Hi Peter,
Many things changed in PI/PO 7.31, especially for the alerting part.
Please have a look at this nice blog: http://scn.sap.com/community/pi-and-soa-middleware/blog/2012/03/25/michals-pi-tips-component-based-message-alerting
I used that one as a starting point.
Next to that, you can also use PI Monitoring, within SAP Solution Manager, as an alert consumer. Also very nice and very useful.
Kind regards,
Dimitri