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SharePoint Highlighter Released for Sale – See it, Try it, Buy it!

Date:May 6th, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: Highlighter, SharePoint, SharePoint alerts
Category: General, Highlighter, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

At last we are there!

After months of heated debate, midnight-oil-burning and general blood, sweat and tears, our latest new product, SharePoint Highlighter is released for sale today!

So come on, what are you waiting for? Get those credit cards out! You know you can’t do without the ultimate tool-kit for brightening up your SharePoint lists!

We realise that although Highlighter has been the centre of our universe for the last few months, some of you may have had other things to think about. So, in case you have forgotten Highlighter is a custom column for SharePoint that lets you add:

Highlighting,
Color coding
Icons
Progress bars
Countdowns
And more

Let’s face, it compared to a lot of things we look at on our screen every day – things like the Facebook Wall, or a Google Search, or even an Outlook Calendar – a SharePoint list can look pretty dull. You can easily find yourself staring at a mass of information, wondering “What is exactly is going on here?”, and “What on earth am I supposed to do with this?”

So Highlighter gives you a whole box of tricks to brighten up those lists and libraries, and make them much more user friendly.

You might choose to highlight high priority items in red on an issues list.

Or flag unpaid invoices by color, depending on just how old they are.

Or use color coded progress bars to show where you are in relation to your KPI’s or targets.

Or countdown to a task or event due date.

The possibilities are endless and with Highlighter you have a whole range of visual indicator options, allowing you to mark up your lists exactly as you want them.

We set ourselves two challenges when developing Highlighter:

Give people flexibility, a choice of options within one product.
Keep it simple, and easy to use.

We looked at what was on the market already and we found that although you can buy a progress bar, or a color coding column, or a KPI column for SharePoint, there isn’t anything out there that gives you a whole bundle of these options, all in one tidy product. In fact, to get all the features you will find in Highlighter from anywhere else you would have to go to at least 3 different software providers – and pay more than double the money.

So we think we are there with the flexibility, but what about ease of use – don’t all these choices make for a really complicated set up interface?

Well, hopefully not. The really complicated (and powerful) bit is there, in our “Advanced Rules” section, but lots of people will never have to use this. We have spent time developing the user interface, making it intuitive, so that lots of scenarios are actually set up semi-automatically. When you use the software you will see that what you want to achieve can often be managed in just a few clicks.

So, what’s this all going to cost then? Well just $995 for a single server license.

Plus, of course our 30 day free trail, which will give you plenty of time to see just how handy Highlighter is.

We hope you will give the product a try, and look forward to hearing your feedback.

Download the 30 Day Free Trial Today.

SharePoint Highlighter – Beta Testers Needed!

Date:April 15th, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: Highlighter, SharePoint
Category: General, Highlighter Comments:0 ;

We’re very nearly there – a couple more weeks and with a fair wind and a bit of luck SharePoint Highlighter should be ready for full public release (i.e. the bit where we actually get to charge people for using it!). But first we need some Beta Testers.

Public Beta testing is the last and maybe the most important stage of the product testing process. This is where we get to find out how people are really going to use the software. Whether we have got it right – or not, nerve-wracking doesn’t really cover it.

So we really want you to get involved.

Let me just remind you what SharePoint Highlighter does.

It’s a custom column for SharePoint that lets you add highlighting, color coding, icons, progress bars, countdowns, dynamic highlighting and more to your SharePoint lists. We think it’s probably the only SharePoint tool on the market that has all this in one easy to use package.

And it really is easy to use now. Our final stages of in house testing saw us making some changes to the user interface, which mean that for the great majority of highlighting you may want to do, you will be able to use our new “automatic” button, and set things up in just a few clicks, and a few seconds. Whilst for those who want to do something a bit more fancy the full power of Highlighters “Advanced” options are just a click away.

So, why be a beta tester? Well you get to be one of the first to play with a brand new SharePoint tool and try to break it. We’ll be really grateful, and we’ll give you a nice discount when the product is released for sale – and it’s fun!

