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Archive for the ‘PivotPoint Web Part’ Category

The Ultimate Flexible CRM solution for SharePoint

Date:March 5th, 2013 Author:Ryan Tags: SharePoint CRM
Category: FilterPoint Web Part, General, Highlighter, Partners, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Reminder Comments:0 ;

The Ultimate Flexible CRM Solution for SharePoint

SharePoint is the platform millions of organizations use to manage various facets of their businesses. However, in many cases, SharePoint’s built-in functions do not provide the ease of use and advanced functions that users need to work efficiently and effectively.

Some SharePoint consulting firms will recommend custom-built web parts to provide the necessary functionality required. Before going this route, companies would be wise to evaluate pre-built applications and web parts to save significant time and money! Evaluating and sourcing the right products however can be an overwhelming task – and falling prey to vendor hype a common outcome. This is particularly true with CRM technology (Business/Customer Relationship Management).

Benefits of a 100% SharePoint- based CRM application:

A system that is designed to be highly configurable and evolve with the business’s ability to embrace change is the key to a successful implementation and a higher than average level of user acceptance.

Single point of user login where all business related information is stored
Maintenance of sensitive customer data inside a controlled environment
Leverages existing technology investment

Designed exclusively for SharePoint, SharePoint CRM by LookOut Software revs SharePoint up with dynamic, flexible and powerful features out of the box – yet is easy to personalize, scale, and upgrade as needed.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, LookOut Software partnered with one of the top Web Part developers in the industry to provide powerful, yet optional, enhanced functionality for its CRM application.

Pentalogic’s Filter Point, Pivot Point, Highlighter and Reminder web parts enhance and further empower SharePoint CRM with easy to use, flexible and comprehensive interactive Charts, Graphs, Filters, Alerts and more.

Some examples:

SharePoint CRM and Pentalogic’s simple- to-use and effective add-on web parts combine to create the ultimate Flexible CRM Solution for SharePoint.

PivotPoint web part is now compatible with SharePoint 2013

Date:January 17th, 2013 Author:Ryan Tags: PivotPoint, SharePoint 2013
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

Our PivotPoint web part is now compatible with SharePoint 2013 as of version 2.4.0.

You can download and install the latest version here.

If upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 simply perform the upgrade then install the latest version – your old settings and license key will be picked up.

This page will be updated as our other web parts are made SharePoint 2013 compatible

Turn A SharePoint Task List Into A Task Master

Date:October 19th, 2012 Author:Stuart Pegg Tags: Countdown, Filter, Graphs, Highlighting, SharePoint, SharePoint alerts, Task list
Category: FilterPoint Web Part, Highlighter, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Here’s how you can turn SharePoint’s built-in Task list into a powerful task tracking tool, using Pentalogic products.

These are just examples to get you started – we’re only scratching the surface here of what’s possible with our range of flexible SharePoint web parts.

To start, just create a new blank site and add a task list. Here’s one I made earlier:

Now just follow our guide for each section (or just the sections you want):

Task list: Priority and Due Date highlighting (uses Highlighter)
Home page: Task calendar overview and summary (uses Planner)
Analysis page: Dashboards, graphs and reporting (uses FilterPoint and PivotPoint)
Alert page: Configure “Task Overdue” email alerts (uses Reminder)

Each section has step-by-step instructions and a screenshot of the configuration to compare against.

Task list: Priority and Due Date highlighting

Uses Highlighter

To make the high-priority and upcoming tasks really stand out, we’re going to add a couple of highlighter columns.

Here’s what you will see on the All Tasks view – coloured flags to show priority, a column showing how long we’ve got left to complete items and a red highlight for things that are overdue.

Highlight Priority

Create a new Pentalogic Highlighter column
Name the column Task Priority
Choose the column type Highlighting
Choose Show Icons
Click the Default icon, then click Clear
Change Base on column to Priority
Select Replace ‘Priority’ on all views
Under Rules click the Auto-create button
Click OK

Due Date Countdown

Create a new Pentalogic Highlighter column
Name the column Due
Choose the column type Countdown
Change the Start option to [Today]
Change the End option to Due Date
Select Add to default view, on the Right
Uncheck all the display options except Days
Under Rules click the Auto-create button

Home page: Task calendar overview and summary

Uses Planner

On your site’s home page we’re going to add an at-a-glance overview of your tasks: A view of the task list (highlighted, if you did the previous section) and a task calendar.

