Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts

For the last three weeks, we've been trying to change the schedule of when the daily & weekly portal alerts are sent out for users. The problem is alerts are sent out around 1AM. Using the STSADM.exe utility, you are supposed to be able to set a few properties that specify when alerts can be sent out. For WSS sites, the properties are job-daily-alerts, job-weekly-alerts, and job-immediate-alerts. For SPS, the properties are job-daily-notification, job-weekly-notification, and job-immediate-notification. But for some reason the changes weren't taking effect... alerts were still being sent out anywhere from 11pm-3am. Why was this an issue? We had some people who setup daily alerts and when they were on call, their Blackberry's would wake them up in the middle of the night, just to tell them a document was updated 8 hours ago.

After fiddling with it for a few days with no luck in making any changes take effect, I gave up, and just opened a ticket with MS PSS. After 2.5 weeks, I finally get word that those properties don't work and were never removed from the documentation OR the list of available properties for the STSADM.exe utility. The only way, according to PSS, is to change the schedule of the index crawls as the notifications are sent at that time. So, if you don't want alerts to be sent out in the middle of the night, you index crawls need to be set to crawl in the middle of the day. Getting the feeling this product may have been rushed to market a little too quick.

posted on Tuesday, November 16, 2004 11:14 PM

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# Alcuni ottimi articoli su SharePoint 11/23/2004 1:04 PM Roberdan

re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 12/20/2004 1:11 PM Rummy Beer

So, your are completely sure that this parameters in WSS and SPS alerts don't work at all?

I'm having the same problem...

# re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 12/20/2004 1:13 PM Andrew Connell

That's exactly what I was told by the person working my case. We've had ideas that you could create another instance of the notification service to be run only during certain times (like a scheduled start/stop of the Win32 service), but we haven't given it a shot.

re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 12/21/2004 6:37 PM Rummy Beer

Andrew:
1) Sorry for my english :-(
2) I've been researching on my own about this problem, and found something interesting:

There is a table on the "<xxxx>_SERV" database of the Portal, named <<sub_SubscriptionSchedule>>, that contains the records for every subscription of a user. This table has 3 interesting columns:

- lastNotificationTime
- NextNotificationTime
- timeInterval (default to "1440", minutes, I guess - (24 hours))

The first time a user subscribes to a notification on the Portal (WSS? don't know), the value of the column nextNotificationTime is set with the following formula (as you can see in the StoredProcedure "sub_setScheduleNotification" of the same database)

"select dateadd(minute, RAND()*1440, getutcdate())"

Constantly, the SPS Notification Service is executing a StoredProcedured named <<sub_GetNotificationSeeds>>, and when it finds notifications on the queue, this service calls the <<sub_GetNewsLetterNotification>>. I'm still trying to understand the workflow of all this process (relation between fields and how the values change over time, etc.), but it seems at first sight that if I manually change the <<NextNotificationTime>> value (considering the UTC hour of the server) for each user, the notifications are send at the specified time, at least the "daily" notifications.

This is just an experiment.... don't know yet if could be usefull somehow.

By the way, it seems that the stsadm.exe utility stores the values that you mentioned in the <<properties>> field of the <<virtualservers>> table of the SPS configuration database.

# re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 12/22/2004 6:03 AM Andrew Connell

Wow... nice observation Rummy... I'll take a look at this.

# re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 10/5/2005 6:15 AM Praveen

I am new to SharePoint.I have been given task of cusomizing alerts in the following way:
1. If we are editing any document then we set an alert and when we are editing any list then we set an alert.But if that list conatins a document and we change that document in the list then we receive two alerts .one for changing the list and one for changing the document.WE need only one alert.

2. We want to customize the format of email in alerts.

Waiting for a positive response.

re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 6/13/2007 1:00 AM Michael

Reviving an old article - but was there ever an easy solution for this?
Just running into the same problem now.

# re: Interesting "over-documented" setting in SharePoint Portal Server regarding alerts 6/13/2007 8:22 AM AC [MVP MOSS]

Michael-
Not sure... check the setup/admin newsgroup and make sure you specify v2/v3.

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