Managing SharePoint 3.0 Alert Subscriptions

Sharepoint provides you with the handy function of subscribing to alerts generated when list content is added or changed. But what if you need to manage and review your alerts for the entire site?

In a calendar, documents library, or other list, you can choose to receive e-mail notifications for changed items by visiting the Actions menu and selecting "Alert Me”. Furthermore, if you want to modify your existing alerts, you can go to this same screen and then click on "View my existing alerts on this site". The problem comes when you, as an administrator of a site, want to review and manage everyone’s alerts.

Time to crack open Query Analyzer (or SQL Server Management Studio) and look at your content database (usually WSS_Content_SiteNameHere). The ImmedSubscriptions table houses all of the immediate alerts that have been set up by users, which you can delete or tweak if necessary. Here are some of the useful table columns:

Id: GUID for the alert
ListId: links to the AllLists table
UserId: links to the UserInfo table
UserEmail: email address of the alert recipient
SiteUrl, WebUrl, ListUrl: determines the location of the list to which the alert is associated
Alert Title: arbitrary name for the alert