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SharePoint Timesheets – What are your options? Part 1: Native Commercial Solutions

Date:October 24th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint TeamTime, SharePoint Timesheets Comments:1 ;

Regular readers of this blog will know that over the past few months we have been doing some work on SharePoint Timesheets.A clock on a laptop

As a part of this we have spent quite a bit of time looking at what the available options are for people wanting manage timesheets in SharePoint, and in the spirit of social sharing we thought we would give you a run down on what we have found.

I want to stress here that we haven’t tested all of these timesheet applications. We’re not aiming to offer any kind of recommendations here, simply a handy run down of what’s available: A brief summary of each product in the publishers own words, and an idea of pricing where possible.

We are going to look at the options in 3 categories:

  • Native Commercial SharePoint Timesheets: Timesheet applications fully built and deployed within SharePoint (commercially produced and supported).
  • Plug-In Commercial SharePoint Timesheets: External applications that ‘plug in’ to SharePoint, rather than being fully integrated; making them accessible through your SharePoint Portal (commercially produced and supported).
  • Free SharePoint Timesheets: Free to use, but lacking a commercial standard of support.

Native Commercial SharePoint Timesheets

Today we are starting with Commercial Native SharePoint Timesheets, with the other 2 categories in separate posts over the coming few days. When we finish there will also be a PDF covering all the options, which you will be able to download for reference.

In this category we are looking at applications which are built in SharePoint and available commercially (i.e. you are going to have to pay for them).

If SharePoint is key to your IT infrastructure then the advantages of having a “native” SharePoint Timesheet application are easy to see.  You are leveraging your existing IT investment, allowing people to record time in the familiar SharePoint interface and storing your data in the central SharePoint data repository.

SPTimesheet (1st Thinking)

Product Homepage

SPTimesheet is the first 100% SharePoint based time tracking management solution. With SPTimesheet you are able to fully leverage your existing investment in SharePoint while benefiting from a feature rich powerful time tracking solution.

Pricing is per user and starts at $1000 for 20 users.

Time Management (EPM Live)

Product Homepage

Understand the full effort associated with the execution of any work item. Reduce organization costs by re-aligning employees to improve deliverables and improve employee productivity and performance. Understand historical data to create precise future estimates and quotations.

This is part of the EPM ‘Work Engine’ which “expands the capabilities of SharePoint with a whole raft of common business applications for you to pick and choose from”.

Pricing – is not clear from the website, however this is firmly positioned as an Enterprise solution, which may give some clue as to where pricing is likely to fall.

Timetracking for SharePoint 2010 (NowShare)

Product Homepage

Our application “TimeTracking for SharePoint 2010” offers you a professional time tracking tool. It simplifies the time registration on different tasks or projects, also with your iPhone while travelling. The instantaneous commenting simplifies the documentation of the accomplished tasks.

Pricing starts from $1600 for a 10 user license.

SharePoint TeamTime (Pentalogic Technology)

Product Homepage

This is of course our own offering:

A simple SharePoint time tracking application.  Time is entered through a punch card or a traditional grid. The Team Dashboard shows what everyone is working on now, a breakdown of work this week and timesheets awaiting approval. Powerful reporting and analysis with Export to Excel gives an overview of the big picture. All in a ready-to-use SharePoint site.

Pricing – $995 per server.

That rounds off the commercial SharePoint timesheet applications.  If you know of one we’ve missed, please share!

In our next post we will be looking at Plug-In commercial TimeSheet solutions.

SharePoint Questions: MSDN versus Stack Exchange

Date:October 17th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , , ,
Category: Community, General Comments:7 ;

SharePoint is an enormous heaving behemoth of machinery; full of spinning cogs, churning engines, and peculiar dials. We’ve all worked with parts of it, but not even those that created it understand all of its inner workings.

So where do we go when the wheel that goes ‘whir’ is going ‘squeakity’? Or when we’re having trouble bolting on some shiny new levers? What we need is an expert in that area.

Two likely candidates for finding yourself an expert are:

  • The MSDN SharePoint forums (MSDN): A SharePoint specific branch of the MSDN forums; a staple of the Microsoft Support offering for the past 7 years
  • SharePoint Stack Exchange (SPSE): A community-created sister site to Stack Overflow, whose rebirth into the new Stack Exchange engine (which I’ve blogged about previously) culminated in a re-launch on its 2 year anniversary last month

All about Questions and Answers

So where does everyone else go to post their questions? A quick glance at the number of questions on each in the last 24 hours* is quite revealing:

MSDNvSPSE questions

The MSDN forums have had over 10 times the amount of questions in the same times period, across its various forums. SPSE is clearly the underdog in terms of its volume of questions, and certainly in terms of traffic.

