Why is the Run Alert Plus on Application Server radio button grayed out?

Why is the Run Alert Plus on Application Server radio button grayed out?

You have just upgraded to or installed Alert Plus R4 and you want to specify that the Alert Plus services run on certain application servers in your farm. However, when you go to the Alert Service Selection page in SharePoint Central Administration, the radio button is disabled.

app server selection grayed out.png

This is probably because you have not installed and configured the Alert Plus Service Components on your farm. Please see Run Alert Plus from an Application Server for more information.

Troubleshooting Alert Plus Event Handlers

Troubleshooting Alert Plus Event Handlers

The alert that sends an email when a column value changes uses an Event Handler. This handler is created on the event list when the alert is created. If this event handler is missing or corrupted, our Support team may advise you to go to the Support tab of your Alert Plus web part. On the Support tab, click View to see the Event Handlers as shown in the screen shot below.

CheckEventHandler.png

The Event Handlers section provides diagnostic information for Alert Plus event configuration. If you are working with Bamboo Support to resolve an Alert Plus issue, you may be directed to provide results from this section to Support during the troubleshooting process.

The Value of the Token Does Not Appear in the Email Message

The Value of the Token Does Not Appear in the Email Message

Issue

You configured the Email message sent for your alert to include the values from several different columns in your alert list. When users receive the Email, some of the information they expect to see is missing.

Background

In Alert Plus v4.x and higher, you might see Emails with missing information if your alert is configured to alert on a list view.

A current limitation of Alert Plus is that columns defined as Site Columns are not displayed in the Email message.

Resolution

In Alert Plus version 4.x and higher, when you alert on a list view, the columns included as tokens must be included in the list view. If they are not, modify the list view to make sure those columns are included.

Unfortunately, there is no current resolution for the display of Site Columns in Alert Plus Emai messages.

Performance Considerations

Performance Considerations

Alert Plus Highlights

Alert Plus Performance Tuning

As a general rule, Alert Plus does not require special performance tuning after installation. Because some organizations may have special performance considerations, the suggestions included in this section are intended to provide users with configuration guidance for specific scenarios that may affect Alert Plus performance. In particular, the section discussing Bamboo List Rollup Web Part tuning provides recommendations to achieve the best performance when rolling up large amounts of data monitored by Alert Plus.

Distributed Architecture

Alert Plus is designed to scale automatically based on your existing SharePoint infrastructure. By using SharePoint timer jobs, SharePoint distributes the alert processing workload across all available Web front-end servers in the SharePoint farm to minimize the impact on a single server.

Since it is possible to configure an alert in any list on any site from the Alert Plus Web Part, it is best to consider consolidating alerts to minimize the number of web parts used. Not only will it be easier for your staff to maintain alerts configured in a single web part per site collection, it will minimize the number of timer job instances as well.

See Overview of the Alert Plus Solution Components for additional information.

SharePoint List and Library Performance Tuning

Similar to the Microsoft advisement that SharePoint lists containing a large set of data should be filtered using list views that result in 2,000 items or fewer, Bamboo Solutions suggests that Alert Plus jobs running on SharePoint lists or libraries should be configured to filter alert items to 2,000 items or fewer for the best Alert Plus performance. To filter alert items, select an appropriate list view or create a CAML query to filter on specific criteria. For more information, read the Event Tab topic and Creating Alerts topic.

List Rollup Performance Tuning

With the List Rollup Web Part, users can combine multiple lists or libraries into a single view and then create a single alert on the resulting rollup, saving time and effort for managing alerts. The following are recommended best practices for reducing the number of alerts users might receive when alerting on rollups that contain a large number of items:

  • Do not select As Soon As Possible for the alert frequency. Instead, use Every Hour, Every Day, Every Week, or create a custom schedule.

Icon-Tip For very large rollups, creating a custom schedule is best because it causes the creation of a custom SharePoint timer job for this specific alert. The standard Alert Plus timer jobs could be used to process multiple alerts, but a custom timer job is responsible for only one alert. See How often should E-mails be Sent for more information.

An Item Exists Alert Trigger Recommendation

If you are using the alert trigger An item exists, it is recommended that you set the Follow-up Wait Days setting to 1 day or greater so that users do not receive frequent alerts on the same item. This setting tells Alert Plus not to send another e-mail about the same item for the specified number of days. See Which Trigger Type Should You Use for more information.

Alert Plus Email Configured Correctly?

Alert Plus Email Configured Correctly?

HW05_TestSendEmail.jpg Alert Plus uses the e-mail configuration for the SharePoint server. If Emails are not sent when Alert Plus events are fired, and Bamboo logs (c:windowstempbamboosolutions) show this error:

“5.7.1 Client does not have permissions to send as this sender”

This issue is most likely due to the account running the SharePoint Timer service in Admin Tools > Services (OWSTIMER.svc) does not have permission to send email.

To resolve this, check the following:

  • The farm account running the SharePoint Timer service in Admin Tools > Services (OWSTIMER.svc) must have a mail box in the Exchange server.
  • The From email address configured in Central Administration needs to use this mailbox address.
  • If you do not wish to monitor this farm account mailbox address, then you can forward replies to a mailing list that includes all SharePoint administrators.

To test that e-mails can be sent by Alert Plus, enter a destination e-mail address and click the Send E-mail button. The results of the test will be shown in the Test Result window.