Sharepoint and Email... Am I Missing Something?

Well, It's been quite some time since we went on a 'considerable' sized Sharepoint implementations and honestly speaking I do feel Sharepoint is a GREAT tool when it comes to collaborating within project teams.

One of the BIGGEST limitations I've had to work around however is the inability to send automated emails to users. Alerts though present are very different; because a user needs to sign up for his own alerts and manage them himself. On the other hand forced emails sent to the person in the "Assigned To" column is only a function of the issue list and as far as I realized most of this code is in Camel and not open source so it's pretty ugly to use an issue list for all scenarios just to utilize this email feature.

We've been working around this using multiple approaches - some of which are:

• Have JavaScript functions which are invoked on certain events firing - these functions just link using "mailto://" protocol and works like a charm for basic emails.


• Another idea I had was to have a ASP.NET component that uses Mail APIs to send mail. This could be invoked by web parts and parameters could be passed to it using query string. To generate Meeting Request the component could generate ICS files and then send them to the users.

Any better ideas or approaches, Anyone? Am I missing something here? Does Sharepoint have any out of the box solutions for emails when a list (which is NOT an issue list) is updated?