Setting Alerts
You can create alerts for yourself that send an e-mail when one of the following events occurs in Visual Studio Application Lifecycle Management (ALM):
Work items that you created are changed by someone else. For example, you might want to receive an alert whenever a bug that you opened is resolved.
Anything is checked in to version control.
A build quality changes, any build completes, or a build that you defined completes
You receive alerts in e-mail and can obtain additional information about the alert by clicking links in it. You can subscribe to alerts for yourself or for others, and you can receive alert messages in either HTML or plain-text format.
Note
You can create custom alert subscriptions by using Alerts Explorer, a power tool for Visual Studio. This tool is not supported. For more information, see the following page on the Microsoft Web site: Team Foundation Server Power Tools.
Alert subscriptions are stored on the server and organized by team project, and you can add different alerts for each team project that you have permission to access.
You can set alerts from either Team Explorer or Team Web Access.
Important
To support e-mail notifications of project alert settings, your project collections administrator must configure the instance of Team Foundation Server that contains your team project to use an existing SMTP server. For more information, see Configure Email Notifications and Specify the SMTP Server.
In this topic
Adding, Editing, and Removing Alerts
Viewing Work Items from Alerts
Required Permissions
To add or edit alerts, you must be a member of the Readers group or your View project-level information permission must be set to Allow.
To view alerts, you must be a member of the Readers group or your View work items in this node permission must be set to Allow. For more information, see Team Foundation Server Permissions.
Adding, Editing, and Removing Alerts
To add alerts
Perform one of the following actions:
In Team Web Access, click Settings, point to Team Project, and then click Alerts.
In Team Explorer, right-click your team project node, and then click Project Alerts.
Select the check box next to each alert that you want to receive.
For each alert, in the Send to column, add the e-mail addresses of the team members who should receive the alert.
You can use a distribution list to simplify managing recipients when team members are added or removed.
For each alert, in the Format column, select HTML or Plain text for the type of e-mail message to be sent.
Click OK to save your alerts for the selected team project.
To edit or remove alerts
Perform one of the following actions:
In Team Web Access, click Settings, point to Team Project, and then click Alerts.
In Team Explorer, right-click your team project node, and then click Project Alerts.
For each type of alert, you can change the following:
Select or clear the check box to turn the alert on or off.
All e-mail addresses are removed for an alert whose check box is cleared.
In the Send to column, type the e-mail addresses, separated by semi-colons, of the people you want to receive each type of alert.
In the Format column, specify the format of the e-mail messages for each type of alert.
Click OK to save your changes.
Viewing Work Items from Alerts
To view work item alerts from e-mail
In the e-mail message that contains the alert, click the link to display more information.
Note
To open links in an alert e-mail, you might need permissions to connect to the team project.