About managing alerts received from a SharePoint site

If your organization uses Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services or Microsoft SharePoint Portal Server to manage and provide access to documents on a Web site, you can be notified by e-mail when content on the site changes. This type of notification is called an alert. Alerts notify you of changes to documents, list items, document libraries, lists, surveys, or search results— helping you to be more effective by easily staying up to date with relevant information. If you have access to a SharePoint site, you can add, modify, and delete alerts from Microsoft Outlook. You can create alerts for lists and document libraries, as well as for individual items and any files in them.

You can manage your alerts from each SharePoint site you receive them from, or you can manage all your alerts from the Manage Alerts tab in the Outlook Rules and Alerts dialog box. From this dialog box, you can view the following information about each alert:

Alert Source The name of the SharePoint site you receive the alert from.
Alert Description Specific information about the alert, such as the document library and, if applicable, the name of the document you receive alerts about. It also displays the types of changes you chose to be alerted about, such as when a document is added or deleted from a list.
Received As How you receive the alert. For example, you receive alerts as e-mail messages.

From the SharePoint site, you can specify the types of changes you want to receive an alert about. For example, you can create an alert that notifies you when someone modifies a particular file in a list of shared documents.

You can also specify how frequently you want to receive alerts. You can be notified immediately or receive daily or weekly summaries. When you no longer need to follow changes for an item, you can delete the corresponding alert.

When you create an alert for an item, you immediately receive a confirmation e-mail message notifying you that the alert was successfully created. This message indicates that the alert process is working. The confirmation message also contains information about the alert and provides links to the SharePoint site where the item is located. When someone makes a change to the item, you receive an alert e-mail message that indicates what was changed, who made the change, and when the change was made. The alert message also provides a link to the SharePoint site to help you view and manage all your alerts on that site.

Note You can create and manage alerts from any Web site that generates alerts compatible with Microsoft Office 2003. For more information, contact your administrator.

Rules for alert messages

You can use Outlook rules to manage your alerts. For example, you can create a rule that moves alert messages notifying you of changes made to items in the Shared Documents document library to a folder in your Microsoft Exchange Server mailbox.

For more information on alerts, see Help on any SharePoint site.