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.

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.

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.

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.

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

Following on from Part 1 of this series which covered Editing the SharePoint List Item Menu Using Elements, I thought it would valuable to reproduce the same results without using Visual Studio or SharePoint designer (Part 4 will be to do it without a monitor). This method will allow non-developers with view edit access to customise the List Item Menu.

In this example, a ‘View (new window)’ option will once again be added to each item’s context menu to avoid the modal box, as illustrated to the right. Although as Christophe helpfully pointed out in response to Part 1, the modal boxes can be banished under the list’s Advanced settings. Fortunately there are many other uses for these techniques, as we will see in Part 3.

This example uses a Content Editor web part, which means the Javascript can be added on a view-by-view basis. This allows a more targeted release and can be added by any user with permissions to edit the view. However, it makes widespread distribution more difficult; putting the function in a master page can overcome this but will implement it for every item menu on every list.

The steps to set this up are surprisingly straightforward:

• Navigate to the view you wish to customise
• In Edit Page add a Content Editor web part (Click “Add a web part” then find it under “Media and Content” in 2010 or “Miscellaneous” in 2007)
• Edit the web part and set it to Hidden (under the Layout tab)
• Click the body of the web part and click the Edit HTML button under the Format Text section, choosing “Edit HTML Source” in 2010 (“Source Editor…” in 2007).
• Paste in the below code and finish editing

This Javascript function’s name is checked for and called by the code that produces the rest of the menu, as described by MSDN. This allows us to add items to the menu before the rest of the options are added:

<script type="text/javascript">

</script>

The CAMOpt function adds the option to the menu; with the menu reference, title, URL, and icon URL being passed in as parameters respectively.

Finally, the last line return false ensures the rest of the menu is shown. If set to True, the menu rendering function does not show the default options.

A nice addition to the above would be the CAMSep(m) function; this would add a separator to the menu (as between the ‘Edit Item’ and ‘Manage Permissions’ options). This is functionality not offered by the CustomAction method, and left out to produce an identical menu to that in Part 1. Jan Tielens illustrates this, as well as submenus (also Javascript-only).

Interestingly, the currentItemId variable is set in the context of this function call, which contains the current Item ID (as expected). Additionally, a reference to the field’s container is held the variable itemTable. This can be used to get some quite useful information by calling the GetAttributeFromItemTable function with an appropriate attribute name (Ishai Sagi has a list of possibilities).

The following would get the URL for an item (equivalent to {ItemUrl} in a CustomAction):

var currentItemUrl=GetAttributeFromItemTable(itemTable, "Url", "ServerUrl");

The second and third parameters are the possible attribute names. It seems from the INIT.js that they are checked in the displayed order for values, and either can be set to null if only one attribute name is to be checked.

So now we have the same functionality using a CustomAction in Visual Studio (Part 1) or using Javascript through the standard web interface. In Part 3, we’ll expand into functionality using both of these techniques to further enhance the item menu.

Well finally, after months of hard work we are delighted to be able to let you know that we have just released our new FilterPoint web part for SharePoint in beta.

FilterPoint has been a long time coming so we hope you are going to like it.  It’s a tool that we always knew we wanted to develop. Dynamic filtering  – the ability to flip between filter values at the click of a mouse – is one of the building blocks for the kinds of rich applications that our customers like to build for themselves.  It builds on the power of webpart connections (a much neglected area in SharePoint) and once you have the ability to apply a group of filters to a page with a selection of webparts and lists you have the potential for some really nice dashboards.

But, as I said FilterPoint has been a long time coming, because what started out looking like a straight forward project turned out to be anything but . . . .

It starts off looking ever so simple with plenty of online examples – but when you start delving into the details it quickly becomes the stereotypical ”Can of Worms” project.

There are basically two interfaces you can use – one old IFilterProvider interface , and the new ITransformableFilterValues interface. So far sounds easy but how about some wildcards….

