuchoice for altering the existing alerts if there are any, but better help users understand how to alter alerts.
Yes you can have more than one alert for each list or item… This makes sense if you want to receive updates on a document only if someone else changes a document created by you or last modified by you.
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