“New Item Added” Alert not working

I hope there is a happy ending to this story, I will update it when I find out. [Updated 7/26/2010]

Here is the situation

MOSS 2007, Alerts set on a Survey list.  Users complain that although they have set up Alert Me to tell them when a New Item is Added they are not getting the email alert.

I setup my own Alerts to test behavior, here is the run down:

• Creating an Alert produces the “successfully create an alert” email message
• Changing an item produces the item “has been changed” alert email message
• Deleting an item produces the item “has been deleted” alert email message
• Creating a new item DOES NOT produce the “New item added” alert email
• Alerts on other lists in same site behave normally (all Alerts work as expected)

Some of the things I have done to troubleshoot/resolve this behavior:

• Restarted the Timer service
• Verified the Timer service was running
• Checked the Timer Status in Central Administration – everything Successful and 100%
• Checked the properties:

STSADM -o getproperty -url http://YourSiteURL -pn alerts-enabled
STSADM -o getproperty -url http://YourSiteURL–pn job-immediate-alerts

• Re-registered the Alert Templates

stsadm -o updatealerttemplates -url http://YourSiteURL -f “c:\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft Shared\web server extensions\12\TEMPLATE\XML\alerttemplates.xml” -LCID 1033

Behavior after Re-registering the Alert Templates – same as before re-registering, ugh.

Decided to test more alerts on other sites, ah-ha!

• Other sites in the collection with lists using Alerts behave as expected – “New Item Added” Alert works!

So what do we have?  Behavior is localized to this survey and only impacts New Item Alerts.  Wait, that sentence made me verify…other survey’s behave the same way!  So the problem is not with that “list” it is a problem for all survey’s.

Workaround’s

One workaround that was plausible was to create a workflow to send notifications when new items are created.  This seemed plausible only because in this situation, the users had already requested assistance creating an approval workflow for this survey.   I decided to do a quick test by setting up an approval workflow.  The workflow fails to start.

Following this trail actually helped me get to the bottom of all of this.  I finally came across this Microsoft support article explains how “starting a workflow from a survey response is not supported in Windows SharePoint Services 3.0” – and the article  “Applies To” MOSS 2007 as well.

That lead me to some blogs saying that Microsoft does not support “New item added” Alerts on SharePoint Survey’s in WSS 3.0 or MOSS 2007.   These blog postings were older, so I wanted to find either ‘new’ postings or something that I could consider more reliable.  After searching further I found a hotfix mentioning this behavior – KB983307 Description of the SharePoint Server 2007 hotfix package (sts-x-none.msp): June 29, 2010.

Resolution

What have we learned?

1. The Alert behavior is a known problem in WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007; there is a fix, but you will want to review that material and make a decision regarding installing it in your environment or not.
2. Workflows are not supported for SharePoint Survey’s for WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007, so keep that in mind to avoid the obvious issues and let your users know that they shouldn’t create Survey’s if they want to eventually attach a workflow.

Epilog (of sorts)

Using Alerts to notify people of Changes to items in Survey’s does work, however you should evaluate what you are trying to accomplish and choose the best tool.  Survey’s are quick and easy to build, so make use of this nice tool built-in to SharePoint when you need it…just be aware of the potential pros and cons associated with using them.

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