TechNucleus

Recently one of our Business user requested to use “Custom Alerts on old SharePoint” even though we are in the process of upgrading to SharePoint 2013.

Anyway I found a nice article to implement “Custom Alert Templates” here. This is what I did, in simple steps.

• Created a copy of “AlertTemplates.xml” found in 12 hive\Templates\XML
• Created a new “AlertTemplate” section with in the XML and gave the unique name (simply copy the GeneraicList and renamed the Name)
• Made couple of changes to Styles and layout (adding new tables to show Company logo)
• Ran the STSADM command to update the template
• Create a  small tool in VS to update the template name to specific list
• Reset the IIS
• Reset the SharePoint Timer Service

Even though I followed same as mentioned in the article, still alert emails are defaulting to the old template no matter what i did (Even I made exact changes to generic list section to see at least its falling into that)

After spending couple of days, I removed existing alerts on the list and created new one. Now i see the emails with update template.

I found out that, if we already have alerts setup on the list before updates, even you change the list to use different template (through code), SharePoint still sends alert emails using the template that was assigned to the list at the time of Alert setup.

Lesson learned !!!