But beta testing isn’t for everyone. There isn’t a full manual yet, so you need to know your way around SharePoint reasonably well. The software is still in development so there may still be bugs. You should never install a beta on a live SharePoint environment; you need a test or development server to play. And we will be looking for lots of feedback, so you are going to need some time to play with the product.

So, now you’ve had a look at all the warning signs, if you still think beta testing is for you we would be really grateful for your help. You can download the beta here.

If beta testing doesn’t sound like your kind of thing you can still pre-register here for the full public release, which we expect to have ready for you at the beginning of May.

SharePoint Charting in PivotPoint – Coming Soon!

Date:April 13th, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: PivotPoint, SharePoint
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

I am sure you have noticed that there is a lot going on here at Pentalogic lately. Just a couple of months ago we launched FilterPoint, which brings fast, flexible filtering to SharePoint lists and web parts. Then we unveiled SharePoint Highlighter which gives you a whole range of color coding, icons and effects to brighten up your lists. And our new free tool View Rescue sorts out an annoying niggle for SharePoint 2010 users.

But we haven’t forgotten our existing products. Feature requests for Planner, Reminder and PivotPoint come in from customers all the time and new versions of all 3 are planned for the coming months.

First off the blocks is PivotPoint with the new version out by May. We are very excited about this and we hope you will be too.

PivotPoint v2 includes a host of handy new features like drill down form the Pivot table to relevant list items, the handy “Add New” button which Planner users will be familiar with at the bottom of the display, and charts and graphs.

The charting and graphing functionality will mean that you will be able to choose to view bar, line, pie. Column and area charts as well, or instead of the traditional Pivot table.

We think that this is really going to bring dashboards to life – imagine your Sales Team being able to view “Sales to Date” as a dynamic color bar chart, generated straight from the SharePoint list? Or the Helpdesk viewing a pie chart of current open requests by status, or age?

We have always thought PivotPoint was pretty nifty: it’s the only tool we know of that applies Pivot Table, or Cross Tabulation functionality directly to SharePoint lists. But as they say, a picture speaks a thousand words (or in this case should it be numbers?) and we think that when you see the charts PivotPoint can produce directly from SharePoint lists, you are going to wonder how you ever managed without it.

PivotPoint v2 will be available in the next few weeks. For immediate notice of the release subscribe to the blog RSS feed, or email me at: clare.stone@pentalogic.net

Use SharePoint Reminder to Email Your Customers

Date:April 4th, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: Reminder, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder Comments:0 ;

We all know how great SharePoint Reminder for sending internal reminders and driving simple workflow. But have you tried it yet for managing the bits of your processes that happen outside of your organization? Sending emails to customers, suppliers or other contacts who are not members of your SharePoint deployment, or even members of your organization.

This is really easy to do and there are lots of places you might use this. Let’s look at some of the issues you’ll need to bear in mind.

General Tips

When you are sending emails to people outside your organization you need to ensure that:

you can actually send external emails from SharePoint
the email comes with a recognizable “from” label.
any replies go to an address where they will be dealt with.
don’t send a hyperlink to the list item in your email

First, to be sure that your STMP server allows relaying to outside addresses then you may want to use the diagnostics tool to send a test email to a private email address. – http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-products/reminder/reminder-manual?p=configurationtool%2Fdiagnostics.htm

When sending emails to people outside your organization you will want to make sure that what shows up in the inbox is recognizably from you. You don’t want your customers getting emails from “SP2010 Intranetxyz”, or some other random label. SharePoint automatically labels outgoing emails with the name of the site or subsite they have come from. So for this example we are going to set up a sub site called “Locks and Latches CS” so that all of our emails to customers and suppliers will be clearly identifiable as coming from Locks and Latches Customer Services.

When a customer or other external contact replies to your email it’s important that that reply gets routed to an address where a real person is going to read it and deal with it. You can write “please contact service@zyz.com in the body of your email until you are blue in the face – but you can be sure that a good percentage of customers who want to reply to you are just going to ignore that and click on “Reply”. By default SharePoint will route all replies to emails it has generated to one central address – one address for the whole SharePoint deployment. This address typically gets lots of mail, and often doesn’t get very closely monitored, so in Reminder we have the ability to override that and specify a “Reply To” address for each Reminder you set up. For this example we are going to have all replies go to customer.services@locksandlatches.com. If in your own set up particular people are responsible for their own order you might choose to have replies going to the person who created the order record “Created By” or maybe the account manager for that customer “Assigned To”. The main thing is that you ensure replies go to an email address which is monitored, and where they will be responded to.

