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I am trying to figure out why SharePoint does not send notifications every once in a while. I seem to find myself restarting the "Windows SharePoint Services Timer" on the server and then all of a sudden the notifications work.

I can't check the logs because it only keeps the last 10 minutes and usually the problem is discovered out of the blue.

When I go to Central Administrations > Operations > Timer job status - the "Immediate Alerts" job status was "Initalizing." After restarting the service it was changed to Succeeded. Is this a known bug in SP?

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  • Hi and welcome to the SP.SE community! I've heard of issues like this before caused by anti-virus software. Do you have any AV running on the server? Also which version of SP are you using? – thanby Jan 23 '14 at 19:33
  • I have Vipre Antivirus 4.0.3907 running and it is SP 2007. Do you think the issue is caused when the AV starts scanning? – John Green Jan 23 '14 at 19:56
  • You can check the Event Log on the server(s). You don't explicitly state. Is this a custom-coded SP Timer Job Definition, or an OoB definition? At least, convince your SP admin(s) that you need a lot more than 10 minutes worth of logs!! You could also consider setting the ULS logging threshold to Verbose during the troubleshooting. – Eccentropy Jan 23 '14 at 21:46
  • It is an OoB definition. I will talk to them. The issue just happened again and I had to restart the timer service and then all the updates just came in once. I see the following in the event viewer: Error loading and running event receiver Microsoft.SharePoint.ApplicationTemplates.KnowledgeBaseEventHandler in KnowledgeBaseEventHandler, Version=12.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=**************. Additional information is below. : Object reference not set to an instance of an object. For more information, see Help and Support Center at go.microsoft.com/fwlink/events.asp. – John Green Jan 24 '14 at 18:15
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Typically the AV interference with alert emails is because the AV ties up certain ports on the host machine itself. It can also be the result of the SharePoint server being a Vmware machine or having certain Vmware tools installed. I believe this KB article should fix the issue, as I have seen other AV providers (not Vipre specifically, but could be the same cause) reference it:

Microsoft KB article

Edit: The basic steps in the article are as follows.

Change the winsock provider order with the sporder.exe tool. Make sure the MSAFD Tcpip [TCP/IP] is placed above any UDP providers. sporder.exe is a GUI tool part of the windows platform SDK http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms740483(VS.85).aspx

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  • Interesting points with the AV and ports being tied up. As I have stated in my original statement - I already restarted the service like it says to do so on the KB. I am just trying to figure out what causes this? It just happens randomly and out of nowhere SP won't send an update when making a change or creating a new page. After restarting the service - it sends a mass alerts of all the changes that have been made. – John Green Jan 23 '14 at 20:52
  • I noticed in Central Administration > Operations > Antivirus - it has the "Scan documents on upload" checked. The time out is 300 secs and the number of antivirus thread is 5 threads. – John Green Jan 23 '14 at 20:56
  • Hm the article describes some steps other than restarting the service. See my edit above for the basics. I'm not aware of the document scanning causing any issues, but you can always just try disabling it and seeing if the problem occurs again. However if this is a public-facing site you may want to leave that enabled, unless you have other security measures in place. – thanby Jan 23 '14 at 21:02
  • I am not sure what it is exactly asking me to do for that KB. I see the Vipre is set to daily scan at 12 AM midnight and I experienced this issue around 6PM. – John Green Jan 23 '14 at 21:31

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