Alerts may be intended for a personal or public audience:
Personal alerts are created by a user to alert that individual about the status of a measure for which they are responsible. Personal alerts apply to only that user, and cannot be accessed by anyone else.
Public alerts function can be created by administrators only. Public alerts work in the same way as a personal alerts, but can be subscribed to by other users, or used as a template to generate new alerts that have common attributes. Only administrators can create, modify or delete public alerts.
You can inherit attributes from both public and personal alerts. When you inherit attributes from a public alert, the public alert is effectively being used as a template. When you make changes to a pubic alert that was used as a template, those changes are reflected in all alerts created based on the public alert.