Don’t send out dead end links or useless information. Both SharePoint’s built in Alert Me feature and SharePoint Reminder send out a hyperlink to the relevant list item in the alert/Reminder email by default. If you are sending emails to external contacts this link will very likely be of no use, as the contact probably won’t have permissions to view your SharePoint site. In SharePoint out of the box alerts you can’t customize your alert emails, but in Reminder you can, so when sending emails to an external contact remember to uncheck the “Include Hyperlink” box.

Reminder Set Up

In this example we have used Reminder to send an email to a customer each time a new order is received. The set up of a Reminder when sending an external email is really much the same as the set up of any other Reminder.

In this example Reminder is set to watch our orders list. It’s set to watch the “Order Received” column, and email the address in the “customer email” column when “Order Received” is “Due Today” – or equal to today. Reminder is checking the list every hour, which means customers should get a confirmation email within an hour of their order being received.

Because “customer email” is simply a text field, and not recognized by SharePoint as containing an email address you will need to check the “Show all fields” box.

Customize your emails with merge data from your list, just as you would with a Word Mail merge.

And away you go, SharePoint Reminder emails for your customers.

Where Else Might I Use This?

There are loads of places where you could use this with customers, suppliers or other external contacts:

delivery notification emails for customers
overdue invoice emails for customers
stock re-order emails for suppliers.
meeting reminders for contacts.

to name but a few.

And if you have other examples of using Reminder to send emails to external contacts we would love to hear them.

ViewRescue for SharePoint 2010 – Updated!

Date:March 30th, 2011 Author:Ryan Tags: Community, Free, New Version, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Free Tools, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

We’ve recently updated our free ViewRescue tool for SharePoint 2010 to version 1.1.2

This latest version will now work with customized Master Page templates, as long as you have an “AdditionalPageHead” control in your template.

See our website for the latest version (you can install this over the top of the existing version to upgrade) and details about this free tool that fixes a common annoyance in SharePoint 2010.

SharePoint Highlighter – new product, coming soon.

Date:March 16th, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint
Category: General, Highlighter Comments:0 ;

We are delighted to be able to let you know that we are about to add a new member to our family of SharePoint products.

Highlighter will let you bring your SharePoint lists to life with:

Highlighting – duh!
Color coding
Icons
Progress bars
Countdowns
And more …

Why did we feel the world needed SharePoint Highlighter you may ask? Well, SharePoint lists can be a little dull on the visual side. As people get more are more into dashboarding, finding ways of picking out different bits of information easily becomes ever more important.

When we looked at what’s on the market already we realised that though there are quite a few products that will give you one highlighting option – say progress bars, or KPI columns, or some kind of icon, there didn’t seem to be anything out there that would give users flexibility and choice in how they mark up their lists. So we thought we’d have a go.

After all how hard could it be?

“Looking back I think it would have been easier, and less painful, to eat my own eyes.”

Bjørn Furuknap

I’m quoting Bjorn because he kind of became our hero during the product development process. The problems challenges fell into three main areas.

First there was the inevitable SharePoint issue. Everything looks simple on the surface. The examples given look straightforward, then you start digging into SharePoint’s dark and dusty undocumented corners and everything suddenly becomes a lot less clear. Once you get in to custom columns you are heavily into uncharted waters. Which basically means you don’t know what you don’t know – and neither does anyone else. There is very little reliable information around on this area, so we do owe a debt of gratitude to Bjorn Furuknap,his blog and his excellent book: “Building the SharePoint User Experience” (APRESS). Rare beacons of light in our darkest hours!

