Adding alerts

SharePoint notifies you by email when items are added, edited, or deleted in lists or libraries.

In this recipe, we will see how to create email alerts for SharePoint lists and libraries.

Getting ready

You will need at least Readaccess on the list or library for which you'd like to get alerted.

How to do it...

How it works...

Alerts in SharePoint are a very handy way to get notified about changes in a list or library. Announcements, Contacts, Issue Tracking/ Tasks lists, and Calendar are examples of where you might want to get notified of such changes. In addition to setting up alerts on entire lists and libraries, SharePoint also lets you set alerts on individual list items and/or documents, as shown in the following screenshot:

This can be handy when, for example, you are collaborating with your team on important documents and would like to stay up to date on any changes made to them.

Once you've created a list- or item-level alert, you can modify and/or delete it through the Manage my alerts menu option, as shown in the following screenshot:

Clicking Manage my alerts will take you to the following screen, which will show you your alerts for all the lists, libraries, items, and documents across the entire site:

Clicking the alert name will enable you to make changes to it. Selecting one or more alert(s) and clicking Delete Selected Alerts will delete the alert(s). Note that unlike various other information types in SharePoint, deleted alerts don't go to the recycle bin, and hence cannot be recovered.

There's more...

When you sign up for alerts in SharePoint, you receive detailed email notifications every time that the alert is triggered. These emails contain various details about the item itself and metadata surrounding the triggering event. In the next section, we will look at these emails in more detail. We will then see how, as a site administrator, you can view and manage alerts that other site users may have subscribed to.

Notification emails

SharePoint sends two types of emails for alerts:

As you can see from the preceding example, the notification email contains the following information:

As you can see from the preceding example, the notification email contains the following information:

Finding and deleting other users' alerts

As a site administrator, you can not only view and manage your alerts but you can also view and delete alerts for other users of your site. To do so, browse to the Site Settings page of your site, as described in the Viewing and changing site settings recipe inChapter 3, Working with Modern Sites in SharePoint Online. Then, click User Alertsunder the Site Administrationheading. This will take you to the User Alertspage, as shown in the following screenshot:

Here, you can select a user from the Display alerts for drop-down option, and click Update to view alerts that they are subscribed to. You can then select appropriate alerts and delete them by clickingDelete Selected Alerts.

See also