Are alerts  not working? ...or are you expecting your alert settings in WSS
2.0 to be automatically migrated when you upgrade  to WSS 3.0?

I don't believe the WSS 3.0 upgrade process migrates your WSS 2.0 alerts
settings.

We haven't upgraded yet, so we don't know if the alerts  will work  or
not. It sounds like old and new alerts may not work. If it's just
the old ones, I have no problem w/ that since I can easily recreate
them for myself and others. My concern is if alerts simply don't
work in certain circumstances for whatever reason.

Our hosting  provider simply warned that alerts sometimes do not work
in 3.0. It sounds like they are referring to newly created alerts
because they talk about getting the initial "alert created
successfully" email message but not getting the subsequent messages
when alerts should fire (when specified changes are made that should
trigger the alerts).

I ask about this being specific  to upgrading because I was using a
new 3.0 trial site  by the same hosting company, and the alerts
worked just fine.

So confused. The hosting company  said that Microsoft is aware of
the problem but has yet to offer a solution.

Has anyone upgraded and had no problems w/ alerts? I suppose there
are so many possible scenarios that this is going to be impossible
to pinpoint.

I'm not aware of any general WSS 3.0 issues with alerts.

Look here. Go through some of the users that are not receiving the
alerts profiles and ensure that a work  email address is showing up.
If they dont have an email address in there that is most likely your
problem.
http://servername/_layouts/people.aspx?
MembershipGroupId=0&FilterField1=ContentType&FilterValue1=Person

I wrote a blog post about a similar problem in SPS 2003 but have yet
to test the same scenario within MOSS.
sharepointinsight.com/.../Post.aspx?ID=3

If this is the case let me know and I will create  a part 2 as
applies to MOSS.

WSS v3 alerts  do not show properly  in Outlook 2007 when you are running
Exchange. I believe that there is a hotfix for Exchange that fixes this
problem.

Had a similar problem after performing a wss  v2 to wss v3 upgrade  a few
weeks ago and the fix  ended up being that outgoing e-mail settings were not
upgraded properly. So after re-updating the outgoing mail settings (trying
by both DNS and IP address) they began to work  again.

Just something to consider checking.

I don't have access to check on this, but I'll send it to the
hosting company  to see if it fixes the problem they described.

I would have thought alerts  would as they are merely emails

However, tasks don't display properly  (edit task) button in office 2k7 when
running exch2k3 and there's a hotfix for that

This is because exch2k3 can't create  the x- field types for mapi

It makes you wonder if it also therefore uses these field types for alerts ?

We are actually using Outlook 2003. Our company  hasn't upgraded
anything internally yet. The only upgrade  we were trying was our
externally-hosted wss  site for our volunteers. So the alerts  I'm
supposed to receive are coming through Outlook 2003, not 2007.

I talked to the hosting  company today, and they told me that they
don't know what causes the problem, why it happens sometimes and not
others, nor when Microsoft will have a fix. They simply
said "Microsoft is aware of the problem." When I asked if it were
directly related to the upgrade/migrate process, the guy said he
didn't think so because he had problems w/ alerts on his 3.0 site
created from scratch.

I'm just sad because I *really* wanted to upgrade, and it looks like
we'll have to stay in 2.0 until there's a solution for the alert
problem. No offense to 2.0, but who wants lemons when lemonade seems
to be within reach?

I'll continue to research this and plan to annoy the hosting company
by sending them everything I can find on the subject. Wish me luck!

I'm not aware of any problems displaying WSS v3 alerts  in Outlook 2003.
Please provide details  about the problem situation.

It doesn't seem to be a problem w/ "viewing" the
alerts in Outlook 2003 as it is receiving the alerts  at all. I've
checked junk mail folders to see if the alerts are being trapped
there, but no such luck.

The problems seem random. Sometimes pre-existing alerts (pre-
upgrade) work, sometimes they don't. Sometimes new alerts work,
sometimes they don't. Whenever we create  new alerts, we always get
that initial "alert successfully created" message, but that's the
only consistency we're getting.

I'm just trying to see who out there has had problems with alerts
(or, for that matter, who has successfully upgraded from 2.0 w/out
any trouble w/ any alerts). The hosting  company makes it sound like
there's nothing they can do until Microsoft produces a fix  for the
problem. I'm wondering if that's it or if they configured something
wrong and that's why alerts aren't functioning properly. If it's the
latter, I need them to get off their butts and start testing every
scenario until the problem has been resolved. :P This isn't exactly
a tiny inconvenience- alerts will make or break our decision to move
to 3.0. Our users HAVE to have alerts.

I'm just having trouble believing this is a "Microsoft problem." If
it were, I think they'd be scrambling to fix it and they'd have info
posted on their site  about it. I'm having trouble finding any info
about alert problems in 3.0.

Its a bit of a bizzare answer from your hosting  company I've got to say.

Now it is true that alerts  are known to be 'fragile' and there are a number of things that can stop them working  - but there is lots of information out there on how to get them up and running again. Including (blatant plug) my own troubleshooting guide.

sharepointalert.info/.../

re: Opening alerts in Outlook.
I know this isn't your question but its been brought up a number of times in the thread - there IS a problem with opening alerts if your server is Exchange 2003 and your client is Outlook 2007 AND you are running cached exchange mode
sharepointalert.info/.../