All of our customers are aware of the basic capabilities of Smart Alert Pro in sending alerts based on events in their list or document library, like:

• Item Added
• Item Modified
• Item Deleted
• File Checked In / Out - in Document library

But when it comes to timer-based alerts, there is a bit of confusion about their definition and the outcome. 

Timer-based alerts are possible to create by choosing the According To Date Column option in What To Send.

At this point we will be able to choose between a timing During a period around the Date column value or a timing with Exact Difference from the Date column value

Or

The second option allows us to define a repetition for this alert, after the original has fired.

The repetition can be defined every N amount of minutes / hours / days / weeks / months / years  for M times.

One common usage for this setting would be to repeat the alert attempt until certain condition is met, for Example: Approval status became Approved. We are able to achieve that by setting the alert to repeat for several times every day and add a condition that will cause the alert to be fired only when Approval Status is Approved.

We might want another alert to continue sending emails every day, until a task is completed. In this case we will define it to repeat daily and add a condition on Task Status column not be equal to Completed.

Alerts According to date in column During - these alerts will be sent exactly once in the selected range of dates around the Date column value. 

1. The ranges are: Today, Tomorrow or This week
   Some Examples:
   During Today - alert will be sent once during the day of the Date column
   
   Date = 03/09/2015 11:00AM - alert is sent during the hour selected in the Date column
   Date = 03/09/2015 - alert will be sent at midnight of the date selected
   
   During Tomorrow - the alert will fire a day before the day in the Date column
   
   During This Week - the alert will be sent on the first day of the week of the Date column value
   
   
2. Alerts According to date in column By Offset - these alerts will be sent on a specific offset from the date/time specified in the selected Date column. Minimum Offset is 30 minutes.
   
   Some Examples:
   Date = 03/10/2015, Offset = 1 Days after - the alert will be set on midnight of 03/11/2015

Some Important notes about timer-based alerts:

• Alerts will not be sent retroactively on items that already passed the time condition, only on items where the date definition has not happened yet.
• When Date column is defined not to show the time part, the time will always be midnight.