InfoPath Dev

Hello

I took over Sharepoint admin (and hence InfoPath forms) as an extra job in my company a few months ago.

I'd never played with either until that point but everything has been fairly straightforward.....until now!

We use Sharepoint 2003. I've been asked if I can set up an alert email when a specified date, set in the date picker, has been reached.

I've searched the forum but maybe I'm not asking the right question (since I'm not really sure how to ask it!).

I also realise that SharePoint 2003 is quite restricted in what can be done compared to MOSS 2007, So I'd be grateful if someone could confirm this can be done and how difficult it would be?

Thanks in advance, Steve

Hi Steve,

To trigger SharePoint alerts based on a value in your form's date field you will have to write code. Qdabra sells a Web service (DBXL) that includes support for data-driven notifications so that you can mark forms overdue if they are beyond a certain date, but the triggers are based on when the form's assignment or workflow state changes, not based on a custom value in the form. We have a future feature in our list to add customized trigger dates, but it hasn't been a widely requested feature to date.

In the meantime, I recommend a workaround. Promote your date field so that it shows up as a column in SharePoint. Then, create a custom view in SharePoint marked "overdue documents" and set it to sort based on date or filter based on date. SharePoint may have some special filter (like the [me] operator) for today's date, but I don't know about it so you'll have to investigate. If it doesn't have that, you can still show the most overdue documents on top, or have a hardcoded date that you update manually. Not as pretty as the solution you are looking for, but doesn't involve much work to set up....

Hope this was helpful,

 Thanks a lot, Patrick.

That's very helpful. I can't try it until I'm at work tomorrow, but I'll investigate the options in SharePoint as you suggested!

Following on from what Patrick mentioned re: promoting the field to the list

You can use [Today] in filters for the current date so you can have a filter of Due Date <= [Today]

You can also formula like Due Date >= [Today] AND Due Date <= [Today]+7 for anything due in the next 7 days.

Actually - I just noticed that you're using 2003, so you can't use [Today]+x in the filters but you can do the same thing by turning the problem on its head. http://blog.pentalogic.net/2008/10/advanced-sharepoint-view-and-filters/

re: email alerts - I don't think you're going to be able to do this OOTB.

This post give several options about how to do this, some are 2007 only (such as workflow) but some like the idea of the batch job to search through the list would work in 2003.

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/529045/dated-reminders-in-sharepoint-calendars

There are also several commercial products mentioned that do this but I believe only one will work on 2003 and 2007. (Disclaimer - its my own companies product) http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-reminder.aspx

Good luck!....Ryan

 Thanks for the extra info, Ryan. I'll definitely have to go the "workaround" route with this as  a commercial solution would be out of the qustion - even though I'm working for one of the biggest IT companies in the world on possibly the biggest IT contract in the UK at the moment! Even if the management of my department agreed to spend money on something, it would probably take a year before anything was put in place  - and being a contractor I have zero "pull" when it comes to getting things done :-(

Anyway, thanks again. I'm looking forward to playing with this some more now I've got a bit more of an idea what I'm dealing with. :-)