This is largely unsurprising, as most people will automatically go to Microsoft with their questions, and the MSDN forums are a long-standing staple of the Microsoft support process.

What’s more surprising, is the percentage of questions that are actually answered**:

MSDNvSPSE Answered That’s a 64% answer rate on MSDN and a notably higher rate of 91% on SPSE. So why is there such a big difference? This boils down to two factors:

  • The quality of the questions
  • The quality of the answers

Question quality

Part of the difference in answer rate (and question quantity) is the different motivations behind the sites. MSDN’s goal is to help an individual person with their problem, whereas SPSE is built on Stack Exchange’s ethos of building a definitive FAQ on the subject; making it more likely you’ll find an answer to your question without even asking it.

When it comes to asking a question there’s unfortunately very few ways to improve how someone goes about it (short of Internet-based mind control rays). So the question quality is largely determined by how it is handled after it has been posted. This brings us to Moderation:

MSDNvSPSE modsThe mysterious fade effect isn’t entirely because I just found the ‘Gradient fill’ button; the MSDN SharePoint forums are moderated by the mysterious and unquantifiable force of Microsoft Support, and an unknown number of community moderators with their own pockets of influence.

In contrast, SPSE is moderated by three recognised members of the community. Much like MSDN’s Forum Issues forum, SPSE has Meta for contacting them, but it also has a chat room that can be used for asking questions about questions.

The final and most important effect on question quality is us (the community). Here are the ways we get involved in this process:

MSDN SPSE
Editing Moderators only Anyone can suggest an edit
High reputation users can approve suggestions
Reporting Anyone can Report Abuse As MSDN, with additional dedicated Review reports and achievements
High reputation users can close questions

This additional community contribution on SPSE has a noticeable effect on the quality of questions. Unfortunately this can lead to a much higher maintenance role for Moderators, which may not translate well to MSDN’s moderation processes.

Answer quality

The biggest factor in answer quality is of course the answerer: The quantity of experts on a site that may know about the problematic area, and the amount of everyday people who may have suffered the same problems in the past.

In terms of quantity, both sites have roughly the same number of responses (~3.5 per question***). Approximately 1.6 of these being proposed answers on SPSE; unfortunately the MSDN proposed answer rate isn’t available (except through checking each one of the 163K questions manually).

An important step is luring and identifying the experts, while also rewarding the everyday contributor:

  MSDN SPSE
Points Recognition points Reputation
Awards Achievements Badges
Incentives MVP and MCC programs Increased site privileges

Although very similar in other respects, the two sites use very different incentive methods. The prestigious MVP award and more commonplace MCC award are highly sought-after by experts (especially aspiring ones), and draw many people to the MSDN forums in search of widely-acknowledged recognition.

The incentives on SPSE take a slightly more understated route: As your reputation increases you become more trusted by the community, and hence the site. This increase in trust gives high-reputation users comparable abilities to moderators, purposefully blurring the boundaries.

Another important step is to make it easy for experts to find questions about their area of expertise. MSDN has 21 forums, each dedicated to a category of SharePoint. Between these forums there is fair bit of overlap, and moving misplaced posts is a continuous battle.

In SPSE the questions are all bundled together on a single page. While this would seem chaotic, the tag system thankfully mitigates most confusion, while allowing more flexibility. However, tags are even more open to misunderstanding and misuse than MSDN’s separate forums, leading to the addition of the ability for medium-reputation users to retag questions.

Which site is best?

As a person with a question, the above pie charts would seem to make it clear that SPSE is the best choice. However, it’s worth mentioning that the comparison is not as straightforward as it seems. Both sites have slightly different means of showing questions as answered, and SPSE has a built-in reputation incentive for marking your question as answered (possibly skewing the results).

As an expert, MSDN is like seeking your fortune in the Big City; you might see your name up in lights, maybe just make an honest living, or you might quietly disappear into anonymity. SPSE is more like staying in your home town; the rewards aren’t as dazzling, but they are more certain and (depending on your community-mindedness) possibly more satisfying.

