SharePoint and RSS vs Alerts
(This post is for those who use, or are thinking about using, SharePoint Server. I'm going to refer to RSS as 'news feed' as much as possible - it doesn't matter what RSS stands for, what matters is that it is a technology that feeds you news updates.)
The next version of SharePoint (SharePoint Server 2007) will provide support for both alerts and RSS news feeds. Given their similarities - they both tell you when 'stuff' has changed or new content has been published - it could be easy to confuse the two terms for being the same thing. They aren't.
Alerts are notifications - they tell you when something has changed. You can create an alert on just about anything in SharePoint Server, including search query terms (useful for being notified when new content you didn't even know about gets indexed) and this is true for the current version (SharePoint Portal Server 2003) as well as the new one. Alerts can be received via email or viewed under your 'MySite' page in the portal. You can choose to receive an alert immediately when something is updated, or see an aggregated list on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It is wise to minimise how many alerts you choose to receive via email, to avoid swamping your inbox - ideally select it for important documents that you want to keep track of.
RSS is a news feed - it is designed for keeping track of content that is regularly updated. You can create an RSS news feed on just about anything that can be stored in a list in SharePoint Server 2007. That includes news lists, document libraries, wikis, blogs... RSS news feeds can be viewed under your 'MySite' page in the portal and can be sync'd to a folder in Outlook 2007. If you are thinking this sounds very similar to Alerts, you are right. In most situations, you could choose to either set up an Alert or an RSS feed to be notified about changes to some sort of content held in SharePoint. But there are subtle differences, more psychological than feature-driven.
An alert should be just that - it alerts you. Something has changed and you need (or want) to take notice of it, either immediately or at some point in the future.
A news feed is just that - it feeds you news. Content has changed and you may or may not choose to take notice and read it, usually depending on how busy you are.
For example, you may be working on a project that has its own web site within SharePoint with a list containing documents being produced. In this scenario, you may want to set up a news feed to keep track of all updates to content on the project. You could also set up an alert to notify you when documents you are actively involved in are updated. When you are busy, you probably won't find the time to keep on top of everything that has been published (i.e. you won't bother to check the folder containing the news feed), but you will want to keep track of your specific documents and alerts prodding you via email are more helpful than scanning through a news feed (unless you set up a rule that automatically moves them to a folder too!)
Related library topics: SharePoint and News feeds
Technorati Tags: SharePoint
The next version of SharePoint (SharePoint Server 2007) will provide support for both alerts and RSS news feeds. Given their similarities - they both tell you when 'stuff' has changed or new content has been published - it could be easy to confuse the two terms for being the same thing. They aren't.
Alerts are notifications - they tell you when something has changed. You can create an alert on just about anything in SharePoint Server, including search query terms (useful for being notified when new content you didn't even know about gets indexed) and this is true for the current version (SharePoint Portal Server 2003) as well as the new one. Alerts can be received via email or viewed under your 'MySite' page in the portal. You can choose to receive an alert immediately when something is updated, or see an aggregated list on a daily, weekly, monthly basis. It is wise to minimise how many alerts you choose to receive via email, to avoid swamping your inbox - ideally select it for important documents that you want to keep track of.
RSS is a news feed - it is designed for keeping track of content that is regularly updated. You can create an RSS news feed on just about anything that can be stored in a list in SharePoint Server 2007. That includes news lists, document libraries, wikis, blogs... RSS news feeds can be viewed under your 'MySite' page in the portal and can be sync'd to a folder in Outlook 2007. If you are thinking this sounds very similar to Alerts, you are right. In most situations, you could choose to either set up an Alert or an RSS feed to be notified about changes to some sort of content held in SharePoint. But there are subtle differences, more psychological than feature-driven.
An alert should be just that - it alerts you. Something has changed and you need (or want) to take notice of it, either immediately or at some point in the future.
A news feed is just that - it feeds you news. Content has changed and you may or may not choose to take notice and read it, usually depending on how busy you are.
For example, you may be working on a project that has its own web site within SharePoint with a list containing documents being produced. In this scenario, you may want to set up a news feed to keep track of all updates to content on the project. You could also set up an alert to notify you when documents you are actively involved in are updated. When you are busy, you probably won't find the time to keep on top of everything that has been published (i.e. you won't bother to check the folder containing the news feed), but you will want to keep track of your specific documents and alerts prodding you via email are more helpful than scanning through a news feed (unless you set up a rule that automatically moves them to a folder too!)
Related library topics: SharePoint and News feeds
Technorati Tags: SharePoint
Labels: SharePoint
posted by Joining Dots at 12:57 PM. Permalink
2 Comments:
This is excellent information that I've been searching for the answer to for quite some time. I work at a small company where we use SharePoint for internal collaboration like status reporting, event updates, etc. It is also used as a Knowledge Base.
It has been difficult to get people to monitor new content in the portal, and the alerts have not been very manageable since you cannot subscribe to one area and have it generate alerts for all of the subareas underneath. We have quite a bit of hierarchy in our portal, so it takes some digging for people to find recently posted information which is not very efficient.
I'd like to set up an RSS feed that our users can subscribe to that notifies them when any new information is posted in any section but our knowledge base. Is this possible at all in 2003 or do we have to wait for 2007?
Thanks for the info.
Hi Thomas, thanks for the feedback. It's always great to hear when a post proves useful to someone. :-)
There were some RSS tools developed a couple of years ago for SharePoint 2003, but most of the links now seem to be broken or removed - http://www.u2u.net received the most favourable reviews at the time.
The alternative is to stick with the Alerts feature. Are you using SharePoint Portal Server 2003? If yes, then the Alert feature is very granular. If your hierarchy is well-defined, you could use metadata and create alerts based on search queries. (Using the advanced option when you create an alert, you can set it to track for certain keywords appearing within docs or even use the 'date modified' field) If you are using Windows SharePoint Services, your options are more restricted because it just uses SQL Server full-text indexing for search.
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