Building a Custom Notification Center for SharePoint On-Prem – My Thrive 2023 Session

At Thrive Conference 2023, I delivered a session focused on something I’ve been working with for over 15 years: SharePoint On-Premises.
Specifically, I presented how to build a modern, unified Notification Center that brings SharePoint alerts into the modern world—similar to notification models users know from Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, Teams, and other platforms.

This solution is not a workaround or enhancement of “Alert Me.”
It is a complete three-step architecture, built specifically for SharePoint On-Prem environments where modern cloud features are not available.

All content in this post comes directly from the session’s slides.
📑 Slides: https://rasper87.blog/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/spnotificationcenter_thrive2023.pdf

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Why a Custom Notification Center?

SharePoint’s built-in Alert Me feature is simple, but limited:

• Users must manually turn it on
• Notifications arrive only via email or SMS
• Emails are often ignored
• The look & feel is outdated
• No unified overview of activities across the portal

Modern intranets need something more:

• Centralized
• Non-intrusive
• Always visible
• Configurable
• Secure
• And ideally: looks and behaves like notifications in social networks

This is exactly what the Notification Center provides.

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The Solution: A Three-Step Architecture

The Notification Center is built through three integrated layers, each one responsible for its own part of the system.
Together they create a powerful, scalable, fully SharePoint-aware notification platform.

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Step 1 — Detecting New Content and Activity

The first layer focuses on finding new or updated content anywhere inside the SharePoint portal.

How detection works

This component periodically reads data from the SharePoint Content Database, examining:

• Lists and libraries (AllDocs)
• Items and documents (AllUserData)
• Their publishing approval state
• Last modification timestamps (TimeLastModified)
• Content type definitions
• Page layouts
• Metadata stored inside the ColumnSet XML

By comparing timestamps, the system can accurately identify new or updated content and generate internal “events” representing:

• New published pages
• Updated documents
• Newly uploaded files
• Changes to specific content types
• And more…

The same detection logic is applied to SharePoint’s Social DB, capturing:

• New comments
• Discussions
• Social interactions on pages

These events are then prepared for the next phase.

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Step 2 — Synchronizing Content Into the Notification Center Database

Once new activity is detected, the next component synchronizes this information into a dedicated Notification Center database.

This DB contains:

• News (all detected portal-wide updates)
• MyNews (per-user “already read”)
• MyNotification (social comments + metadata)
• MySettings (user-specific preferences)
• Settings (global system configuration)
• SyncData (timestamps of last sync cycles)

The Timer Job

A SharePoint Timer Job runs at scheduled intervals and:

1. Reads the SharePoint Content/Social DB
2. Identifies new changes
3. Stores updates in the Notification Center DB
4. Applies filtering rules (ListIds, PageLayouts, authors, site scope…)
5. Prepares optimized JSON structures for the front-end

The job is fully configurable via:

• web.config (static settings)
• Notification Center DB (dynamic settings)

This middle layer is the “brain” of the system.

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Step 3 — Displaying Notifications Inside SharePoint

The final step is delivering a modern, user-friendly notification experience directly inside the SharePoint interface.

How it is shown

Notifications appear in the SharePoint SuiteNav (top bar), using:

• A custom JavaScript extension (main.js)
• A custom SharePoint Web API endpoint
• Real-time querying of Notification Center DB

What users see

• A clean notification icon with a badge counter
• A dropdown list of unread items
• News items
• Comments
• New content published across the intranet
• Personalization based on user settings
• A social-style feed

The experience is unified, consistent, and always visible—no more email clutter or missed alerts.

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Extensibility & Future Enhancements

The architecture can be extended to cover:

• Document libraries
• Media galleries (videos, photos)
• External systems
• Fine-grained permission trimming
• Mute functions
• Subscription filters
• Notification categories

It can also serve as a complete replacement for “Alert Me”, expanding it with richer, more flexible notification channels.

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Conclusion

This Notification Center architecture is the result of many years of SharePoint experience and understanding the needs of modern intranets.

It brings:

• centralized notifications,
• social-style usability,
• reliable detection of content changes,
• and a clean user experience across the entire SharePoint portal.

It was great to present this solution at Thrive 2023, especially since SharePoint has been a key part of my professional work for more than 15 years.

That’s all folks!

Cheers!
Gašper Rupnik

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