Posted by James | Posted in SharePoint | Posted on 07-12-2009
Another simple one – I was asked today about the meaning of the ‘Search alerts status’ setting on the Search Administration page of SharePoint 2007. Basically, when a user does a search they have the option of saying ‘alert me’ which will tell the system to notify them if any new items are added that meet their search criteria.
Say for example they search for ‘weekly meeting’ and ask to be alerted. Next week when ‘weekly meeting 09′ is added, they should receive a notification. However, if for any reason the index has to be cleared and rebuilt, it’s going to find all the existing items as if they were new and annoy all your users. Therefore if you ever need to rebuild your index, you might want to consider turning off search alerts and then putting them back online once the rebuild is complete.
