As my professional responsibilities have shifted over the past year or so. An unfortunate side-effect of the changes in my role has been how little time I’ve been able to devote to SharePoint Blank. An especially unfortunate result of the limited time I’ve had available to devote to this blog is that I have a backlog of questions that have been submitted by readers. I just haven’t had the time to devote to researching and answering in a timely manner. Alas, I don’t see the likelihood of a sudden increase in my available time to Blank (to employ the usage I’ve adopted). But I will make an effort to give priority to the backlog of questions when I am able to squeeze in some time for Blank going forward.
Since there’s no time like the present, and since it’s the one freshest in my mind. Let’s go with the question posed most recently (via a comment that was left on an older post). ChristerS asks:
Is it possible to use different mail-addresses if I create multiple alerts? Reason is that I would like to use different addresses depending on urgency, but [SharePoint] seems to only store one set of mail-settings. Is there an option to change this?
Based on past experience, I had a sneaking suspicion that the answer to this question was that no, different email addresses couldn’t be set up for a single user out of the box. But this could be accomplished using Bamboo’s own Alert Plus Web Part. Since I wasn’t certain, however, and since time was of the essence when I started looking into this on Friday. I opted to not pass “go” and went directly to Jeff Kozloff, the Patron Saint of SharePoint Blank, and Product Manager for Bamboo’s Components division.
Sure enough, Jeff’s answer was that “Alert subscriptions are associated with SharePoint profiles, not emails and, as a result, you can only subscribe an alert to one email per user account.” By default, that email address is the one associated with a given user’s SharePoint profile. That’s the bad news, ChristerS, but the good news is that Bamboo is here to help. You see, Jeff also went on to confirm the second part of my suspicion, saying that “Alert Plus. However, does feature the option to create alerts where the recipient is based on (as just one of the available options) a specific email account.”
Rather than just telling you that subscribing to alerts based on a specified email address is possible using Alert Plus though, why don’t I show you instead?
Once you’ve added the Alert Plus Web Part to a page and have clicked the New Item link. The Event tab will be the in-focus tab when the Alert Plus Web Part refreshes. On the Event tab, you’ll give your new alert a title and will choose the desired settings relating to the location of the alert item, what triggers the alert, frequency of emails, etc.
Since this post isn’t meant to be an overview of the Alert Plus Web Part. However, let’s proceed without further delay to the second tab you’ll note in the image above. That would be the Recipient(s) tab, and the drop-down list of options related to the “Who should the alert e-mails be sent to?”.
As you can see, I’ve highlighted the one that pertains to the question at hand, but I would be remiss if I were to fail to point out that “Send to a fixed set of Users or E-mail Addresses” is only one of a half dozen options relating to alert recipients.
I would also be remiss if I didn’t mention that a major new release of Alert Plus is imminent, as Jeff Kozloff himself blogged just last week.
And there you have it. Please note, that not every question that gets asked ends up resulting in a Bamboo product recommendation. When a question gets asked and the answer is that it can’t be done out-of-the-box, it can be done through the use of a Bamboo product, well, what’s a poor blogger to do but speak the truth?
