Get the Latest Scoop in SharePoint
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:
- On the SharePoint home page, click your user name, and select My Settings.
- Click My Alerts.
- My Alerts page opens so you can manage alerts. On the toolbar click Add Alert.
- From the pane on the right, select the list or library you want to track, and then click Next.
- 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:
- Navigate to the site and library for which you want to create an RSS feed, such as Shared Documents.
- On the Library Tools contextual tab, click the Library tab.
- In the Share & Track group, click RSS Feed.
- Click Subscribe to this feed.
- 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.
- 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.