Dated reminders in sharepoint calendars

Question

I have a departmental maintenance that needs to be done roughly every 3 months. The maintenance itself can't be automated (it involves physically swapping a primary and spare piece of networking hardware to verify the spare is still working correctly).

I could put this as a recurring event in Outlook and give it a two week reminder window, but I don't want it to be tied to an individual's account (if I or one of my coworkers leaves the company, I still want the reminder to go to the department).

We're working on implementing Sharepoint and my group has a maintenance calendar, which seems like a lovely place to put this. However, there don't seem to be dated notifications for the events. You can set up notifications if the event changes, and you can subscribe to the calendar and set up a notification via Outlook, but that notification is still a per-user notification.

At this point I'm probably just going to write a cronjob on a linux server that emails a reminder, but I thought I'd ask if there's a way to do it using all these expensive collab tools we're putting in place.

So, any idea how to get notifications of a dated event that is not tied to individual users? I also welcome being told that my entire take on the problem is false as long as it involves some good alternatives. Thanks!

Answer 1

Expanding on Andy's answer (http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/CreatingCustomSharePointTimerJobs.aspx) if you just put code to send an email in the Execute method of the timer job this doesn't give you anything more than cron.

What you could do is to write code to iterate through the Calendar (actually an Event List) finding any events due soon and sending email to whomever is in the Assigned To field. This could then be called from the Timer Jobs Execute method or using a normal scheduled task. This will be easier to administer changes than cron and could be used for other types of tasks.

A link to get you started - Iterate through Items in a List

Another option would be to use Workflow to send out emails from the calendar

EDIT - Since SharePoint SP2 this no longer works as is as workflows can no longer start themselves (loop) - explanation and workaround

This CodeProject article shows how to develop a feature to send scheduled reminders

Yet another option would be to use one of the 3rd party tools that do this (disclaimer - I work for the first company)

• Pentalogic - SharePoint Reminder
• Bamboo - Alert Plus
• BoostSolutions - Alert Reminder Boost

Finally - whichever method you choose (custom code/workflow/3rd party) you will likely run into trouble with recurring events as SharePoint doesn't provide a way to get an 'expanded' list of all occurrences.

Answer 2

The best way to do this would be using a Timer Job - see Andrew Connell's blog here: http://www.andrewconnell.com/blog/articles/CreatingCustomSharePointTimerJobs.aspx