SharePoint Alerts
Alerts help users stay in touch with changes on a site through email notification. When documents, lists, or items in a list on a server running WSS are created, modified, or deleted, users who have signed up for alerts will receive messages informing them that changes have been made.
The default is that Alerts are Turned On and each user is limited to 500 Alerts. These settings can be changed by navigating to SharePoint Central Administration–>Application Management–>Web Application General Settings.
Pushing Alerts to other users
In WSS v3 and MOSS 2007 it is possible to push alerts to other users through a new text box on the Alert subscription page that allows the user to enter a list of email addresses with each seperated by a semicolon. This is a nice feature that was not present in SharePoint 2003.
The only caveat to this is that only users with the Manage Alerts permission are able to push out Alerts to other users. The standard "Contribute" permission level which is automatically assigned to the out-of-the-box "Members" SharePoint Group DOES NOT give members of that group the Manage Alerts permission. So, it is necessary to add that permission to the Members group in order to enable this feature.
SharePoint Solutions offers an Alert Manager for SharePoint 2007 add-on that augments the alert features of SharePoint 2007. Check it out at http://sharepointsolutions.com/SharePoint-Add-ons/Products/Pages/AlertManager.aspx
