Oh 365 Eh? » Create Alert for All Users in a SharePoint Group

Create Alert for All Users in a SharePoint Group

Fact: You can’t set up an alert for a SharePoint Group in SharePoint 2010 or SharePoint 2013.

And for many that’s a great thing, as they dread the thought of more emails flooding their inboxes. But there are times, especially during the early days of rolling out an implementation or a new feature where notifications can be useful – not only to identify if people are making errors, not following instructions, or (worse) not showing up at all to perform the task you asked of them.

So what’s a Site Owner or Admin to do (especially if workflows aren’t an option)?

Fortunately, I happened across a brilliant tip shared in a TechNet forum post by Mike Smith, SharePoint MVP, MCT, and TechTrainingNotes blogger.
Take note – this one is a time saver!

Here is the quick workaround:

  1. In the Site Settings > People and Groups > select the SharePoint Group.
  2. Click the Select All check box
  3. Actions menu > Select E-Mail Users
  4. Follow the prompts to open Outlook to create a new email
  5. Highlight the list of email addresses in the To field. Copy.
  6. Paste into the alert screen.

Remember: You’re not actually adding the SharePoint group. You are adding the individual users in a batch. You will need to remember to go and add/remove a new/departing person’s name later.

How do you keep track of changes you make in your SharePoint site?

I’d recommend creating a OneNote notebook to store notes and screen clippings of changes to share with others as well as jog your own memory. At itgroove, we use the same Notebook to store master copies of template checklists to reuse for various processes. Documentation is useless unless people read it – so we complete our Change Control strategy by posting an announcement along with a screenshot in a dedicated Group in our Yammer Network (that our team is required to subscribe to). Everyone “likes” the post to communicate they’ve seen it – and share their feedback using hashtags – which can lead to lots of #lolz.

11 responses to “Create Alert for All Users in a SharePoint Group”

  1. I followed your instructions but #6 doesn’t make sense. Paste into what alert screen?

    1. Ginger,

      when at the list you want the alert to be set up on, select the option “Alert Me” | “Set alerts on this list”.

      You will get the options for the alerts, including this textbox:

      Send Alerts To
      You can enter user names or e-mail addresses. Separate them with semicolons.

      Hope it helps.

  2. “You will need to remember to go and add/remove a new/departing person’s name later”. The list of users to be alerted counts something around 250. The question is: can I modify the alert (add new or remove old users) without alerting everyone on the list? I do not dare to try it out at this point, but I guess, you have to set a new alert anytime you modify the recipient list? Thanks for the answer

    1. What I mean is not just alerting everyone aoubt the authorization changes (desired), but also each time automatically alerting everyone about the fact, that a new alert has been set (not desired)…

  3. The alert screen is on the “List/libary” tab at the top. Click on that then click on “Alert me”, then “set up an alert on this”. Then paste in all the email addresses.

  5. This is a great solution for SharePoint sites.

    Do you have a work around for O365 Groups sites. Under site settings there is no People and Groups to select.

    Thanks

    1. I have not dived into playing around with Office 365 Groups yet. I will be exploring Teams in the future, but haven’t had a lot of experience with Groups.

  6. If I click the “select all” box, it only selects all the members visible on the screen (items 31-60 on one page, 61-66 on another for example. Is there a way to select all the users in the group? Thanks!

  7. Hey itgroovers, I’m a big fan of Alerts, as a great out of the box feature. In a Modern Team Site, it appears we are able to use the o365 “Mail Enabled Security Group” type to Alert a group. I’m still testing this; what’s your experiences? This client also has External Users they want to Alpert, which also appears to be working. (He said excitedly!)

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