One of our New Years Resolutions for 2010 was to: “find out how people really use our stuff”. We really want to understand how people use our Planner, Reminder and Pivot Point in the real world.  We know we have clients from a huge range of industry sectors, so it will be great to see how our software helps with the special challenges of your area. And we know that some of you use 2 or 3 of our products together: we would love to know what you are doing there. So this year we want to find out how you use our products in your SharePoint environment. If we know how you use them it will help us to improve them! Just send us a quick email telling us a bit about your business and how you use our products and we will enter you into our free prize draw for the chance to win a funky Flip video camera. We would really appreciate your help on this one, so if you have a minute free please send us a quick email.

Terms and Conditions

1. You must be a user of Pentalogic Technology Software in order to enter (free trial users are welcome to enter.)
2. Entries must be sent to clare.stone@pentalogic.net with the subject line “Case Study”
3. The draw will take place at 12 noon GMT on Monday 1st March, you entry must be submitted by 12 noon GMT Sunday 28th February to qualify.
4. All entrants agree to take a 30 minute phone call from Pentalogic Technology, to clarify details of your case study.
5. All entrants agree to their case study being published by Pentalogic Technology, on line or in print.

Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget what it was like to be a new SharePoint user.  Sometimes you need a wakeup call to remind you of the “WOW” moments of delighted surprise when you discovered an amazing new feature, and the “AAAGGGGGHHHH!” moments of frustration, when you hit upon something SharePoint obviously should do, but for some inexplicable reason just doesn’t.

We got our wakeup call this week when we were putting together a product features chart for our Planner web part – which is an easy to use planning tool, with a Gantt chart view.  We like to do this with all our products, to see how we stack up against the competition, and against SharePoint out of the box.

When we looked at SharePoint out of the box, some of the basic things that you would expect from a Gantt chart just weren’t there.  Here are our top 5 “missing in action” feature in SharePoint Gantt charts:

1.  No Color Coding

Seems obvious.  All you organized souls out there with colored marker pens and highlighters that you use on your wall planners would naturally expect to be able to color code your SharePoint Gantt charts – and you would be disappointed.  Color coding is not possible.

Here’s a simple project Gantt chart in SharePoint out of the box – a little dull don’t you think?

And here’s exactly the same calendar list displayed in a Pentalogic Planner Gantt chart – color coding allows us to see the completion status of each task – so much more informative!

2.  No Zooming in to see the detail

In most projects there are times when you have a lot going on all at once.  It’s nice to be able to zoom in and take a look at the detail of a particular time period and then zoom out to take an overview of the whole project.  Sadly this just isn’t possible with a SharePoint out of the box Gantt chart.  Your view is 3 months, no matter how long your project is.

So if there is one day in your project that is chock full of meetings, like this:

you’ve got no way of seeing exactly when they are, who should be attending – like this view from our Planner:

3.   No Printing

For us techie types who are permanently attached to a monitor the concept of printing may seem a little old hat.  But for the rest of the world, those people who attend meetings where there may be no computer present (!) and people want to huddle round a paper version of the plan – maybe even scribbling notes on it – this is really quite important.  Like many things SharePoint, out of the box Gantt charts are just not designed to print – and that can be really quite frustrating. Whilst our Planner doesn’t have the world’s most sophisticated printing options we do at least off a basic printer friendly version – for everyone who still loves paper!

4.  No Labels

As you can see from the examples above, with Planner you can use labels to add that extra layer of information to your Gantt charts.  In this example we have used them to show who a task is assigned to, but you could use them to show the values in any column in your list.  Really quite useful – but simply not available with SharePoint out of the box Gantt charts.  Hmmm, disappointing!

5.  No Recurring Events

Recurring or repeating events are a mainstay of calendar usage.  Let’s try adding a regular weekly project meeting to this one.

Oh dear, the meeting doesn’t really go on for a whole six weeks does it?  Should I bring a sleeping bag?  Book a dog sitter?

Oh right – when I look at the view in Planner I can see that it’s actually just once a week for six weeks – what a relief!

SharePoint out of the box Gantt charts just don’t support recurring events.  Enter one into your calendar list and the Gantt chart will show one event, which starts with the first recurrence and ends with the last.  This surely must be a bug rather than a deliberate omission?

Well, that does all sound a bit disappointing – but surely all that will be fixed with SharePoint 2010 right?

Wrong! Although you do get some ability to zoom in and out with SP 2010 in the current beta at least, the rest of the omissions remain as is.  But maybe things will change with the release candidate?

So, those are our top 5 “missing in action” features for SharePoint Gantts, what are your most annoying missing features?

A happy New Year to you – and 2010 looks like being an exciting one in the wonderful world of SharePoint

Here at Pentalogic we have a good crop of New Years Resolutions.  We thought we would share them with you now – so that you can hold us to them if our resolve waivers down the line.

So here they are:

1. Join a gym.
2. Give up chocolate.
3. Read “War and Peace”.

OK, so we’re never going to stick to those, lets focus on something realistic.

