So here we are with the second instalment in our occasional series on SharePoint 2010 features for the end user.

In part 1 we looked at the new features in SharePoint 2010 that we thought would be most welcomed by end users.  Our vote went to FAST Search, because it’s going to make search within SharePoint much more like search in Google – which has to be a good thing.

This provoked a lot of debate and whilst some of you agreed with us, others had different candidates for the top spot.

A lot of people liked the improved UI and the introduction of the Office Ribbon, others loved the new Metadata features, tagging and voting, and others thought Records Management was going to be a winner.

But enough of all this positivity: (we are British after all: skepticism is our default setting!) this week we are looking at our pick for the #1 “turkey” feature SharePoint 2010, the feature that has been really hyped but that we believe could easily sink without a trace.

And our vote goes to . . . . well, we have a tie for top spot actually:

• Business Connectivity Services
• Social Networking

So, today we are going to talk about Business Connectivity Services, and on Monday we’ll come back to Social Networking- we wouldn’t want to bore you by gong on for hours!

So, Business Connectivity Services.  This is the successor of the Business Data Catalogue, which allowed integration of Line of Business Data into SharePoint.  It wasn’t all that well used as a feature (according to the AIIM 2009 State of the Market Report) and where it was used it was almost always used in a read-only capacity – read/write was not available out-of-the-box, and was very tricky to implement through 3^rd party applications.

BCS goes a lot further and encourages the set up of 2 way, read/write links between SharePoint and Line of Business applications.  It sounds great: you will be able to access, amend, even create data for your line of business applications from within SharePoint 2010.

Well, nice idea, but we don’t think it’s going to fly.

Two way synchronization between any two complex applications is a minefield, both politically and technically.

On the technical side, two-way synchronization is a two-way street. SharePoint 2010 may be all set up for seamless integration into your line of business applications, but things may not run so smoothly at the other end.

So Microsoft may very well be able to set up SharePoint 2010 so that they can run a search in SP2010 for “Steve Jobs”, see the receipt for the Xbox 360 Mr. Jobs just bought in the accounting system, find his customer record in Salesforce, and change the record of his address and banking details. All done from within SharePoint.  But the problems start when we try to push those changed records back into Salesforce and the accounting system.

This is really a very complex process and the potential for error is huge. There is a lot of development time involved in making sure that the two (or maybe even more) applications work correctly together.  It’s not just a one-off investment in development time either – every time there is a change, or an upgrade or a patch in either system time needs to be spent on figuring out what implications that has for the link – and making changes where needed.

Things that look really impressive in the laboratory conditions of a demo can very easily turn into a nightmare when subjected to the constantly changing environment of the real world.

The political issue is around security and governance.  Line of Business data is generally sensitive and closely guarded stuff.

The accounts department might be happy to print out (or these days maybe even email!) endless reports on what’s going on with the numbers – but do they want the rest of the business poking around inside the accounting system?  I don’t think so!

So in our scenario above, Mr. Jobs returns his Xbox, (because he’s found he gets a much better gaming experience on his new iPad) and asks for a refund.  Sales pass the request to accounts, who duly refund the money to Mr. Jobs debit card – only they don’t because the helpful soul who amended the records from within SharePoint has miss-keyed, the card number. The money goes to some random person in Guatemala, accounts have no chance of retrieving it and Mr. Jobs is fuming because he hasn’t got his refund.  The head of Accounts can’t even fire anyone, because the person who made the error isn’t in her department!

All in all we feel that BCS may fail to live up to the hype once businesses start to look at the implications of this in the the real world. From both development and governance points of view they may well decide that a BDC type read-only connection is going to be good enough – if indeed they feel the need to integrate line of business data into SharePoint at all.

The AIIM report seems to bear out our feeling.  Of those surveyed who had deployed SharePoint but then stopped using it, the two most common reasons for ceasing use were security concerns, and problems with integration into existing systems.