So what’s the conclusion? Post on both of course! There’s no law against cross-posting questions on both sites, and experts are welcome wherever they go. In time you may find you prefer one or the other (which is likely to be a personal choice) but at least now you know what to expect from each.

 

*SPSE numbers from Area51 (only overall total available), MSDN posts were manually counted for the 24 hour period prior to 11:00 13/10/11.

**SPSE numbers from Area51, MSDN answered rate based on sum of forum totals on the front page as of 11:00 13/10/11.

***SPSE numbers are from the Data Explorer (sum of comments and answers), MSDN response rate based on sum of forum totals on the front page as of 11:00 13/10/11.

PivotPoint for SharePoint – New version Released v2.1.5

Date:August 31st, 2011 Author: Tags:
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

Only last month we launched PivotPoint v2, which added charting and drill down to this popular SharePoint tool.

Now we are releasing v2.1.5 which has some pretty nifty new features added as a result of your feedback on v2.

Axis Minimum

You pointed out that when looking at a chart, if all of your values are bunched between say 90 and 100, viewing them on an axis that runs from 1 to 100 doesn’t make things all that easy to read.

So the new Axis Minimum option lets you choose where your axis starts (in the example above this would be 90) making charts that much easier to read.

Split Multiple Values

In PivotPoint v2 we had disabled the option of using a multi-choice column. We felt that in most circumstances this simply didn’t make sense as an option within a Pivot Chart or Table.  But you disagreed, so we put the option to work with multi-choice fields back in and we think we have come up with a way of making it more usable.
So for example, take a simple task list – where as you can see the “Present Proposal” task is assigned to multiple people – Barry and Fred.

In your Pivot Table or chart you can choose to either treat your multi-choice record as a single record, effectively creating a new category in the Pivot Table, like this:

Or you can choose to split the multi-choice record between all the choice categories (in this case people) in it, like this:

If you choose to split multiple choice records between their multiple parts the full value of the record is allocated to each of its choices.

This brings PivotPoint in to line with the way that SharePoint Planner works, so will be especially useful for people who use dashboards with both Planner and PivotPoint deployed, and will also be very useful for our Vacation Planner users – watch this space for an update on how this is going to help you.

Allow Custom Field Types

Custom fields can cause all sorts of trouble, so previously we had simply outlawed them in PivotPoint in an effort to try and keep things simple.  However quite a few of you have said you wanted to be able to use custom fields, so we have now allowed you to enable this feature.

Be warned though, not all types of custom field will work correctly in PivotPoint (depending on their design) and we won’t be able to provide support on 3rd party custom fields.

Full information on all of these changes can be found in the PivotPoint manual.

Getting the Latest Version

PivotPoint v2.1.5 is free to download for anyone who has previously purchased PivotPoint v2, or PivotPoint v1 plus Premium Support.

Existing customers can download the latest version here.  The new version can be installed directly over the top of the old, and you will retain all of your existing web part settings.

For those of you using PivotPoint on a 30 day free trial, you can upgrade to the new version here, your trial will continue and you will retain any web parts you have set up already.

We hope you find these new features useful and we would love to hear your feedback on them, or any other aspects of PivotPoint v2.

SharePoint Planner – New Version Release, every minute counts!

Date:August 25th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Planner Comments:0 ;

We were recently contacted by a customer who was going to be responsible for organizing a visit from a Very, Very important person. The visit would only last a couple of hours, but would involve many people and needed to be planned down to the minute.

The client wanted an easy to use graphical representation of the project, in SharePoint, for everyone to refer to and update as the event progressed.

Let’s take a look at how the project might have looked in an out of the box calendar view:

Hmmm, don’t think that’s really giving us the kind of info we need.  We have 7 items here, scheduled over a 3 hour period from 12 noon to 3pm, items fall in to different categories and are assigned to different people.  We’re not really getting that from this view are we?

Actually, the view is quite misleading.  The first event “Close Streets to Traffic” looks as though it lasts for one hour from 12.00 to 13.00 right? Wrong, this is actually a 40 minute event, starting at 12 and finishing at 12.40.  This may not seem like a big deal but there are times when this kind of accuracy really matters – it’s easy to see how running 20 minutes late at a VIP event could lead to VIP tantrums!

So how about the out of the box Gantt Chart? OK, so we have access to a little more info on who is doing what, but now we can see nothing at all on timings.

We can zoom though, and this is what we get when we do maximum zoom.

