What are alerts and reminders?
Put simply, alerts are triggered by events and reminders are based on a period of time.
What does that even mean?
Well, an event is referring to items you have in your SharePoint environment. If items are added, modified and/or deleted you will be sent an alert so you know when something has changed.
A reminder is when you are reminded about something that will occur, such as a meeting, important function, etc. and can be set for minutes, days or even years.
Where can you find it?
Out of the box SharePoint lacks this function, but BoostSolutions comes to your rescue with SharePoint Alert Reminder Boost?which gives you these two functions and more.
How do you use them?
Alerts
Think of how embarrassing it would be if you have to meet a client or you have an important meeting or presentation and you think you have the latest version of a document but it turns out that you don’t. Someone on your team made some last minute changes and forgot to tell you. With alerts you can be notified right away if something has changed. From email alerts to SMS alerts you can always be in the know and be ahead of the game.
Reminders
In some organizations security is very important and as such it is often necessary to change passwords every month. But if you are busy and have other work you may forget to change your password making your system more vulnerable to infiltration. A monthly reminder can be set to remind everyone in your organization that it is time to change their passwords.