Scenario: I'm using SharePoint for Project Management and I'm having a hard time getting my task assignees to remember that they have tasks due for my project. The tasks list is in SharePoint and many team members use Outlook to manage their time. They are very busy. I need to sent them e-mails to remind them that they have a task coming due in a few days.
How To: This is a very common alert that many people use the Alert Plus Web Part for. Here are the steps to configure a Reminder Alert:
- Create a new alert by clicking New Item in the Alert Plus Web Part interface.
- On the Event tab, configure the following:
- Which List contains the items to alert on? Select the Tasks list, or the list you are using to store task information for your project. If your Tasks list is on a different site than your Alert Plus Web Part or you want to use a List Rollup Data View that contains items from many tasks lists; locate it by clicking the Select another... checkbox.
- What triggers the alert? Select An item exists.
- How often are e-mails sent? I usually pick As Soon As Possible, since it gives me the best results for reminding my team members, but you can also choose to send messages in a summary e-mail once a day by selecting Every Day and clicking the Combine multiple alerts into summary notification checkbox.
- Which items in the List generate an alert? Click the radio button Some Items (Advanced). When you do that, a CAML Query and a Criteria Builder appear on the page. For those that don't know how to write CAML queries, we are going to generate a CAML Query to describe the tasks that generate an e-mail using the Criteria Builder.
- Build your filter criteria using the Criteria Builder as shown below. When you select And in the And/Or column, the second line of criteria will appear.
- Click Copy Criteria to CAML Query Field to paste the query code in the CAML Query box. Your Event tab will look similar to that shown below.
- Build your filter criteria using the Criteria Builder as shown below. When you select And in the And/Or column, the second line of criteria will appear.
- On the Recipient(s) tab, we need to tell the alert service to send the e-mail to the person identified in the Assigned To column of the particular task item. Configure it as shown below, which sends the message 2 days before the due date. If you are using a List Rollup Data View and don't see the Assigned To column listed, it is because your data view doesn't include that column. You will need to create a new data view that includes the column(s) you want to use in your alert (including those in the Mail Format tab, described next).
- On the Mail Format tab, we want to compose the Subject line and Message body of the e-mail that will be sent. We want to make it easy for our task assignees and tell them as much about the task as we need to in the e-mail so they can decide if they need to go into SharePoint or not when they receive the message. See the example below; it uses the {Title}, {Priority} , and {itemlink} tokens, which will be replaced with the actual data from the alert item at runtime. Be careful when using tokens, they are case sensitive (they must reflect the exact display name of the column). If you include a token like {title} in your mail format, you won't see any data because Title must be capitalized.
- On the Admin Options tab, you need to set the E-mail Follow-up Wait Days to 3. This is so the next time this alert is processed, we can be sure the task will no longer meet the CAML filter criteria; we only want to sent this message once. If we built the CAML to send the e-mail 3 days before the task is due, I would set the follow-up wait days to 4.
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