Well it’s certainly an improvement, but it’s not great is it?  We are on maximum zoom here are it’s still quite difficult to see the detail of what’s happening when.

We thought we could do better.  So we added to SharePoint Planner the ability to set timescales to 10 or 15 minutes.  We think this gives a much clearer view for fast moving projects like this. Either in the classic Gantt view, most usually used for projects: Or in a category view for exactly what each of your team members should be doing at any one time:

The new 10 and 15 minute scheduling options allow you to schedule events more accurately and deploy resources more effectively.

This is a new feature in Planner version 2.6.6, so if you are using an older version of the software it would be worth upgrading now.

Or if you don’t yet use SharePoint Planner why not give it a try today with 30 day free trial?

SharePoint Highlighter – color coding date ranges based on [Today]

Date:August 17th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, Highlighter, SharePoint Ideas Comments:2 ;

It is sooo much easier to keep on top of your tasks if you can see at a glance what is due when.

Tasks Highlighted by due date

 

It’s easy to add this color coding to your SharePoint lists with SharePoint Highlighter in just a few clicks, but setting up the rules correctly is a bit of a mind-bender, so in this post we are going to show you how.

So above you can see:

  • Tasks due in less than 7 days highlighted in orange
  • Tasks due in 7-14 days highlighted in yellow.
  • Tasks due in more than 14 days highlighted in green.

So first add a Highlighter column to your list:

http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-products/highlighter/h-manual/h-configuration

Give it a name – I’ve called mine “Due When”.

From the 3 Highlighting Styles choose Highlighting, and choose to Highlight Rows, though this method would work equally well with icons or cell highlighting.

As we are highlighting the whole row we don’t really need to see the actual Highlighter column, so choose to put this to the right of the view, out of the way.

If we were using Auto Setup Rules we would now base the Highlighter column on your Due Date column – this is where it would get its information from.  But what we want to do is a bit too complex for the Auto Setup, so you can leave this box blank and go straight to to the Advanced Rules – click Add Custom.

Scary!  Not really, we just need to think logically about when we are trying to achieve.

The main thing you need to remember is that Highlighter will apply the first rule it finds that is true.  Once it has applied one rule to a row, it will ignore all other rules.

So to get the Highlighting shown above we need this setup:

So, when Highlighter checks the list, first it checks to see if the item’s due date is less than 7 days after today, if it is Highlighter colors the row orange and moves on to check the next list item.  If this rule isn’t met Highlighter checks to see whether the item’s due date is less than 14 days after today, and so on.

It’s all a matter of getting your rules in the right order.  So for example, if we change the order of the rules so the 14 day rule comes first, like this:

This is what happens to the list:

As you can see we have lost our orange highlighting for items that are “Due in Less than 7 days”.  Because Due in less than 14 days is now at the top of our list of rules this is what Highlighter is checking for first, so it is missing the more urgent items.

It’s all about getting your rules in the right order, and as you can see, Highlighter gives you the ability to move items up and down the list with the up/down arrows, or insert or delete a rule at any point.

I hope this has helped to make sense of the advanced rules, and if you have any scenarios that you would like us to work through for you then we would love to hear from you.

Show Actual v Target Performance in SharePoint with PivotPoint web part.

Date:August 3rd, 2011 Author: Tags: , ,
Category: General Comments:0 ;

So we all like to know how we are doing – hitting our targets, meeting our KPI’s, staying within our budgets, running out of vacation days.

If you record things like this in SharePoint lists you would hope it would be easy enough to see how your actual performance compares to your targets, budgets or KPI’s.

Well for those of you who have Enterprise  and PerformancePoint it is possible – if not exactly a walk in the park –  but for the rest of us this can be a tricky task.   You need to find a way of bringing together 2 different sets of data:

  • a Target or KPI – which is one item of data, which stays constant – no one likes a moving target do they?
  • and an “Actual” figure which is the sum of a number of list items – sales, purchases, leave bookings, whatever, and which will clearly change as list items are added and changed.

So if we were looking to compare Target and Actual sales for July, as in the chart above, the date would loook like this.  A list of sales items, which will grow as the month progresses, producing a changing Actual total,  and one Target item, which will stay the same throughout the month.

These two data sets would generally live in separate lists.  The way many KPI columns work is by getting you to manually enter – and manually update – your changing Actual total into your Target list.  Not great, as you never get to see how the situation is changing until you have done your manual update.