With the new ITransformableFilterValues interface – you can’t create filters dynamically,  and you can’t have multiple connections on the consumer side in SP 2007.

On the other hand, with the old IFilterProvider interface you can’t send multiple filter values to List view web parts and you can’t connect more than one provider web part to a consumer web part. And that’s just scratching the surface.

To top it all off you have little control over what the filter consumer web part actually does with the info you give it – want to say “Equals” or “Not Equals” or “Greater Than” etc and thats out of the scope of what a filter provider can do (we’ve got some ideas on how to work around this in a future version of FilterPoint though).

My oh my, enough to make your head spin!

Anyway- we’ve worked really hard to make this web part as simple to use as possible whilst still being compatible with any web parts that can accept the standard web part connections.  We have managed to come up with a tool which allows you to apply multiple filters to multiple webparts and lists, and (at least when working with our Planner and PivotPoint) you can have some control over the operator – using “not equal”, “greater than” and “less than” as well as the standard “equals”.  We hope to extend this aspect of the functionality in v2.

So, why might you want to use this thing then?

Well, you might want to use simply it to guide your users to the most relevant data in one list or webpart – giving them the ability to “filter on the fly”, selecting new data sets, and then clearing filters in one click.

Or, at the other extreme, you might want to bring together a collection of lists and web parts on one page, and use FilterPoint to create a truly dynamic dashboard for your users.

In fact, once you start to use filters and webpart connections there are any number of different ways to enhance the functionality of your SharePoint site with a tool like FilterPoint – we already have it set up on our Sales Pipeline and Client lists here, and are finding more possible uses every day.

We are planning to have FilterPoint ready for full public release by the end of the month.  In the meantime, if you pre-register for your free trial, you will qualify for a 25% discount on the product purchase price.

We hope you like it, and as always, we are keen to hear your thoughts and feedback.

Tooltips  – those little boxes that pop up when you hover over something – can be a blessing or a bit of a nightmare.  It drives me nuts when people enable those snapshot tooltips on every hyperlink on a page.  the resulting pop ups are huge, usually contain info I don’t want to see, and seem to hang around on the screen for ever.

But imagine a tooltip where you choose exactly what information is displayed?  How cool would that be?  Well that’s exactly what you get with tooltips in our PivotPoint web part  for SharePoint – which is why I think they rock.

So PivotPoint:  we take a SharePoint list – like this sales list, which has a record for each order Widget Wonderland have received over the past 4 years:

It’s a monster list, but hidden in the depths are some real gems of business information.  So let’s apply Pivot Point to it to see which are our best selling products year on year:

Wow, hundreds of lines of data summarized in seconds – neat eh?  We can see that in 2009 Agile App is a clear winner, but over the full 4 years Turbo Tool is our best performer.

But wait – see what happens when we hover:

Now I can not only see that we sold $125,365 worth of Turbo Tools in 2006, but also that we made 26 sales of that product, with an average sale value of $4,822, with Turbo Tool sales for 2006 accounting for 8% of our total sales to date.  And I can see this data for any cell – just by hovering.

How long would I have had to spend shuffling through Excel spreadsheets to extract all that?

And the best thing about this feature is that you choose exactly what you display in the tooltip:

In the web part configuration panel you can choose exactly what value you want to display in you tooltip, giving you access to several layers of data, all in the one view.

Now how cool is that?

Not a PivotPoint user yet?  Why not try it for free for 30 days?

Hi everyone.

We wanted to share this new SharePoint case study with you.  It shows how online security specialists Websense are using our PivotPoint webapart to slice and dice their marketing list data, and create some awesome, dynamic dashboards.

Websense were moving Excel spreadsheets into SharePoint lists.  In moving the data into SharePoint the marketing department didn’t want to lose the Pivot Table view that they had found so useful in Excel.

But nothing in SharePoint out of the box, or any of their existing 3rd party solutions could give them that Pivot Table in SharePoint.  The case study shows how PivotPoint delivers that functionality.