Here’s what your home page will look like once we’ve finished:

List view

Edit the page and add Tasks from the Existing Lists category
Edit the web part
Change the Selected view to All Tasks (to ensure Highlighter columns are displayed)
Click OK

Task calendar

Edit the page and add Planner v2 from the Miscellaneous category
Set the Style to By Category
Set the Planner Source to Tasks
Set the Start Date to the column Start Date
Set the End Date to the column Due Date
Set the Category to Assigned To
Set the Label to Title
Set the Progress to % Complete
Set the Period to Auto
Change Set colour by column to Priority
Assign appropriate Colors to the priorities (e.g. High – Red)
Optional: Set a Fxed width under the Appearance section
Optional: Set the Font size to Medium

Analysis page: Graphs and granular reporting

Uses FilterPoint and PivotPoint

Now we’re going to create an Analysis page to produce some graphs and reporting data from your task list.

You will have an Analysis page that looks like this – showing charts for each persons workload.

Creating the page

From Site Actions choose New Document Library (to put the page in)
Call the library Pages
Set Quick Launch to Yes
Set Versioning to No
Change the Document Template to Web Part Page
Click Create
From Site Actions choose More options…
Under Page choose Web Part Page
Call the page Analysis
Change the Template to Full page, Vertical
Set the Document Library to Pages

Graph and Report: Priority skew

Let’s add a graph to show us if tasks are being raised too often as “High priority”:

Edit the Analysis page
Add the PivotPoint web part from the Pentalogic.net category
Edit the web part
Set Display to Both
Set List to Tasks
Under Columns set Field to Priority
Under Chart options set Chart type to Pie
Click OK

Graph and Report: Status by Person

Next we’ll add a graph to show the status of tasks assigned to everyone. That’ll show us if we have any bottlenecks in the team:

Edit the Analysis page
Add the PivotPoint web part from the Pentalogic.net category
Edit the web part
Set Display to Both
Set List to Tasks
Under Columns set Field to Status
Under Rows set Field to Assigned To
Under Chart options set Chart type to Bar
Set Color mappings to Automatic colors
Click OK

Filtering

Lastly, let’s add a filtering web part. this will allow us to drill down into our data by selecting certain statuses and date ranges:

Edit the Analysis page
Add the FilterPoint web part from the Pentalogic.net category
Connect the other web parts via the menu (Connections -> Provide filter to)
Edit the web part
Under Filters click New
Change the Label to Status
Set the Style to Drop Down
Under Get the filter values select From a list
Still under Get the filter values, the list Tasks and field Status
Under Filters click New
Change the Label to Start Date
Set the Style to Date Range
Set the Field name to From the connected web part and select Start Date
Click OK

You can display the page on the Quick Launch menu via Site Actions -> Site Settings and selecting the Quick Launch option under Look and Feel.

Alert page: Configure “Overdue” alerts

Uses Reminder

The last step is to configure Reminder to send email alerts to us when tasks are overdue. You’ll need to create the Pages document library if you skipped the previous section, and then continue with the instructions:

From Site Actions choose More options…
Under Page choose Web Part Page
Call the page Reminder
Change the Template to Full page, Vertical
Set the Document Library to Pages
Edit the page
Add the Reminder web part from the Miscellaneous category
Edit the web part
Set Watch list to Tasks
Under Email to select Assigned To from the dropdown
Under Email CC enter the manager’s e-mail address in the text box
Next to Subject click “…” and enter the following into the popup box:Overdue task ([Title])
Next to Message click “…” and enter the following:This task is overdue: Title: [Title]
Due date: [Due Date]
Priority: [Priority]
Under Send When expand Overdue and choose by 1 Days
Click OK

You should hen see the following on the page:

You can also setup email alerts to remind you when tasks are due in a few days.

Finished!

Your mundane Tasks list is now an all-singing all-dancing Task Master!

This is just one example of the many possible solutions that can be achieved with our products. Please feel free to browse the product pages below to learn more or take advantage of our 30 day free trial:

New version of PivotPoint web part for SharePoint – v2.2.3

Date:May 15th, 2012 Author:Ryan Tags: New Version, PivotPoint, SharePoint, Web Part
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part Comments:0 ;

A new version of our PivotPoint web part for SharePoint (v2.2.3) is ready.

This new version improves performance for large lists, corrects bugs when you have angled brackets (“<” and “>”) in your row or columns, adds support for site column lookups and a 2 new features.

Sort by Title or Total

The new version of PivotPoint allows you to sort by both the Title and Total rows, either ascending or descending.

Title and Total cells

For example, instead of sorting alphabetically by product you can sort by their total sales – showing your best performing products at the top of the table or left of the chart.

PivotPoint showing all columns

More details are in the online manual.

Show Top N

In combination with sorting by the Total you can choose to show the Top N columns or rows.

