Those SharePoint alerts are just filling up our inboxes

How often have we heard this complaint from IT Managers with enough to worry about already. SharePoint is a great tool, and alerts are really useful, but the reality is that they get overused and therefore very quickly ignored.


Result: loads of alerts are filling up users' inboxes, and they are either just being left there, or they get deleted by the users without ever getting read.

And hey, how about coming back from vacation and finding your inbox jammed with irrelevant notifications?


We were asked - about 6 month ago - to develop a little "instant message" alerting mechanism for a client. As soon as we heard about it we thought this sounded like a neat little idea. Another client happened to complain that same week about their FD sending global emails with massive attachments. His messages really belonged to a SharePoint announcement list, but they were reluctant to start alerting users even more than they did already via SharePoint.

Two weeks after I was discussing how to use SharePoint for contingency planning, and the topic of notifications came up again. The organisation really wanted to use SharePoint as a primary location for contingency information, and as the primary mechanism to distribute information. Long story short, email is a great mechanism, but not fast enough, and what if email servers are down. So as a primary distribution mechanism, how about something that broadcasts directly to the users from SharePoint.

Right that was it. We just had to get to it, and CorpCast was underway.....

CorpCast was built as a "stand-alone" communication tool, i.e. it does not require Office Communication Server, Exchange or other. Just SharePoint standard edition, and a port to broadcast on.


We released CorpCast about one month ago, and are getting some great feedback at the moment (thanks to everyone who have been providing this feedback).


Let me quickly summarise how CorpCast works:

A SharePoint feature allows Site Owners to configure CorpCast notification alerts on any list. CorpCast can be configured to notify individual users or groups, and can be set to trigger notifications on Add, Update or Delete events on the list.



So, when a new item is added to a list the event is caught by CorpCast, and it passes a message to the "CorpCast Server Service", which in turn broadcasts the notification to all listening CorpCast clients.

On the client a little light weight application is installed to the Windows notification area, and displays the notification with the "toaster effect" on the users desktop. When the user clicks on it, it closes and the user is taken straight into the relevant item on SharePoint.


So, the feedback we have had since is that this is great for:
- contigency planning
- reducing email alerts filling up Outlook
- pulling users into specific areas of SharePoint (i.e. this is a great tool to encourage people to visit a newly published intranet page)
- support / helpdesk lists, to instantly notify the helpdesk team.
- etc

(keep the feedback coming, and tell us how you are using CorpCast)

We have uploaded latest version of CorpCast here: www.clearpeople.com/corpcast
You can download a free - fully functional - 45 day trial.


Also -here is a One Minute Demo... not the most impressive video editing skills (I admit it), but should give you enough to get going on (and I promise I will record/edit something better soon):

Gabriel