The second challenge was narrowing down our options. There were so many things we could have put into Highlighter – bells, whistles, flashing lights, Unicorns. The temptation to make it all singing, all dancing was almost overwhelming. But we had to resist. If we had put everything we wanted to in it a) it would have been totally unmanageable, and b) we wouldn’t have released in until 2099. So we narrowed it down to the features that we thought would be most useful. The rest remains on our private list of “Shiny Things” possibly for future releases, depending on how many customers say that really need to have unicorns prancing through their lists!

And finally there was the user interface challenge. Though we have been quite strict with ourselves in terms of the number of features we have put in, Highlighter still does some pretty fancy stuff. So keeping the user interface simple and intuitive was always going to be interesting. What we wanted to avoid was presenting users with so many options at the outset, that they just ran away screaming. What we have come up with is an interactive interface – almost a “wizard” (but definitely not a helpful paperclip!) We think it is pretty easy to use and we hope you will agree.

Highlighter is a bit of departure for us, it’s not a SharePoint web part, it’s a custom column. Every time I go to switch it on I have to remember not to “add a web part” to the page, but to add a column to the list instead. I am a mere marketer and my feeble brain struggles with such changes in routine!

And the other first for Highlighter is that it’s a first as project lead for our new developer Stuart Pegg – new job, new project, new area of SharePoint – we really believe in trial by fire for our people! But Stuart has come through with flying colors and a great product that we think you are going to love.

Highlighter is now in the final stages of testing and will be available in public beta in the next few weeks.

We are inviting you to pre-register for the free trial now – which will mean you will be one of the first to get the product and will qualify for our product launch discount.

SharePoint 2010 and the mystery of the disappearing view selector menu

Date:March 8th, 2011 Author:Ryan Tags: Free, SharePoint 2010, Web Part
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:34 ;

Remember the good old days, before SharePoint 2010, when a dropdown on the top right of a List View Web Part (LVWP) allowed you to select different views, quicly and easily?

In SharePoint 2010 we have lost this handy feature. On some pages, a substitute does exist in the Breadcrumb on the title bar (which is part of the Ribbon, at the top of the page). It took us a little while to actually realize was there – but once we found it, it was very welcome.

But wait, all is not well. as Kerri from one of our partners – LookOut Software who develop CRM software for SharePoint – pointed out even the breadcrumb option disappears on the majority of pages. It disappears if you

Add another list view web part
Add any other web part such as a Content Editor Web Part containing things like instructions for the list
3rd party web parts like our PivotPoint or FilterPoint tools that work really well alongside list views for creating dynamic dashboards.
use your list on a wiki page – and remember most of the pages in SharePoint 2010 are wiki pages by default now.

Also you don’t get it if you’ve created a new page and added a list view web part to it.

Once it’s gone, you have to resort to the following ninja moves to change a view. Select the list title (or something in the list) > List Tools > List, Current View dropdown > Then the view you want. 4 clicks? My finger is getting sore SharePoint!

SharePoint Task List - Show Active Tasks

This bugged me so much that I decided to look into it further and ended up developing a little tool which – well – rescues the view selector drop down.

If you just want the solution you can skip the rest of this post and download our free fix for this annoyance – ViewRescue

If you’re interested in the techie details then read on…

(more…)

Your SharePoint community needs you!

Date:March 7th, 2011 Author:Stuart Pegg Tags: Community, SharePoint, SharePoint Overfow
Category: General Comments:0 ;

As many of you may know, SharePoint Overflow is site where anyone can find out anything about any version of SharePoint. Unlike other expert answer sites, it’s solely dedicated to solving SharePoint problems in all their forms.

In order for the community to continue to grow and thrive, SharePoint Overflow being melded into the enormous and varied Stack Exchange community.

Stack Exchange?

A shopping mall of different expert answer sites, based on the three original sites: Stack Overflow for developers, Server Fault for Systems Administrators, and Super User for power users.

Although Stack Exchange in general is an amazing and reliable resource for getting expert answers on tricky questions, all three of these sites cover slightly different aspects of SharePoint. Deciding which category a problem falls into can be a problem in itself.

