Jacob Marks: Stuck in the Past! SharePoint Alerts Pointing to An Old URL After Migration?

I've run into this personally a couple of times and never really documented my own solution so that I had it for myself to reuse. If the URL for your SharePoint Farm ever changes, you're more than likely to start hearing from your users that the alert subscription emails they get still point to the old Farm URL. I've encountered this on SP 2007 and SP 2010 Farms.

As it turns out, each Alert Subscription contains a hard-coded server root URL which is used when the alert email is generated to construct links. I wrote the PowerShell script below to loop through all Web Applications of the server and perform an update on all Alert Subscriptions. I like my scripts that need to be run on all sites to run through my whole farm rather than one site at a time. This script works on both SP 2007 and SP 2010. It will skip the Central Admin Web Application, your SSP, and MySite sites.

$oldrooturl = "https://<url>"

[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint") > $null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Portal") > $null
[System.Reflection.Assembly]::LoadWithPartialName("Microsoft.SharePoint.Security") > $null

$farm = [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPFarm]::Local;
$services = @($farm.Services | where -FilterScript {$_.GetType() -eq [Microsoft.SharePoint.Administration.SPWebService]})

foreach ($service in $services) {
    foreach($app in $service.WebApplications) {
        if ($app.DisplayName.Contains('Central Administration')) {
            continue
        }
        $sites = $app.Sites
        foreach ($site in $sites) {
            if (!$site.ServerRelativeUrl.Contains("ssp/") -and !$site.ServerRelativeUrl.Contains("MySite")) {
                $rooturl = $site.Url.Replace($site.ServerRelativeUrl, '')
                foreach ($web in $site.AllWebs) {
                    $updated = 0
                    $alerts = $web.alerts
                    Write-Host "Number of Alerts in: $($web.url) : $($alerts.count)"
                    if ($alerts.count -ne 0) {
                        foreach ($alert in $alerts) {
                            $alert.Status = [Microsoft.SharePoint.SPAlertStatus]::Off
                            $alert.Update()
                            if ($alert.Properties -ne $null) {
                                $siteUrl = $alert.Properties["siteurl"]
                                if ($siteUrl -ne $null -and $siteUrl.Contains($oldrooturl)) {
                                    # Logic for URL replacement would go here
                                }
                            }
                        }
                    }
                    $web.Dispose()
                }
            }
            $site.Dispose()
        }
    }
}

Update: This PowerShell script is now maintained in my blog-code repository on GitHub. You can find the full script and documentation in the /PowerShell-SP-Alert-Fix directory.

Stuck in the Past! SharePoint Alerts Pointing to An Old URL After Migration?

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