Custom Alerts – Part 2 – Filters

In my previous post on how to customise Alerts, we could see how to change the html of an alert. In this post, I will show how to change the filter for an alert, which defines the conditions in which events cause and alert to trigger and an email sent.

Say for example we have a list with a field called “Assigned To”, and we want know when someone (other than yourself) changes the assignment on that list item.

If we open the custom alert XML file we created in the 12 Hive at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\alerttemplates.xml, and search for our customised AlertTemplate node, we will find a section called Filters. Inside that node is a few different default FilterDefinitions, which specify the conditions for an alert to fire.

Anonymous access and 401 Unauthorized – Sign out first

I have just been attempting to configure anonymous access on a MOSS publishing site, and was getting quite frustrated when I continued to receive ‘401 Unauthorized’ error messages. In Central admin – I extended site to extranet and configured anonymous access on the Extranet site.

1. Opened the extranet site, set anonymous access to ‘Entire site’ in the advanced permissions for the site
2. Turned off ‘integrated windows authentication’ in Extranet site (in Central admin) to test as an anonymous user
3. refresh the extranet site again and bam – 401 error

After thinking about it for a while I realised it may still be trying to access authenticated components. So if you experience the same problem, try this simple answer. Before you do step 3 above, make sure you log out of your session on your extended extranet or internet site first, and then turn off integrated windows authentication on the Extranet site in Central Admin. When you return to the extranet site and refresh, it won’t try refresh the authenticated version of the site. 

SP1 Publishing Additions

The other day I stumbled across some new additions to the properties of publishing pages that MOSS Service Pack 1 has given us.

If you view the properties of a Publishing page, you can now see that the Schedule End Date has some extra email review options.

Never – send a content review. This can be used if you don’t want the page to actually expire and disappear on a certain date, but you can now send a regular email to authors reminding them to update their content. Before SP1 you had to write some code to achieve this.

On the following date – Notify Page Contact prior to end date. Now with SP1 you can set this option to send an email before the page expires. Very handy for easy setting of automatic reminders.

Page Contact – With SP1 you can now add a contact picture if you manually add a contact rather than picking a SP user.

Pre-SP1 publishing screen

Custom Alerts

In SharePoint 2007 we have a great feature called Alerts, basically it sends an email when something in a list or library (or view) is changed. I’m sure I don’t need to tell anyone about them, but when it comes to actually applying them, it would be ideal to be able to customise the alerts for your own application.

So not only might you want to change the presentation of the email that you send as an alert, but you may also want set certain custom conditions for when an alert is triggered.

The alert template xml file is located in the 12 Hive at C:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\alerttemplates.xml, if you open the file you will see all the different alerts for each type of list/library.

Using a word 2003 XML template with SharePoint List data

So how do you generate a word formatted document from a template doc, that substitutes placeholders with SharePoint list data?

Say for example you have a standard agreement or contract style document that you want to generate for new clients. You have your standard word 2003 template (doc) where you’d like to automatically populate data such as clients name, address, phone number etc. from your data already contained inside a SharePoint list.

Well there are a couple of approaches you could take:

1.       Use InfoPath – this is easy to connect to SharePoint data, however not as flexible to modify text etc if the contract wording changes

2.       Use Word 2007 – there is automatic ‘Document Property’ fields which you can add as placeholders, and if your template is uploaded to a library on your SharePoint site you can connect these fields to your library or content type fields.

3.       Or, if you want to save your output file as .doc and not .docx for compatibility reasons, you can use word 2003 and save it as a word xml file. This is what I’ll be looking at…