If Stack Exchange is a shopping mall; imagine the three original sites as a clothes shop, shoe shop, and an accessory shop. These are all very large and full of useful things, but what about if I’m getting married? The clothes shop has a suit that’s a bit like a morning suit, the shoe shop has some shiny shoes that’ll do the job, and the accessory shop has a likely tophat hidden away at the back (but they’re only selling it “ironically”).

So at the end of this several hour long imaginary trip of rummaging I have something that passes as a suitable outfit. Unfortunately my wife-to-be sighs and points out that I could have done all this at the wedding shop (Shar LaPointe’s Ouverflowe) on the other side of town in a matter of minutes, and I wouldn’t have “I <3 Hatz” written on the front of my tophat.

So, why is this relevant to me?

Well, to get to the point, this is all about getting the wedding shop into the mall where it can be seen by slightly befuddled grooms.

If enough people get together and vote on the proposal, SharePoint Overflow gets it’s own spot in the bustling Stack Exchange community. It will consolidate the SharePoint questions and answers into a single place; becoming much more than the total of the individual sections.

A bigger community also means more and better quality answers for everyone. Even if you don’t ask such questions yourself, helping to bring this project to fruition means your future problem-investigating web searches are more likely to have useful results.

So who gets to vote?

You! Here’s how:

1. Follow this link to Area 51 (the Stack Exchange site proposal site):
SharePoint Overflow on Area 51
2. Press the big “Commit!” button
3. Put in your name, e-mail (there’s no spam or newsletters) and reason for loving SharePoint.
4. Take the next 20 seconds off work; you’ve earned it.

SharePoint FilterPoint New Version Release; now with personal defaults

Date:February 22nd, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: Filter, filterpoint, filters, SharePoint 2010
Category: Filter, FilterPoint Web Part, General Comments:0 ;

We’ve just released a new version (v1.1.3) of our FilterPoint web part for SharePoint. We have had plenty of user feedback over the past few weeks and this new version has some added features and functionality that we hope you will all find useful.

As you know, FilterPoint already gives you the ability to set default values globally, to help get users to the most relevant information quickly.

And now new functionality in v1.1.3 will help each user get to their own individual information more quickly too.

There are 2 ways FilterPoint does this. First by re-loading the last used filter values when you revisit a page. And secondly by looking for FilterPoints on different pages that filter on the same fields, and getting them to fetch records with the same values.

So how could this help you?

Well, let’s take the example of 2 national sales account managers. Freda’s biggest client is Big Corp and Sophie’s most important customer is Enormous Inc. They each want to know what is going on with their key accounts on a daily basis.

So Freda and Sophie both look at dashboards that show sales activity, financial account status, cases and help tickets etc. Freda always filters to see the stuff on Big Corp and Sophie always filters to see what’s happening with Enormous Inc.

Because FilterPoint will now save filter values between visits to a page each account manager will see information on her main client account as soon as she opens a page – so long as that was the last thing she looked at when she last visited the page.

Even better, once one FilterPoint is set up to filter for “Client = Big Corp” by Sophie, all other FilterPoints on the site will also look for information on “Client = Big Corp” and display this for Sophie, so long as this field and value exist in the lists and web parts they have been applied to.

These two new features should be a real time saver for many users.

In addition, there are other new features in FilterPoint v1.1.3:

Allow you to send multiple filter options to list view web parts when using multi-choice fields.
Allows you to use vertical as well as horizontal orientation and
Adds better error handling for situations where a List, Field or View that FilterPoint is using is later deleted.

If you’re an existing customer or trial user you can download and upgrade to the latest version.

And if you haven’t yet tried FilterPoint why not download a 30 day free trial now?

What is SharePoint?

Date:February 22nd, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: Microsoft, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

What is SharePoint?

How often do we get asked this question?

And how difficult is it to find a sensible answer?

There are really helpful diagrams like this one:

Are you any the wiser after looking at that?

Then suddenly we find ourselves spouting all manner of pompous business waffle: “extensible collaboration platform”, “business process automation solution”, “enterprise search capabilities” – oh dear!

And Mr Ballmer from Microsoft is prone to get lost in just the same quagmire of incomprehensible verbosity: