SharePoint 2010 Training – Page 2 – JoelBlogs – Joel Jeffery's Microsoft 365 Blog

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 was recently asked how to remove the Editor Parts (Appearance, Layout, Advanced, etc) from custom Web Parts.

One strategy is to implement your own Editor Part and mark the built-in ones as not Visible.

Firstly, we need to create our Editor Part class:

class MyEditorPart : EditorPart
{
    protected override void CreateChildControls()
    {
        // this line hides the default EditorParts
        Parent.Controls[2].Visible = false; 
        base.CreateChildControls();
    }

    public override bool ApplyChanges()
    {
        // do stuff here
        return true;
    }

    public override void SyncChanges()
    {
        // do stuff here
    }
}

And here’s how we invoke our Editor Part from our Web Part:

public class MyWebPart : WebPart
{
    public override EditorPartCollection CreateEditorParts()
    {
        ArrayList aryParts = new ArrayList();

        MyEditorPart myEditor = new MyEditorPart();
        myEditor.ID = this.ID + "_myEditorPart";
        aryParts.Add(myEditor);

        return new EditorPartCollection(aryParts);
    }
    // do more stuff here...
}

Hopefully, when you edit the Web Part it should look something like this:

The next step would be to extend CreateChildControls(), ApplyChanges() and SyncChanges() to get and set any properties you’d like to allow users to edit.

Resetting and Managing SharePoint User Alert Frequencies

Removing the Default Editor Parts from SharePoint Web Parts