Team, Meet SharePoint

10/29/2008

Contents

Knowing What’s Going On

One of the challenges to teamwork with a SharePoint site is the simple matter of forgetting to check for new information and new action items on a regular basis. People on the team will write a draft document and post it into SharePoint, create a new meeting event, or update one of the existing wiki pages, but they should not have to tell everyone else what they have done. They should be able to trust that everyone else will either make it a regular habit of checking for new information in SharePoint, or that they have some way of being alerted to the changes that have been made.

The best approach is to have some way of being pulled back into the SharePoint team site when a relevant change is made, without having to go there and manually check for changes. For the first couple of days, team members may be diligent in checking the site, but there should be an automated way for SharePoint to alert team members that something has changed in their world.

Thankfully, there is.

Getting Pulled Back into SharePoint

SharePoint offers a couple of key ways for alerting users about changes that have been made by other people within the SharePoint sites they belong to:

E-mail notification, whereby an e-mail message is sent when something is added or changes
RSS notification, whereby the same type of update is distributed by a file called an RSS feed, rather than by an e-mail notification

Either alert type will work fine, but it is vital that each team member chooses one or the other or both.

Setting Up E-Mail Alerts in SharePoint

E-mail alerts are set up for each list or library in SharePoint. Rather than having a global e-mail alert option, users are able to choose which lists or libraries they want to be notified about. The key list of interest for Roger and the team is the announcements list, because that will be the central place for coordinating the things that are happening in the project. To create an e-mail alert for the announcements list, Roger first opens the announcements list, either by clicking Announcements in the Lists area on the Quick Launch bar, or by clicking Announcements on the home page of the Project Delta Inner Team site.

After the Announcements list opens, click Actions, and then click Alert Me to set up an e-mail notification (see Figure 4-2).

Figure 4-2. Click Alert Me to set up an e-mail alert for a list.

Roger can create e-mail notifications for himself and for other people on the team from the New Alert page. He first gives the alert a descriptive name, and then enters or selects the list of people on the team in the Send Alerts To box (see Figure 4-3).

Figure 4-3. Give the alert a name, and enter the people to receive the alert.

The lower half of the New Alert page provides options about the alert itself. For announcements, this is things like the type of change that should trigger an alert, specific criteria for the alert, and the timing of the alert. Because the key objective is to let everyone on the team know as soon as anything changes on the Announcements list, Roger goes for All Changes, Anything Changes, and Send E-Mail Immediately (see Figure 4-4).

Figure 4-4. Set the options for the alert.

When done, he presses OK at the bottom of the page, and the alert is created.

Roger’s next action is to create the first announcement in the list, welcoming everyone to the project and letting them know that SharePoint is ready for them to use. To create the first announcement, he clicks Add New Announcement from the main page of the Project Delta Inner Team site (see Figure 4-5).

Figure 4-5. Add the first announcement welcoming the team to the Inner Team site.

After Roger clicks OK on the Announcements form, it is saved to the Announcements list and an e-mail alert is sent to each of the team members.

Receiving an E-Mail Alert

When the alert that Roger has just configured is triggered by activity in the Announcements list, a message will be created and sent out to Roger (and anyone else with the same alert). The subject line of the message says that it is an alert from a specific SharePoint site, and the message provides a link for pulling the user back into SharePoint to view the change (see Figure 4-6).

Figure 4-6. SharePoint distributes alerts in e-mail messages so that people are advised quickly of relevant changes.

Deleting or Modifying an E-Mail Alert

Although Roger has created the alert for everyone on the team, the team members individually can delete or modify the alert if they don’t want to recieve it every time something changes. They can see their own personal list of alerts by first clicking My Settings, which they can access from anywhere in a given SharePoint site by clicking on their name in the upper-right corner of the page (see Figure 4-7).

Figure 4-7. Open My Settings to review your alerts for a SharePoint site.

Then click My Alerts on the User Information page to review your active alerts for that specific SharePoint site (see Figure 4-8).

Figure 4-8. Access the Alerts page through your My Settings page.

The My Alerts On This Site page lists all of your alerts for the current site, organized by frequency of notification—immediate, daily, and weekly. Because only one notification has been set up for Robert O’Hara, he sees only the New Announcement For Project Delta alert. He can select it and delete it, or he can open it to make changes (see Figure 4-9).

Figure 4-9. Individuals can review their alerts for a SharePoint site.

Robert opens the alert, and decides that for his requirements, an alert only when New Items Are Added is the way to go, so he selects that and then clicks OK (see Figure 4-10).

Figure 4-10. Users can change or delete alerts.

Managing E-mail Alerts in SharePoint

Let’s have a deeper discussion about setting up e-mail alerts in a SharePoint team site. It is important to strike a balance between creating more discordant e-mail noise for yourself with too many alerts of the wrong kind, and being swiftly informed of new happenings by e-mail that make your life and work easier. SharePoint offers an e-mail alerting capability, but how you use it will determine whether it has positive or negative effects for you.