We were really pleased to get the case study because PivotPoint is perhaps the least understood of our products, but maybe one of the most useful.

Accountants and Statisticians have grown up with pivot tables and cross tabulations so they “get” the concept of a pivot view instantly.  But for the rest of us the concept can be a bit tricky to grasp in the abstract.

It’s only when you see it applied to your list data:  instantly presenting insights and summaries that might otherwise have taken you hours to uncover, that you really understand how it can help you.

So we hope you enjoy the Websense case study, and maybe it will give you some ideas about how you might use PivotPoint in your own SharePoint deployment.

Read the PivotPoint Case Study.

Just a quick note to let you all know that we have just released a new version of SharePoint Planner web part - v2.6.4.

The new version includes a couple of handy new features that might be useful for you.

The new Split Multiple Values option will be useful in resource planning in circumstances where you want to enter multiple category values into one list item, but still view each individual category’s activity as a separate line in your Planner view.  For example you might want to create a list item for a project meeting, with several people in attendance.  In a Gantt view of project tasks it would be appropriate to show this meeting as one item.

But in a category view of staff availability/commitments you would want the meeting to appear as a separate item for each staff member involved.

The split multiple values feature now gives you this option when working with a category view.

Another new feature allows you to word-wrap long labels. By default Planner truncates long labels, and this isn’t a problem when you are in front of your screen as you can see the full label of an item in the tooltip simply by hovering over it.

However, for those of you who like to print your planner views, the tooltip isn’t an option.  So we have provided the option to word-wrap long item labels, ensuring that you have all of your information to hand when looking at hard copy versions of your Planner charts.

We hope you find these small improvements useful.  We have spent quite a bit of time comparing the functionality of Planner with what’s available out of the box in SharePoint 2010 and although Planner is more than 5 years old now we have been pleased (and a little surprised!) to find that Planner still offers significant benefits for resource and simple project planning.  We will be sharing more of our insights into the good the bad and the ugly of resource planning in SP 2010 in a future post.

This is likely to the last minor upgrade of Planner before we move to version 3 early in 2011. Version 3 will include some of your most regular feature requests like grouping multiple categories, dynamic sizing and rich tooltips; and will also harness the power of Silverlight now available in SP 2010 to deliver a much richer display and improved printing capabilities – watch this space!

If you are an existing customer you can download the new version here.

Or if you don’t already use SharePoint Planner why not try it free for 30 days?

This is Part 5 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

See the System In Action

So, now let’s reap the rewards for all of our hard work and see the system in action.

I need to book a day off for a hospital appointment on Friday 9th of July.  I can see all the absence bookings for my department and the number of days I have had off this year on the absence dashboards above. I’ve only had 1 day off for Medical Appointments so far this year and I am allowed 3 so that’s fine – but 3 people are off on that day already, it’s going to be tough, but I really need to go to that appointment.

So, as you can see, I can add a new item to the planner straight from the link in the webpart, I don’t need to go to the list.

Ryan receives the absence request email and from looking at his dashboards he can see that although I am well within my Medical Appointments entitlement approving this absence is going to leave him really short staffed on Friday – but he can’t face the thought of listening to me moaning about my in-growing toenail for another 3 months, so he approves the request.

Once the request is approved I get an email notifying me, and the status of the absence changes from “pending” to “approved” on the absence planner.

And for the final step in the process, is the email to Ryan on Thursday, to remind him that I am off the next day, giving him chance to make sure all my work is covered.

So now we should have no excuse for messing up staff absence planning ever again!

So Can’t I do this with SharePoint out of the Box?

Well some of it. Clearly, your basic list and filtered views are all set up in SharePoint out of the box.

When it comes to your dashboard views there are some limitations.

This is how your Vacation Planner Wall Chart looks out of the box:

or as a Gantt view:

We have lost all of our color coding, it’s not possible to show the name of the person who is absent, unless you make this the title of the event, and we have no way of distinguishing between approved and pending items.

