Here’s a common use case: a user in your company is complaining about how frequently they receive Alerts from content added to SharePoint 2010 Lists.
Yes, there are quite a few tools out there, and some folks suggest using Control Point or something expensive for this requirement. But in principle you don’t need those tools.
SharePoint 2010 is best administered by PowerShell. Here’s an example script that will reset all of the alerts for a specified user (e.g. “DOMAIN\JOEL”) to receive a weekly digest.
Start-SPAssignment –Global
Get-SPWeb http://sharepoint/* | ForEach-Object { $w = $_; ForEach($alert in $w.Alerts) { if($alert.User.UserLogin -eq “domain\joel”) { $alert.AlertFrequency = “Weekly”; $alert.Update(); } } }
Stop-SPAssignment -Global
Enjoy!
Post Script:
Top tip from Andrew, one of my students. Why not train users to manage alerts for themselves? Outlook has the Manage Rules & Alerts feature to make the task easier:
I train users to go into Microsoft Office Outlook and look at Rules and Alerts. Either on the Tools Menu or the file tab/office button. As well as the rules tab that most people have seen there is an Alerts tab that connects to SharePoint and lists out all of their alerts. They can Add, Edit and Delete from here. It’s been there since Outlook 2003.