Route SharePoint Email from non-prod farms to mail enabled group or SP list.

Why do we need to route emails coming from SharePoint DEV & TEST farms to mail enabled group or SP list. This includes both Nintex and SharePoint alert mails.

 Where this can be useful:

• When carrying out testing for SharePoint alerts or Nintex workflows to confirm delivery of emails to users – this email routing will help validate this.
• When we move site collections to non-prod farms from PROD accidental notifications to users will not occur.
• Preventing emails reaching a larger audience sent mistakenly by a workflow or SharePoint alerts.
• Gauging which users are active on non-prod site collections and notify them when we plan to implement changes to DEV and TEST SharePoint environment.

Issues this may cause:

• Any power user/user trying to test something in non-prod will not receive emails, they will have to contact SharePoint Support for confirmation of emails or SharePoint support can forward that email to the user.
• You need to provide “from address” to an SMTP server to the exchange admin and he can setup a rule to route these to a newly created mail enabled group also mention which group/list need to be part of these mail enabled group to receive emails.

From Address	mail enabled group	Members of the group
DEV FARM: SP2010Dev@contoso.com	SharePoint Dev Alerts	Sharepoint.Support@contoso.com
DEV Nintex: SP2010Dev@contoso.com
TST Farm: SP2010Test@contoso.com	SharePoint Test Alerts	Sharepoint.Support@contoso.com
TST Nintex: SP2010Test@contoso.com

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“Alert Me” Missing in the SharePoint Ribbon

These is a strange issue that “Alert Me” button Missing in the SharePoint Ribbon but only for a few site collections and for one complete web application. Check the following paths in central administration.

• Central Admin –> Systems settings –>E-Mail and Text messages –> Configure outgoing email settings

• Also make sure the web application outgoing email settings are filled as well.

But in this case some web applications are showing “Alert Me” button and this I vaguely remembered something with STSADM commands, and this was suggested by me to the customer to disable alerts for any restored databases from prod to test to stop the site collection from sending alerts to users.

There is a STSADM property which is by default enabled and we can turn the property to false for each site collection or to a complete web application.

#To disable alerts, use the following syntax:
stsadm -o setproperty -url http://server_name -pn alerts-enabled -pv false

#To view the setting for the alerts-enabled property, use the following syntax:

stsadm -o getproperty -url http://server_name -pn alerts-enabled

PS C:> stsadm -o getproperty -url http://teams.contoso.com -pn alerts-enabled

<Property Exist="Yes" Value="no" />

PS C:> stsadm -o setproperty -url http://teams.contoso.com -pn alerts-enabled -pv true

Operation completed successfully.

The following documentation will be helpful to start on this: Here

At the time of this writing these details applies to SharePoint 2010.

 

tags: SharePoint 2010, powershell, SharePoint Alerts, STSADM