The first rule in creating e-mail alerts is selectivity. Don’t do it for everything. When you are waiting for a certain document to be added to SharePoint, set up an alert (New Items Are Added, then Send E-mail Immediately). After the document has been added, delete the alert. When you have asked a team member to review a document for you, set up an alert (When Existing Items Are Modified Then Send E-mail Immediately). After your team member has reviewed the document for you, get rid of the alert. Even if the alert is only current for three hours in the system, you haven’t had to worry about or think about it during that three-hour period, but were able to get on with your other work knowing that you would be told as soon as something happened.

The second rule is to create alerts that align with your current areas of focus. If working on a project like Project Delta is a major part of your time and energy investment at the moment, create a set of alerts so that you know what’s going on without having to look. These alerts act as a personal butler, announcing changes that you may want to know about, and thus allowing you to at least have been told. It is totally within your power to do nothing about the alerts, but you have had that choice with an investment of three to five seconds to scan an alert, rather than a couple of minutes to head off to SharePoint and check to see if anything has changed.

The third rule is to take an “easy-come, easy-go” approach. It is very easy to create a new alert request in a SharePoint site, and you should create one whenever it makes sense within your work. Hey, create one just for the fun of it ... and then see if the alert is working for you and is proving to be helpful in your work. If you find yourself checking a folder for new things, or just to see what’s changed, you need to create an alert for yourself, most likely of the Send A Daily Summary variety. That’s the easy-come half. The easy-go part is that when you find an alert is no longer helpful, get rid of it. Delete it. And do so without any regret or concern. If you made a mistake in deleting it, and find yourself missing out on key things because you don’t have the alert any more, add it back. But don’t keep alerts hanging around that have outlived their usefulness and are proving to be annoying.

The fourth rule is to automatically shift your alerts from SharePoint into a special “SharePoint Alerts” folder in Outlook. Create an e-mail rule in Outlook to automatically move all of your alerts out of your Inbox into a separate folder of SharePoint project alerts. This means that the alerts are not mixed in with all of your other messages, causing even further e-mail overwhelm. This way, you can see quickly and easily know what’s changed in the various projects you are involved with. Extending this idea for even greater benefit is to create a Search Folder in Outlook 2007 to highlight the particularly urgent and immediate-attention-required alerts from SharePoint.

The fifth trick is to choose an e-mail Alert Title that really helps you in your work. When you look at your list of alerts in a specific SharePoint site, they are categorized by frequency (immediate, daily, and weekly), and then only the Alert Title shows. Hence, if you have 10 to 20 alerts set up, the only piece of information you are given to help differentiate between alerts is the title. So make it a good title. For example, why do I have an alert named Tasks (immediate) and one named Daily Summary of Michael’s Tasks (daily)? What’s the difference between the two? What warrants me having two? Unless I click the title and review the alert information, I have no way of knowing from the title what it does and where it works within the site. So I need to make the title more descriptive.

Having clicked into both of these, there is a good reason there are two. The Tasks alert is to tell me whenever I get a new task assigned to me; I want to see what people are telling me to do ASAP! So the better title for it is A New Task Is Assigned To Michael. But what happens if an existing task that was originally assigned to someone else is suddenly re-assigned to me? The way that I have created my alert means that I won’t see it. So I really need to request an alert for All Changes” when A Task Is Assigned To Me. Then I will get both the new ones and the changed ones. And as a consequence, the title of the alert should be written as A Task Is Assigned to Michael.

Setting Up RSS Alerts in SharePoint

The alternative way of being pulled back into the SharePoint team site is for users to create an RSS alert for themselves. This means that e-mail alerts are not being sent, but rather they are told about changes through a relatively new technology called RSS.

What Is RSS?

RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication” (and a couple of other variants), but the essential idea is that every time a Web site such as a SharePoint team site changes, a list of changes is automatically created and maintained as a special page on the Web server. When an RSS reader on the user’s computer—such as Microsoft Office Outlook 2007—requests the latest copy of the RSS page, all of those changes appear within an Outlook RSS Feeds folder. Outlook 2007 displays the RSS page as a list of messages, one for each change on the master Web site.

To create an RSS alert for a list or library, for example the Announcements list, open the list (as you did when creating the e-mail alert), click Actions, and then click View RSS Feed (see Figure 4-11).

Figure 4-11. Click to view the RSS feed for a list.

This opens a page for the RSS feed, and asks you to confirm that you want the RSS feed for the Announcements list. Click the Subscribe To This RSS Feed link (see Figure 4-12),

Figure 4-12. The RSS feed is shown in Internet Explorer.

If Outlook 2007 is set up as your RSS reader, you will be prompted to add the feed to Outlook. Click Yes in the dialog box (see Figure 4-13).

Figure 4-13. Outlook asks you to confirm your subscription to the RSS feed.

Because you may end up having lots of RSS feeds for different SharePoint sites, and even multiple feeds for your Inner Team site, create a project-specific folder to store your Inner Team feeds, and then move the feed you just added into that folder (see Figure 4-14).

Figure 4-14. Use Outlook folders to group similar RSS feeds.

This means that you can group all of your feeds related to specific projects together, for an at-a-glance view of what’s going on.

Finally, note that other people cannot create RSS alerts for you. Only you can do it, giving you total control over what you receive RSS alerts for. And when you have had enough of being alerted by RSS, you just delete the RSS alert from Outlook 2007 and it will no longer pull it in for you. So you have total control, and only get what RSS alerts you want to get.

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