Do you agree with us on this one, or do you have your own #1 candidate for a SP2010 turkey?

Let us know your thoughts, and check back on Monday when we will be taking a pot shot at SP2010 Social Networking.

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No, it’s not more about the Oscars, it’s our Case Study Competition – just as important to us, but maybe Jeff Bridges wouldn’t share our view.

Random aside: Did you know that this is (allegedly) the first year in over 20 years that award presenters at the Oscar’s have used the phrase “and the winner is”?  “And the winner is” was banned at the 60^th Oscars, for fear of offending the “non-winners” (didn’t they used to be called losers??).  Presenters have been saying “and the Oscar goes to . . .” ever since; until this year, when, presumably due to popular demand, the traditional phrase is back in place.

Anyway, enough of all this.  Our winner is Adam Venn of Bridges Engineering in Bath, England.  Adam wins something far more useful than a little gold-plate statue.  He gets a swanky new Flip video camera, which he tells us will come in very handy for filming the first baby that he and his wife and expecting any time now. So thank you to Adam. Bridges have been using Reminder since 2007 and Adam has sent some really interesting information on how they use it.  As we expected they are doing things over there that we never even thought of.  We will be publishing a full case study in a couple of weeks. Thanks also to everyone else who sent in case studies. We will be publishing them all over the next few months.  If you have a case study that you would like to share with us it’s not too late, just email me clare.stone@pentalogic.net with brief details and I will get in touch to get the full story from you.  There are no prizes in it now – but we would still love to hear from you.

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We wanted to get some more insight into how people use our products out there in the real world, and so we asked you to send in case studies.  In fact we launched a little competition to encourage you – winner to be announced in the next blog post.

We have been delighted with the response, and here is the first in what we hope will be a long running series.

Wade Peterson is Director of Practice Support at leading US law firm Bowerman and Brooke.  Here Wade explains how they chose our Reminder to enhance their Litigation Support Job tracking system and how Reminder and SharePoint help them with the vital task of ensuring they deliver on time, every time.

Wade needed something that would work like Outlook Reminders – providing date based “due” and “overdue” reminders to team members – but from within SharePoint.

Read the full case study here.

We love to read your case studies – it gives us ideas for product improvements, and we think it gives other customers new ideas on how they might get more out of SharePoint and our products.

So, if you would like to share your story, please drop me a quick email:  clare.stone@pentalogic.net – we’d love to hear from you.

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So as we’re now at the “been there, done that” stage with SP 2010 we thought it might be useful to share our thoughts on what the killer features are, and where to watch out for the white elephants!

This week — killer features.

There’s a lot to get the developers excited: Just do a quick Google search and you’ll come across bags of blog posts on all the great new developer features. But here we want to take a slightly different tack and focus on the features that we think will make the most difference to the end user.

Our vote goes to FAST search.

In days gone by, we used to store things electronically and search for things electronically in much the same way as we store and search in the real world. We’d store things in the appropriately labelled folder in the correct virtual “drawer” of a virtual file cabinet.  When we needed to find things electronically, we’d then be relatively happy to trawl through our virtual file cabinets until we located the item we needed.

That has all changed now. For a start, we no longer “file” electronically. For the most part we just leave our stuff in a disorganized heap with a bunch of “tags” attached. Our electronic lives look a bit like a teenager’s bedroom. And yet, despite our virtual untidiness, we expect to be able to find things at the click of a mouse. We expect logical search results ranked for relevance, maybe displayed with images or other media and delivered instantly. And on the Web we get this with Google, but we’re rarely so lucky when searching within a Web site, or worse still when searching internal corporate data.

Google’s magic relies on links to pages being like votes. Given enough votes the best content for any subject becomes apparent. But you don’t get the same high level of interlinked content inside organizations so this doesn’t work as well. Hence the scenario we’ve all faced of being unable to find that document that we know is hiding somewhere.

