Microsoft Lists, AKA good old SharePoint lists, now have a new rules wizard. This is a very simplified way of creating notification rules, to be notified about certain things happening in the list. You can Create a rule, or click to Manage rules (edit or delete) rules that you’ve already created. Here’s what it looks like, at the top of a list:
Let’s start by clicking Create a rule.
Pick the trigger that you’d like to use, Notify someone when. Here’s some information about each trigger:
A column changes
Pick a column in the list, to be notified about the value in that column changing from anything to anything.
Who does the notification email need to be sent to? All people pickers (“person” columns) in the list will be shown here, to pick from. Would you like the alert to be sent to one of those people? If you’d like to receive the alert yourself every time, select Me.
A column value changes
Create this type of rule if the alert only needs to be sent when a specific column is changed to something specific. For example if you have a status column, and you want an alert when the status is “Completed”. Pick a column, then pick a condition such as is not and then enter a value. The choices available for conditions and values will be different depending on what type of SharePoint column you’ve selected.
In this example, the inventory column is a number column, so I can pick from the following conditions:
In this example, the Category is a choice column, so for the value, it shows the choice options from the column:
A new item is created
Send a notification when any new item is created in the list.
An item is deleted
Send an email each time any item is deleted from the list.
Managing Rules
On the Manage rules screen, you’ll see a list of the rules that you have created. Click any rule to edit it, or use the toggle to switch any rule off.
In the first 20 minutes of the following video, I demonstrated how to create rules, and the difference between rules and alerts. Alerts have been in SharePoint since version 2003, and are slightly different. Neither rules nor alerts allow customization of the notification email, but at least the alert emails are a bit more verbose, with details about the item(s) that triggered the alert.
Oh, and as I mentioned in the first sentence of this post, the new Microsoft Lists *are* SharePoint Lists.