Developing a replacement "Alert Me"-function

Question

I'm pretty new to sharepoint-development, so I thought I'd check real quick with the gurus in here.

I've been given the task of building a replacement for the built-in Alert Me feature. The main reason for this is to allow for alerting members of a role with a forms authenticated sharepoint.

This is where you guys come in. I know you can build an immediate Alert Me function by creating list item event receivers.

However, if I wanted to create the summary-feature (daily/weekly notifications) - what would be the best way to go about this?

With very limited knowledge, all I could think of was to create a Windows Service, which checks daily for changes to the lists, and sends notifications accordingly, in one summarized email.

Would I be wrong to assume that this is, if not the best/only way to do it, at least one way of doing it?

And could I use the SPChangeCollection to accumulate the changes?

thanks in advance :)

Answer 1

Think you'd want to look at creating custom Job Definitions, as this is what is used in the built in Alert Me functionality.