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.

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.

Victor from New York asked

Is there a way to configure a Reminder webpart to send an email when task item status in the task list is set to “completed”?

Sure there is!

In this case the trick is to use a SharePoint Views to filter out the tasks you are interested in.

In the “Tasks due and Overdue” example we show now to use the built in Active Tasks view to send email alerts only for overdue tasks that are not complete.

For this requirement we are going to setup a new View to just show the Completed tasks

• Create a new View using a filter of “Status = Completed” – call it something imaginative like Completed Tasks.

• If you are not familiar with SharePoint views then this link should help

• Then you would setup a Reminder web part to watch the Complete Tasks view

• Set Send When to Always – because you want an email alert to be sent as soon as a Task is complete, regardless of any Due dates

• Set-up a recipient, subject and message  (remember that you can customize the contents of the email alert)

• Leave everything else as default (send email once and check list every 1 hour) and then you should be good to go – one email for each completed record will be sent within an average of 30 minutes (1 hour / 2) of its status being changed to completed.

This will send out emails for any completed tasks that are already in your list and some may be quite old – so you might want to look at this tip on how to stop emails being sent for old items.

Reminder is pretty flexible but this also means that its not always obvious how to set something up. The Common Scenario examples may give you the answer you need but you can always contact us, describe what you are trying to do and we can give some pointers.

There are some scenarios where you could setup Reminder to generate emails alerts in a simple workflow scenario such as such as when a Task is completed,  a helpdesk ticket is closed, a company announcement is made, a vacation request or expenses claim is approved and so on.

When you first set up this kind of reminder, an email alert for any records already in this state (e.g. completed tasks) will also be sent and some of these could be quite old, so you could end up sending quite a lot of “old” reminder emails.

If you want to avoid sending emails for these old records you have 2 options:

• Use the Redirect Emails function to redirect the emails to yourself the first time its ran, delete these and then remove the redirect

This also gives you the opportunity to double check that everything is setup correctly.

• Use a view to filter out old records

For example you could filter to show only records with an ID > a recent ID.

Or you could add filter to show only records Created after a certain date.

Tip – All records in SharePoint have an ID and its sequential and automatically generated. To find the id you can show the ID column in your view or see the ID in the URL in your browser address bar.

Have you every tried to use any of the SharePoint Reminder or Alert web parts on the market – including ours – with Recurring Events in SharePoint Calendar lists?  They just don’t work do they? If you want to send out Alert/Reminder emails about a regular event you have to set up each and every instance of the event as an individual list item in your SharePoint calendar list. Annoying isn’t it?

That’s what our customers have been telling us – and with the latest version of Reminder we have introduced functionality which will allow you to use Reminder with SharePoint’s handy recurring events feature.

It hasn’t been easy. A SharePoint recurring event is actually just one list item – so it’s difficult to get the web part to interpret the recurrence specifications correctly.  There can be problems with things like getting the web part to send Reminder emails for overdue recurring events, and well as “due soon” events. Also we needed to make sure that if one item in a series of events changes – for example if you change your Monday morning meeting to a Tuesday on one week – the web part picks that change up and amends the Reminder emails it sends accordingly.

The new version has been through beta testing and we have had some very positive feedback:

“That little ‘Expanded Recurrences’ check box is a dream come true (I know, I need better dreams!)”

Toby Flowers, Delphi Global Technology

Existing clients can upgrade free of charge at out website, or if you are a new customer you might like to try our 30 day free evaluation trial.

For a quick introduction to the new feature take a look at our video.

Or for a full breakdown on how Reminder measures up to the competition see our SharePoint Alert enhancement software product comparison chart.

And if you have any questions or comments please do get in touch.

Did you know that you can customize SharePoint alerts with Pentalogic Reminder by merging data from fields in your lists into the subject and message of each email alert?

This is one of the most powerful features of Reminder  and in this way you can personalise each Reminder email so that you will often be able to include enough data to enable the recipient to complete a task without having to check the task list.

It works just like a Microsoft Word Mail Merge.  Include the Merge data by inserting the name of the field containing the data you want to merge into your email message or subject line in square brackets: [FIELDNAME].

So, for example you may have a list of equipment requiring testing, with its location and the date when the next test is due.  Have Reminder send your service engineers emails telling them exactly what they need to test, where and when.

