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Get the Latest Scoop in SharePoint

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Keeping up on changes to my company SharePoint site is essential in my job. I need to know about newly added documents, team discussion responses, modified tasks, and many other changes. But scouring the company site for changes would be an endlessly tedious task. Instead, I check only one spot: Outlook. In SharePoint I subscribe to RSS feeds, and in Outlook I view the list of changes. I have also configured SharePoint to e-mail me alerts about important changes. I’ll show you how to create an alert first.

To create an alert in SharePoint:

  1. On the SharePoint home page, click your user name, and select My Settings.
  2. Click My Alerts.
  3. My Alerts page opens so you can manage alerts. On the toolbar click Add Alert.
  4. From the pane on the right, select the list or library you want to track, and then click Next.
  5. On the New Alert page that opens, you can change the title or settings of the alert. When you finish, click OK.


SharePoint sends alerts to my e-mail inbox or even to my phone as text messages. Because alerts can really stack up fast, I use them only for items I need to know about right away, such as changes to announcements and tasks. If I don’t need to be alerted immediately of changes, I can have SharePoint e-mail me a daily or weekly summary of all alerts. But I prefer to view nonurgent changes in my RSS feed so I can easily check for updates at my convenience.

To subscribe to an RSS feed in SharePoint:

  1. Navigate to the site and library for which you want to create an RSS feed, such as Shared Documents.
  2. On the Library Tools contextual tab, click the Library tab.
  3. In the Share & Track group, click RSS Feed.
  4. Click Subscribe to this feed.
  5. A dialog box opens so you can choose where to place the feed. On the Create in list, click the list arrow and select where you want to place the feed.
  6. Click Subscribe.

I find it so much easier to view changes to a SharePoint site or library in a neat RSS feed rather than to slog through SharePoint manually to see what’s new.

Comments

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    The comment has been removed

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Cool.. Tip of the day :) Good work David.

  • Anonymous
    January 01, 2003
    Good ..Tip of the day :)

  • Anonymous
    July 12, 2012
    How would/could you create a SharePoint Site wide alerts. Otherwise you're having to create an alert for each library and list within a site? If you creates an alert and include other individuals how can you control the group membership as a whole not on an individual basis.?The only option seems to be to delete the entire alert and recreate

  • Anonymous
    December 12, 2012
    Thanks for the help... Helpful Post :)

  • Anonymous
    July 19, 2013
    When will we have a content pack for Office 2013, Office 365 and SharePoint 2013?  Many customers use this site as their primary training site, so more current content packs would be helpful.