Create a alert based Annoucements

Here’s how to use a single announcements list, categorize the announcements by department, and allow alerts to be created per category. This list can also be set up to display only the announcements of the logged in user’s specific department.

• In your announcements list, create a new column called “Department”, as a text box, choice list, or even a lookup to a separate list of departments.
• In the list, create a new, filtered view for each different department, like this:
  Click the View drop-down box at the top right of the announcements list, and choose “Create View”, choose Standard View.
  In the Filter section, choose to filter by Department is equal to department name.
  Do a new view for each department.
• Now that the filtered views exist, alerts can be set up based on them.

Try it out. On the announcements list, click <Actions> and choose <Alert me>. You’ll notice that in the “Send Alerts for These Changes” section, there’s a new option that lets you choose to be alerted on items that exist in a particular view.


In this case, it’s a particular department’s announcements. Also, as an administrator, since you have the ability to set up alerts for other people, you can create a new alert based on new items created in the view for each department, and have that alert sent to members of a departmental group in Active Directory.