Creating alerts for other users in SharePoint. It is important that collaboration software provide some means of notifying people when updates have been made to the site. In most cases (and unlike Facebook) people will not spend a good part of their day logged into the collaboration space. Nor will they be interested in logging in just in case something on the site has changed. Having a notification system allows users to access the site only when there is something new to see.

In SharePoint, these notifications are called alerts. I won't go into alerts in too much detail here, expect to say that SharePoint makes it easy for users to create alerts for different parts of a collaboration space (ex. discussion areas, document libraries, etc) so that they can be notified via email when additions and/or modifications to these lists are made.

One scenario that SharePoint's developers did not originally take into consideration was that a site administrator may want to add alerts on a user's behalf. For example, when a new user is added to a site, you may have a policy that there are one or two essential alerts that they need to have setup, and you can't rely on them to set them up themselves. Another scenario is that an executive in your organization wants to be kept up to date on discussions happening on a specific site, so you need to set up a weekly alert that will provide them with a digest of activity over the course of each week. With SharePoint 2003, this was not possible. Thankfully the problem has been fixed in SharePoint 2007.

Not so, you may say. If you are like me, one of the first things you did in SharePoint 2007 is see what new alert management functionality had been added. If you go to

Site Settings > Site Administration > User Alerts

you'll see that not much has changed at all. Searching through the Microsoft documentation for SharePoint (which is quite poor, BTW) found almost nothing on the topic of alerts, let alone anything on adding alerts on the behalf of users. Searching blogs and the web was similarly unsuccessful. I did find a few webparts on CodePlex which appears to help manage alerts, but I wasn't sure I could trust them. I also found a few (expensive) products, but that seemed overkill and not a purchase I was likely to get approval for. I also couldn't bring myself to pay a lot for something that I felt should be part of SharePoint's core functionality.

Recently, while researching how to figure out how to customize alert messages, I saw a reference somewhere in passing to how you can create alerts for other users. Once I saw it, it was obvious.

If you are a site owner (i.e. full access) or if you have been given the Manage Alerts permission for a site or list, you can add alerts for other people. To do this, just go to the Actions menu of the list you want to create an alert for, and choose Alert Me.

There, under Send Alerts To, you'll have the ability to enter multiple names:

Now, you'll need to know the names of the people you want to add to the site. I guess if you had them set up as a group in Active Directory you could assign the alert to the group. And you still can't create alerts for the whole site: you have to go one list at a time. But it is a hell of a lot better then what was provided in SharePoint 2003 (i.e. nothing).

The problem with this solution is that it is totally outside of the conceptual model of how you administer a SharePoint site. On the user alerts administration page, there is no way for you to access this functionality, so it makes sense to assume that it doesn't exist. But it does, and if you are like me, you probably looked at it a hundred times before realizing what it was.