So you message would look something like this:

“This message is sent to remind you that the [EQUIPMENT NAME] at [EQUIPMENT LOCATION] is due to be tested on [NEXT TEST DUE DATE]“

Which would appear to your engineer as:

“This message is sent to remind you that the Potterton 2000 Gas Boiler at 37 Gloucester St, Bristol is due to be tested on Monday 1st September 2009.”

Your engineer now has all the information needed to get on with the job, without having to check details on the task list.

For more details and examples have a look at the Pentalogic Reminder online manual.

When you normally setup Reminder you can specify to send an email alert when a date is Due In X days or Overdue by X days

When column Service Date is due in 5 days

One fairly common requirement amongst users of Reminder is the ability to set variable ‘Due In’ or ‘Overdue By’ times. For example lets imagine the scenario of a company using SharePoint and Reminder to help control the servicing of various pieces of equipment.

Some equipment may be quite easy to service and replacements would be readily available whilst they are ‘in the shop’. Other equipment could be very complex and much more specialised meaning that we’ve got to arrange the servicing more carefully to ensure its available when needed. For the standard type of equipment perhaps we only need 5 days warning that its due for a service whilst for the specialized equipment we need at least 30 days notice.

Another example a helpdesk system where you are sending out alerts when tickets are still open after a certain time – in other words the Created date is overdue (or in the past) by a certain number of hours or days. For high priority tickets or tickets from certain people you may want to be alerted if they are still unresolved after 1 day – others may be lest time critical and an alert after 2 days is fine.

So how do you do this? Well there are three ways with their own strengths :-

Use an Alert Days column and a calculated column.

Suppose we have a column Service Date we could add a number column called Alert Days where we would enter the number of days notice we need for that record.

We then create a calculated column called Alert Date and with the formula

[Service Date]-[Alert Days]

Beware though, if you have any records with empty Service Date fields then SharePoint will calculate this as “30th December 1899” + [Alert Days] leading to some very overdue records!

To protect against this you should use

=IF( ISBLANK([Service Date]), “” , [Service Date]]+[Alert Days])

Which says If the Service Date is blank then the result is too, otherwise the result is [Service Date]+[AlertDays]. (You could also use a view to filter out any records with an empty Service Date)

We would end up with a list that looked something like this and we would then setup a Reminder web part to watch for an overdue Alert Date.

So event though these two bits of equipment are due to be serviced by the 30th July we will only get an alert about #1 on the 25th (as its a simple bit of equipment) but #2 is more complex we will get an alert 30 days before the service is due to give time to organise everything.

This method has the advantage of flexibility, but it relies upon the person entering data putting in a sensible value in Alert Days.

Tip – This page gives more examples of what you can do with calculated columns and formula – for example adding a number of months to a date.

Use a calculated column that subtracts a different number of days based on a status

This is similar to the above method, but suppose we have a choice column called Service Type that can either be Simple, Average or Complex. Again we want the alerts for Simple equipment servicing to be 5 days in advance, Average to be 10 days and Complex to be 30.

This calculation will return the number of days to add :-

=IF([Service Type]="Complex",30,IF([Service Type]="Average",15,5))

Adding in ISBLANK as shown above gives

=IF(ISBLANK([Service Date]),"",[Service Type] + IF([Service Type]="(Complex",30,IF([Service Type]="(2) Normal",15,5)))

Or broken down for easy reading

=IF(ISBLANK([Service Date]),"",

   [Service Date] +

      IF([Service Type]="Complex",30,

      IF([Service Type]="Average",15,

      5 )))

If the service date is blank then then the result is blank

else the result is [Service Date] +

   + 30 if Complex service
   or + 15 if Average service

   or +5 otherwise

So again we would create a calculated column called Alert Date, use the above formula and setup a Reminder web part to send an email when the Alert Date is Overdue (or Due Today).

The advantage of this method is that you are not relying on users entering the correct figure in an Alert Days column and you can later change everything by updating the formula, suppose you’ve now decided that you need 45 days notice of complex services. The disadvantage is reduced flexibility.

Using multiple Reminder Web Parts

You can setup Views in SharePoint for various subsets of your list (think of 3 views showing simple, average or complex equipment services). You could then setup 3 different reminder web parts set to watch the records in these views and each web part could be set to send an email alert a certain number of days in advance.

The advantage of this method is that any part of the configuration can be different, for example you may wish to send the alerts about complex services to different people or have a different subject line.