Common Scenarios

Several common scenarios have been described here in order to aid you in setting up SharePoint Reminder to your requirements.

If you are new to SharePoint Reminder then we recommend reviewing the Tasks - Due Soon and Overdue example to familiarise yourself with the software before looking at one of the others that may be closer to your requirements.

Tasks - Due Soon and Overdue

This is probably the most common use of SharePoint Reminder.

The team controls its work by using a SharePoint Task List. Tasks are assigned to a staff member for completion and have a due date.

2 SharePoint Reminder's will be setup, the first to remind the staff member assigned to complete the task when it is due within the next 3 days. The second will warn the staff member and CC the team leader when a task becomes overdue.

Helpdesk - High Priority Open Items

The company's IT Helpdesk use a SharePoint Issues list to issue 'Tickets' in order to track and control progress. The tickets are not set a Due Date - it is up to the Helpdesk staff to attend to them in the most appropriate order.

The Helpdesk team leader wants to setup SharePoint Reminder to send an email to her and the helpdesk team for any High Priority Ticket that is open. A new email should be sent every hour, assuring that open tickets do not get overlooked.

Team Calendar

Setup Reminder to watch a Calendar in your teams site remind everyone of important events like timesheets, expenses claims, quarterly sales reports and other important tasks. 

Enhance the Alert Me feature

SharePoint's built in Alert Me feature has several shortcomings such as poor control over the recipient of the email alerts, not being able to filter the type of records that cause emails to be sent out and being unable to change the content of the email.

This example demonstrates how you can use SharePoint Reminder to overcome these limitations and send out emails for new and updated items in a list.

Simple Workflow

You can use a SharePoint List for simple workflow, listing the different states of a record as it goes through a business process such as submitting, approving and paying an expenses claim.

We can use SharePoint Reminder to send out email alerts to the appropriate person when a record changes state in order to drive the item through our business processes.

Equipment Calibration Control

Some of our equipment needs to be regularly calibrated. We want to use SharePoint to control this, send email reminders and keep a history of all calibration for compliance purposes.

This example demonstrates using the Issues List template to ensure that you have a history of modifications to a record and also demonstrates the use of formula in Views.

Announcements

SharePoint's built in Alert Me feature has several limitations. It can't (out of the box) be setup to alert all users, or all email addresses in a particular list or include fields from your list. In this example we are going to use SharePoint Reminder to send out an email alert to everyone in our Contacts list when a new announcement is made.

Documents are left checked out

If you have document libraries that require check out before editing then you've undoubtedly been faced with the situation where documents have been checked out and forgotten about - blocking other users from editing the document. Reminder allows you to send email alerts after a period of time to ensure checked out documents are not forgotten about.