1. Get all of our products “SharePoint 2010 Ready”. We are quite confident about this one. We have put a lot of work in already and we think we are pretty much there on several of the products, although there is still more to do.  And of course the SharePoint 2010 we see now could end up being very different from the eventual release candidate – so there may be even more work to do that we think.  But we have been here before with the move from 2003 to 2007, so we know the drill and we are confident that our products will be ready in good time.
2. Issue v3 of Planner. Planner is one of the best quick and easy SharePoint planning tools on the market and we are keen to keep it simple – that’s what people like about it.  SharePoint isn’t really the place to do full blown project planning – if you want an all singing, all dancing, project management suite then there’s Microsoft Project.  But if you want a smart and simple planning tool that works inside SharePoint then our Planner is ideal.  We have a long list of development ideas but this years new release will focus on using Silverlight to enable a more flexible, responsive and attractive display.  This will allow us to do all sorts of things that you have asked for that haven’t been possible up to now like drag and drop, rich text tooltips, multiple columns and summary tasks.  We are really exiting about Planner v3 and hope to release it in the summer – so watch this space.
3. Find out how our stuff gets used in the “real world”. We need you help with this one.  We were looking through our client list the other day and were amazed atr the range of organizations that use our stuff.  There are lawyers, military people, charities, Universities, power company’s, health clubs, TV channels – the list goes on!  It would be just great to know what our Planner, Reminder and PivotPoint get up to once they’ve left home.  We would love to here from you on this, so please get in touch and tell us how you use our stuff.

So, those are our new years resolutions – what are yours?

We like to think that the standard support we offer as a part of our licensing is pretty good.  We are after all one of the very few companies in this market place offering all customers free telephone and email support. All backed up by our full 90 day money back guarantee for anyone who is not fully satisfied.

However some customers have requested a higher level of support and for this reason we have now introduced optional Premium support, for an annual fee.

The main benefits of Premium support over and above our standard support package are guaranteed response times on support calls and free major version upgrades. The major version upgrades could well prove to be particularly useful as we are planning new major version releases or both Planner and Reminder in 2010.

You can see full details of our Standard and Premium Support packages here.  If you are an existing customer and would like to upgrade to Premium Support please contact sales@pentalogic.net for a quote.

Whilst Premium Support will offer an enhanced service we would like to reassure you all that we remain committed to offering the highest possible standard of support to everyone: Premium Support Subscribers, standard license holders and those using the trial versions.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions on this new service.

Customers tell us that because of the flexibility of Reminder, and the huge number of different ways in which a SharePoint installation can be set up: getting Reminder correctly set up and configured for the first time can be a bit of a challenge.

To help with this, in Reminder v1.7 we have added a Setup Diagnostic Wizard that will check for many of the common set up and configuration problems for you and suggest possible configuration changes to fix them.

The Wizard will check for a variety of common issues like:  problems with SharePoint outgoing email settings, non-matching authentication settings or insufficient account permissions – which are all frequent causes of trouble during the set up process.

To use the Wizard, go the the Configuration Tool in the “Start Program” files, and click the “Run Diagnostics” Button.

You will then see a window like this:

with any potential problem areas marked with a red cross and suggested remedies listed underneath in blue.

For further information on setting up and configuring Reminder please visit the on-line manual.

We hope this will help many users to solve simple set up issues on the spot, but if you are still having difficulties our free telephone and email support is always available.

We hope you find the tool useful and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

With the huge volume of messages landing in your users in-boxes every day how do you make your important SharePoint Alerts and Reminders stand out?

Easy with the new Rich Text Editor in v1.7 of Reminder.

The Editor uses the SharePoint’s intuitive WYSIWYG interface, which will be easy for any user of Microsoft products to pick up.

It allows you to add Rich Text formatting including font sizing, text effects, color and tables to Reminder alert emails – helping you to get the message across!

A Rich Text Formatted Alert Email

Reminder is a hugely popular product – perhaps because email alerts for tasks and events are such an integral part of everyone’s working day now. SharePoint out-of-the-box offers an “Alert Me” function.  New users often see this and think they have something similar to the date based alerts they are used to receiving from Outlook for tasks and calendar events.  When they discover that SharePoint’s Alert Me feature will only notify them of changes to list items as they happen, disappointment often sets in.  Pentalogic Reminder addresses that issue by providing a more familiar date based alert system for SharePoint users.  It enables users to schedule alerts for both upcoming and overdue events in SharePoint and is still the only software of its kind to fully support SharePoint’s recurring events, allowing users to set up regular reminders for meetings, monthly reports. etc.

Reminder is the longest established SharePoint Alert product on the Market (and still the best we think!) we are always working on new features – both those requested by our customers and new ideas that our developers come up with.  The rich text editor had been on our to-do list for a while now, it has been regular customer request over the past few months, so we are glad to have got it out in time for Christmas!

Download a free 30 day trial of the new version of Reminder – and let us know what you think.

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

With Planner you can show multiple columns in the Category or on the Timeline of a Gantt chart by using a calculated column to merge fields together.

For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-

• From your list click Settings > Create Column
• Set a name such as “Category”
• Choose Calculated for the type
• In formula enter (where [Title] etc is the name of the columns you want to merge)

      =[Priority] & " : " & [Title]

• Uncheck ‘Add to default view’ checkbox if you don’t want this appearing for the normal list view.
• In Planner you can now select this column.

You can merge multiple columns together, for example :-

   =[Priority] & " : " & [Title] & " - " & [Assigned To]

You can also use SharePoint standard functions and formula (many similar to excel) such as :-

   =Text([Start Time],"mmm-yyyy") " : " & [Title]

Which would prefix the Title with Month and year, like so  October-2009 : Your title here

To display the the duration in days you could use

   =DATEDIF([Start Time],[End Time],"d") & " Days"

See some more examples of common functions