In a workaround for one of our PivotPoint customers we have turned this on method on its head – entering the static “Target” into the ~Actuals list (in this example the sales list) to allow you to produce a chart or table with our PivotPoint web part, which will show actuals vs targets and is updated as your actual data changes, without the need for manual intervention.

So here’s how.

Add a new column to your list.  Make it a choice column with the choices as “Actual” and “Target”.  Have it default to actual, as this is what the vast majority of items are going to be.

Then we simply enter a “Target” item for each category we want to compare.  So in this example I want to see actual vs target sales for each of my products. So I have entered a Target Sales item for each of my products for July.

As the month goes on my team will enter actual sales for July, which will (hopefully) start to stack up nicely against my target.

So to see how things are shaping up set up a PivotPoint, get it to watch the sales list, and in this case a “This Month” view of the sales list.  Display a Pivot Chart, in this case a column chart.

To see the actual sales vs target sales set it up like this:

  • Get your column data from the Actual/Target field.
  • Your Row data from the product field.
  • And your values from the Value field.

And you should end up with a nice column chart like the one above.

The best bit about this is that your chart will update as your list data changes.  So let’s say I get a really huge Planner order:

Woohoo – you can take that to the bank!

So, it’s not perfect, it’s a workaround, but some of you might find it useful.

Places you could use this would include:

  • Sales vs Target
  • Budget vs actual expenditure
  • Annual Vacation Allocation vs Vacation taken to date.

If you have any other ideas on where this might be useful we would love to hear them.

SharePoint Pivot Charts and Tables – Quick and Easy Video Demo

Date:July 15th, 2011 Author: Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

It’s all too easy to say that a piece of software is “intuitive” or “Quick and Easy” to use. But what’s quick and easy for me could quite possibly be mind bogglingly slow and tricky for you.

So to show you just how quick and easy it really is to set up dynamic Pivot charts and tables in SharePoint using PivotPoint web part we have produced a 4 minute video demo which walks you through the set up.

The video:

  • walks you through setting up a pivot chart from SharePoint list data,
  • shows you how the chart or table you have created provides a drill-down to a filtered view of your list data, and
  • shows you how your charts and tables update dynamically as you list data changes.

Take a look and if you think you could make use of PivotPoint on your SharePoint site why not try it out with a 30 day free trial.

SharePoint Pivot Charts and Pivot Tables with New PivotPoint v2

Date:July 8th, 2011 Author: Tags: ,
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

Eagerly awaited v2 of PivotPoint web part for SharePoint is now available for you to try, or buy.

We think you’re going to like this one.

Some of you will be familiar with PivotPoint already; it lets you summarize complex SharePoint list data by creating Pivot Tables.  These update dynamically, as your list data changes. So they are great to use in dashboards for things like keeping an eye on how sales are going, keeping tabs on how your helpdesk is performing, seeing who’s taking way too much sick leave.

People in the finance sector and statisticians have always been really keen on PivotPoint; they understand how useful Pivot Tables are and feel right at home looking at rows of figures all day.  For the rest of us  a nice colourful chart tends to make things easier to understand at a glance, so that’s what we have added to PivotPoint version 2.

As well as creating Pivot Tables, which are linked directly to your SharePoint list data and therefore update automatically as your list data changes, you can also create Pivot Charts, which are also linked directly to the list.  You can choose bar charts, line charts, column charts, funnels, pies – the world’s your oyster!  Color code as you wish, and if you want the visualisation and the detail you can display a chart and a table together.

Another advantage of having the web part directly connected to the list is that we have been able to include drill down, from the chart or table, to a filtered view of the list.  So for example when I am looking at my “Sales by Product, This Month”, chart, I will be able to hover over the enormous, sky rocketing column which represents this month’s sales for PivotPoint version 2, click on it, and go directly to a list view showing just the sales records for all the people who have bought PivotPoint this month – how cool is that?

The new version also has other handy features, like export to excel, so that you can do more analysis on your figures if needed, and easy printing, because we know SharePoint generally isn’t all that print friendly.

If you are an existing customer you can upgrade to v2 without disrupting any of your existing settings.

If you’re not a customer yet, well what are you waiting for?  Take a free trial and see what your SharePoint deployment is missing!