For example given the following data the vast majority of revenue comes from 2 products (Bottle-o-matic and Can-o-Matic) and we have a ‘Long Tail’ of other products.

We can choose to only display the top 2 columns (products) and optionally group all the other sales into “Other”

PivotPoint for SharePoint showing top 2 columns

More details are in the online manual.

You can download and upgrade to the latest version without losing any settings.

Date Range filtering with the new version of FilterPoint, PivotPoint and Planner.

Date:December 13th, 2011 Author:Ryan Tags: Calculated Columns, Filter, PivotPoint, Planner, SharePoint
Category: Calculated Columns, Filter, FilterPoint Web Part, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

FilterPoint has had the ability to send Date Filters but a common request has been Date Ranges – like showing everything this month, last year or between two arbitrary dates.

FilterPoint - Date Range Filtering

The good news is that we’ve added this in to FilterPoint as of version 1.2

The bad news is that this will only work with our other SharePoint products – Planner and PivotPoint – it won’t work with SharePoints built in List View web part (LVWP).

That’s disappointing!

Yes it is – it’s just a limitation of SharePoints filtering I am afraid, but all is not lost!

This page shows how you can do things like Month filtering using calculated columns and this blog article shows how you can setup “Current Month/Previous Month” views using nothing more than Calculated Columns and View filters.

Upgrading

As always you can upgrade without losing any settings by downloading and running the latest trial version and selecting “Upgrade” when prompted (don’t forget you need the a recent version of Planner (v2.6.9+) and PivotPoint (2.2.0+) to accept date range filters.

SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Update – dealing with Public Holidays

Date:September 1st, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: PivotPoint, Planner, Reminder, SharePoint, Vacation Planner
Category: PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint Reminder Comments:0 ;

Customers who use our SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit often ask about the best way to deal with public holidays. Public Holidays tend to affect the whole team. So you want them clearly marked on your Vacation Planner dashboard, but you certainly don’t want to have to enter each public holiday for each team member as a separate event. And you probably also don’t want to be firing off absence approval requests for each holiday either.

So here are our suggestions on the best way of handling Public Holidays within the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit.

First you need modify your list. Go to list settings and open up your “Reason” field. In addition to your existing reasons for absence add a new reason – Public Holiday.

Then open up the settings for your “Requested By” column and make sure you have “Allow Multiple Selections” checked.

Now you need to modify your Planner web part.

So, “Edit Shared Web Part” then, under your “Category” picker, check the “split multiple selections box”. This is key if you want to be able to create just one event for each public holiday but have it show up against each of your team members.

Now go down to the Planner Colors section of the Toolpart and update your color coding by column section to include an extra color code for your new Reason for absence that you created in your list – Public Holiday – I am going for a nice orange.

Now check your PivotPoint web part. For this to work you are going to need PivotPoint 2.1.4 or above. Download it here if you don’t have it already (free to all PivotPoint v2 customers, or v1 customers with Premium Support). In the Toolpart make sure that in the “Split Multiple Values” dropdown you have chosen “Split Records”. This will ensure that when we enter a 1 day public holiday for 4th of July, for example, 1 day gets entered against each team member in the pivot table.

Finally, before we start adding events, to ensure that we don’t accidentally fire off approval requests and notifications all over the place, access the Reminder web parts that you have set up and in the “Reminder Testing” section at the bottom of the Toolpart enter your own email address so that any emails generated whilst you are adding the public holidays go to you. This will be a better solution than simply switching the Reminders off as you work, as it will mean that if any “real” requests are submitted whilst you are working you will be able to redirect them, rather than them being lost.

Add a Public Holiday

So, from your Planner dashboard add a new item. Let’s do 4th July. Set it up as an all day event. Set yourself as “approved by”, you will need to approve the event before it will show up in people’s dashboards. Now add your whole team to the “Requested By” field. It’s easiest to do this using the Address Book. Now ensure you have selected “Public Holiday” in your Reason field. Approve the request. Discard all the “Request approved” notifications that are redirected through to you. And now you will see your public holiday, nicely marked against each of your team members. Repeat as needed for all of your other public holidays, remove the redirect from your Reminder emails and then you can relax for another year!

I hope this helps you in using Vacation Planner. If you have any questions or requests about the Vacation Planner we would love to hear them.

PivotPoint for SharePoint – New version Released v2.1.5

Date:August 31st, 2011 Author:Clare Tags: PivotPoint
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 3^rd 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 Pivot Charts and Tables – Quick and Easy Video Demo

Date:July 15th, 2011 Author:Clare 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:Clare Tags: PivotPoint, SharePoint 2010
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!

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