For the “Absences to Date” and “My Absences” dashboards we can achieve something similar, if a bit clunky, out of the box.  From the settings tab in your Staff Absence Planner list, choose edit current view.

Head down to Group By and choose Requested By and Reason.  Then expand the Totals section and choose # Days Absence and sum.

This will give you a view like this:

The information is all there, but I have to work to get at it.  For example Ryan can see that I have had 11 days off this year, covering 3 separate occasions, but he is going to have to drill into each individual event and get his calculator out to figure out how many of my days off have been annual leave, training or Medical.

Then on to the workflow emails. It is possible to generate email alerts for the absence request and the request approval, but the solution isn’t perfect.  For absence requests an administrator can set the list up to email all line managers within your company or department, every time a new request is added to the list.  This means that managers will get absence requests from their own staff, but also from all other staff as well.  The only way to avoid this would be to set up a separate absence request list for each line manager.

For the request approved/rejected email the requester will need to set up an alert on each request as they create it, asking to be alerted any time anything changes on that list item.

When the alert emails arrive, this is how they look:

There is no way to edit the email, and give the recipient clues on what they are supposed to do with it.

The final “John Smith is off work tomorrow” email, cannot be generated in SharePoint out of the box, as it doesn’t do date based alerts.

You could do this with Workflow and Event Receivers, but that means having some technical knowledge and breaking out SharePoint Designer and/or Visual Studio.

So – can you build a staff absence planning system with SharePoint out of the box?  I guess the answer is “kind of”. It is possible to build a basic system but it’s going to lack some useful functionality and may now be enormously user friendly.

We hope you’ve found this useful.

If you would like to try the Vacation planning system you can download a 30 day free trial version here.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments, we would love to hear them.

How annoying is it when you get reminded about something you have already done?  A little email saying:

“Can you please submit your expenses claim form by 12.00 noon today”

is just sooo annoying when actually you have been a good girl and done your expenses yesterday.

We get lots of support calls from SharePoint Reminder webpart users who have annoyed their team members in just this way – by sending our Reminder emails for tasks that have already been completed.

This is easy enough to do.  Reminder will look at the whole of a list unless you tell it to do something else.  So if you ask Reminder to send out an email for everyone who is tasked to complete their expenses claim form by 12.00 today that is exactly what it will do, regardless of whether the status of that task is “Active” or “Completed”.

Some users ask why Reminder doesn’t just work on “Active” tasks by default.  There are good reasons for this.  For example there may well be occasions when you want to send out reminders on completed tasks.

“You have completed your assignment for ZYX Corp, please ensure that all appropriate time has been billed”

or maybe to a line manager:

“John Smith has completed module 256 of the company training program, please arrange a training review meeting.”

But for those times when sending a reminder for completed items just isn’t appropriate you need to ensure that Reminder is watching the “Active” view of your Task or Issues list, rather than the entire list.

Because this is easy to forget we have added a little tip in the Reminder Configuration tool:

This message displays when you ask Reminder to watch the entire task list, and disappears if you select a view.

For more information here is the relevant SharePoint Reminder Webpart manual page.

Filtering is a really great way to get more out of SharePoint Reminder, once customers start to explore the power of filters they generally come up with a whole host of new ways that Reminder could save them time and trouble.  For example you might want to filter on priority, and send a team manager alerts on overdue high priority tasks once a week. For more ideas on using filters take a look at this blog post.

You can download the new version of SharePoint Reminder Webpart here.  The new version of Reminder is Free of charge to all existing customers and will install directly over the top of your existing version with no disruption to your existing configuration.  Please refer to this page for installation instructions.

For those of you who are not yet using SharePoint Reminder a fully functional 30 day free trail is available to download here.

We hope this is helpful, and is you have any other comments or suggestions please get in touch.