Word wrapping SharePoint list column headers

Date:June 23rd, 2011 Author: Category: General Comments:42 ;

A customer for our Highlighter product recently asked us how you could modify SharePoints List View Web Part (LVWP) to word wrap column headers. He had found that as he had replaced lengthy text with status icons he could fit a lot more columns on the page – if only he could shrink the column headers down.

To be clear – this isn’t unique to lists using our Highlighter product, this example shows a basic SharePoint list with a long title that is causing a horizontal toolbar as it won’t word warp even though the column will only ever contain Yes or No.

Of course you could rename the column and shorted the name and put more information in the description – but that only appears on the Edit form so it’s a balancing act between being brief and giving enough info so everyone knows what the columns contains.

Anyway – how to make these columns word wrap?

Inspired by this post on Stack Exchange I looked at using Cascading Style Sheets to do this.

The property we need is white-space : normal

Then we need to figure out which parts of the html to apply it to. This is done by HTML classes, so taking into account SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and different column styles (number/text/filterable/non-filterable) we end up with.

<style type= "text/css">
.ms-vh, .ms-vh2-nofilter, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{white-space: normal}
</style>

So the white-space property is applied to html elements with a class of .ms-vh, ms-vh2-nograd and so on.

We could also make the column headers center aligned and red (just for an example) by putting in

<style type="text/css">
.ms-vh, .ms-vh2-nofilter, .ms-vh2-nograd, .ms-vh2, .ms-vb
{
white-space: normal;
text-align:center; 
vertical-align:text-bottom;
color:red;
}
</style>

So how do we add these styles to the page?

You can use SharePoint Designer, but perhaps the easiest way is to add it via a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP)

  • Go to your list.
  • Select Site Actions > Edit Page
  • Click “Add a web part”
SharePoint 2007 SharePoint 2010 SharePoint 2013
  • Select Miscellaneous > Content Editor Web Part
  • Click “open tool pane” then “Source Editor”
  • Add in the CSS from above
  • Select Media and Content > Content Editor
  • Select “Click here to add new content”
  • On the ribbon select Html > Edit HTML Source
  • Add in the CSS.
  • Select Media and Content
  • Then Script Editor and Add
  • Click “Edit Snippet“

 

And – word wrapping :-

If this doesn’t work for you then as with all things ‘code’ exact syntax is important so check everything carefully – a “ is not the same as a ” for example. Also be sure that you’ve put the CSS in the HTML Source area, not just directly into the rich text editor.

You can add lots more effects (Red, bold etc) but sometimes its hard figuring out exactly what html elements and classes to target (e.g. you can’t apply a colour to the .ms-vh table header, you’ve got to apply it to an anchor element inside this – so “.ms-vh a”) – Firebug, the IE developer tools or the Chrome equivalent are invaluable for this – they will save your sanity!

Simple SharePoint workflow use case with SharePoint Reminder – Invoice Approvals

Date:May 19th, 2011 Author: Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas, SharePoint Reminder Comments:0 ;

Simple SharePiont Workflow - Invoice ApprovalSharePoint Workflows are one of the magic parts of the solution – the bits when even the most cynical and sceptical end user gets to see the benefit.

Instead of emails and bits of paper flying round your organization, getting lost, forgotten and falling between the cracks, everything is managed and driven centrally by SharePoint.

There are a whole load of scenarios where you could use workflows:

SharePoint can handle all of these processes seamlessly and automatically.  Seeking appropriate approvals, escalating, notifying, referring back and reminding as needed, whilst keeping all documentation secure in one central location.

So, that’s the upside.  The downside is that to create a SharePoint workflow you need to use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.  Whilst SharePoint Designer isn’t all that hard to master it is a very powerful tool and capable of doing serious damage in the wrong hands, for this reason many organizations keep it looked firmly away from most users.  Visual Studio on the other hand really is hard to master – strictly for the mega-brains in your IT department.  So this means that cooking up a bit of Workflow magic out of the box is out of the question for most SharePoint users.

The alternative is to use SharePoint Reminder to create your SharePoint workflows. Using SharePoint Reminder and some clever filtered list views you can easily create multi stage workflows to cover any of the scenarios listed above.

This use case walks you through how to create a 2 stage supplier invoice approval workflow, using SharePoint Reminder and a standard SharePoint document library.

Reminder only drives simple workflow, it doesn’t have the advanced logic of SharePoint OTTB Workflows and it won’t do things like automatically updating lists or other systems.  But for a lot of your day to day processes, you might find that it does just what you need.

Download SharePoint Reminder


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