Are you part of a team and need to know when changes are made to critical documents? Or are you simply obsessive and nosey and want to know what documents people are working on? Well, you're in luck in either case because Sharepoint allows you to create alerts to notify you when specified items change.
You can setup alerts for document, discussion groups, folders and even search results. When any of these things change, you'll get an email telling you so at the time interval you dictate.
To setup an alert:
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Find something you're interested in. Remember, folders, documents, discussion groups, and searches are alert-able. (Note, the searches must be within the document library to set up an alert. Site-level searches (i.e. searching from the web site front page) is not allowed.
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On the left-hand side bar, you'll see a link called "Alert Me" under the "Actions" heading. Click it to setup the alert.
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The "Send Alerts To" block is for informational purposes only. Move down to the "Change Type" and "Alert Frequency" sections.
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In the "Change Type" section, choose what kind of information you want to be updated on. Click the appropriate radio button.
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In the "Alert Frequency" section, choose how often you want to be updated. Keep in mind, if your area of interest generates a lot of activity, you may be signing yourself up for quite a bit of email. Digest modes (daily or weekly summaries) can combat being overwhelmed with individual emails.
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Click OK to submit the alert.
Note, once you have alerts setup, this page also has a link so that you can review and manage (i.e. delete) your existing alerts.