Now we all know that SharePoint Lists are pretty amazing things: easy to use, searchable, customizable… Where would we be without them?

But did you know that each list type comes with its own special “Superpower”?

If you understand the different superpowers of each list type it makes choosing which list to use on any given occasion much easier.

Calendar Lists – Repeating Events

For the meeting every Monday, or the staff Birthday list, or the equipment that needs to be serviced every six months Repeating events are what you need.

You have plenty of flexibility to set up your events to repeat daily, weekly, monthly or yearly, when to start them, when to finish them and how many recurrences to include.  So this is the superpower you need if you want to avoid manual entry of events that repeat regularly.

It would be nice to be able to get a little Reminder of upcoming repeating events: “It’s Jane’s Birthday next week.” for example.  Of course this isn’t possible with SharePoint out of the box, as SharePoint alerts don’t offer a date based alert option, like the one you get in Outlook.  You can of course get “Due Soon” and “Overdue” alerts for your Repeating Events with our Reminder webpart.

It would also be pretty super to be able to see your repeating events on the Gantt view of you Calendar list – but you can’t do this either. On a SharePoint out of the box Gantt your weekly team meeting will display as one loooong event, whereas with a Gantt chart created from the same list using our Planner web part, repeating events will display exactly as you would want them to.

(That’s the end of the shameless product plugs now – promise.)

Task List – Assigned To

If you want to stop stuff falling through the cracks this is the one to go for.  You know the drill:

“Have you booked the flights  to the SharePoint Conference?”

“No I thought you were doing that?”

“No, I told you to book them!” . . .

With the Task List (and also Issues and Project Task lists) “Assigned To” feature this need never happen again, as you can ensure that all of your tasks have an owner and that the owner of a task gets an email every time a task is assigned to them.  But there are two things you need to do to ensure this superpower works as it should do.

First, although “Assigned To” is one of the default fields in this list type, it isn’t set up as a mandatory field, so when you set your task list up be sure to change your list settings to make entry of data into this field compulsory.

Second, you have to remember to switch email notifications on. This is done in List Settings – Advanced Settings.

Following these 2 simple steps will have your Task List Superpower fully loaded and ready to go.

Of course it would be great if the owner of the task got an email when the task is due, but that doesn’t happen with SharePoint out of the box – however, if you use our Reminder webpart . . . . .

(OK, so I work in marketing, I start to twitch if I see an opportunity for a product plug and miss it.)

Issue List – Comments History

This is ideal for when you just need to know exactly what has been happening over the course of time – who said or did what, when and to whom.  It’s ideal for service desk issues, customer complaints, maybe staff performance tracking.

Whilst all SharePoint lists offer a Version History which is great for audit and compliance, version histories can quickly get a bit unwieldy and difficult to manager.  The Issues list Comments History lets you see what has been going on at a glance – Kryptonite!

Discussion Lists-Threaded Discussions

You know those group emails, about a particular project, the annual conference, the monthly sales figures.  It’s the email that gets sent to 40 people asking for comments and feedback which quickly becomes an unmanageable mess as you lose track of who is replying to whom and exactly which email response the boss is so very angry about.

Threaded discussions solve all this be letting you see exactly who commented when, who has replied to what, and how the weird tangent that Bill and Sue have wandered off on got started in the first place.

These have some similarities to the comments history superpowers enjoyed by Issue Lists, but where version history just lets you see a chronological sequence of events, Threaded Discussions lets you see the relationship between those events.  To anyone who has ever taken part in forum discussions it will look quite familiar.

If you have any other superheroes who you think deserve a mention we’d love to hear about them.

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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.

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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?

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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

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We are happy to be able to let you know that a German version of the Pentalogic Planner web part for SharePoint is now available.

Although Planner was already partially localized for German, so that German end users would have see Month and Day names in their own language, administration and set up screens were previously only available in English and French.

Over the past few weeks we have been working on a translation with one of our German customers and Planner v2.5.6, fully localized for German, is now available to download.

Depending on how SharePoint is setup you may have to perform some additional installation steps to enable the French or German language packs – please follow the instructions in the Languages FAQ.

And as ever, if you do have any suggestions, feedback or thoughts for us please do get in touch.

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A new version (2.5.4) of SharePoint Planner webpart is available to download with the following minor changes :-

• The Mark Weekends feature will now pick up your non working days and hours from SharePoints Regional Settings (WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 only)
• The This Week period settings will pick up the start of the week from regional settings

Regional Setting in WSS3.0

You can simply download and install the new version – there is no need to remove the old version first.

Thanks to Michael C and Michael S for these suggestions!

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A new version (2.5.0) of SharePoint Planner Webpart is available to download.

The main change is the interface has been fully localized in French.

In addition :-

• New feature to automatically default the web parts Title to the name of the source list and link to the lists default view (WSS 3.0 and MOSS 2007 only). Both of these settings can be overridden if required using the toolparts Appearance > Title and Advanced > Title URL settings.
• Correction to an error that stopped the By Category view grouping correctly if you were using a User lookup field with presence enabled.

You can simply download and install the new vesion – there is no need to remove the old version first.

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Update – an option to use horizontal gridlines has now been built into version 2.4

Alessandro from Italy contacted us wanting to know if there was a way of adding gridlines to SharePoint Planner so it’s easier to visually connect up the column on the left with the corresponding timeline.

With a few Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) ninja moves you can change the display from something like this.

The following snippet does the trick and can be added to an individual page using a Content Editor Web Part thereby changing just the Planner web parts that appear on that page.

DIV.SharePointPlanner2 TABLE.plgx_Default TR TD
{
border-bottom : 1px solid #B9D1F4;
}

Alternatively you can add it to the SharePointPlanner.css file that all planner web parts use or download one that’s already been edited. There can be multiple copies of this file depending on how you install SharePoint and Planner and they can be in different places so it’s best to do a file search and replace them all.

If you are a CSS Ninja then you can make other changes to the appearance and you will find some helpful comments in the CSS file to guide you.

But remember – if you reinstall or upgrade to a later version of Planer you will lose any changes so do keep a copy of your modified files.

We are considering adding this as an option to the configuration tool part so if you think it would be useful then let us know.

And if you’ve got any other questions or suggestions we would love to hear them!

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