So, going back to our virtual teenagers bedroom, if we search for “Xbox” on Google it will most likely direct us first to the console, or the controllers or maybe our current favorite game – because those are the things that are being used most (linked to most), so Google reckons they are most likely to be what we are looking for.

If we search our virtual bedroom for “Xbox” on a corporate search it is just a likely to send us to the Xbox packaging gathering dust under the bed, or the Xbox receipt stuck in a book we gave up reading six months ago. Because – well – they both say “Xbox” on them, don’t they?

FAST search for SharePoint 2010 has the potential to change this. FAST was the Norwegian company that provided the technology behind Alltheweb and Lycos (Remember them?). Acquired by Microsoft in 2008 FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is?? the first FAST product deployed by Microsoft, and if the integration of FAST with SharePoint delivers all that it promises it should offer the end user plenty to smile about.

There are a huge number of features we could talk about, but these are the three key things we think end users will really notice:

1. Findability. The main pitfall with much enterprise search to date has been that you just couldn’t find things. Meta data is key to findability in enterprise search and problems occur because many unstructured documents are stored with no Meta data giving the search engine very little to work on. FAST has the ability to automatically and quickly generate Meta data for unstructured documents which would mean that the user will be able to actually find what they’re looking for.
2. Relevance. We’re all used to the sheer randomness of server search results. FAST should improve things here greatly. Not only does it have advanced linguistic capabilities, but it also offers contextual search capabilities which can tailor search results to user profiles. All this offers the promise of far more relevant search results.
3. Speed. How long have we all spent looking at that little spotlight icon endlessly scanning an empty screen as we wait for our file search results to appear? In this respect FAST lives up to its name. It promises to maintain speed and performance levels on searches of 100 million documents or more which will offer a real time saving for many users.

FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is an add-on, not part of the out-of-the-box solution, and there are those pundits who believe the OOTB search has been improved so much in SharePoint 2010 that for most deployments the investment in FAST cannot be justified.   We disagree and feel that the improvements in the end user experience will result in higher usage rates and so improved productivity.

So. FAST search is definitely on the top of our list of killer features in SharePoint 2010 – what’s on top of your list?

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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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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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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?

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Some of you may have noticed that with the introduction or our new website we also seen to have lost a product – CrossTab.

Don’t Panic!  It’s still there, we just changed the name.

And why have we done that?  Well with the exception of us here at Pentalogic, and a few hard core number crunchers out there no one seemed to understand the old name.

Not that many people seemed to know what a Cross Tab is. And if you Google it this is what you get:

“A Cross Tabulation – often abbreviated to “crosstab” is a statistical technique that establishes an interdependent relationship between two tables of values, but does not identify a causal relationship between the values.”

Phew, sounds like hard work!

Actually it’s pretty simple – it’s just what an Excel Pivot Table does – which is why we have changed the name to “PivotPoint” – which we hope will make sense to a lot more people.

Like a Pivot Table, Pivot Point is one of the handiest little data analysis tools you could wish for.  Use it to get a quick a quick and easy to interpret summary of the numerical data in your SharePoint lists.

• You can see some sample uses here,
• or take the video tour here.
• or try it for free for 30 days.

Since we were somewhat lacking in inspiration when it came to finding a new name we picked the brains of lots of SharePoint users and experts.  The suggestions for PivotPoint came from Kirill Kirg in the MOSS group on LinkedIn.  So many thanks to Kirill!

And as always, if you have any comments or suggestions please do get in touch.

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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.

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Across all of our products we have also introduced 2 new pricing options, which we hope will help to make our software more affordable for a lot of customers.

Firstly, we have introduced “Starter Packs” for each of the products, priced at $199. With these we hope to make our software an affordable option for smaller businesses and small SharePoint installations.  The starter pack license can be used for SharePoint installations using a single Web Front End (your database server can still be separate) and up to 25 users.

We thought it was important to introduce this level of pricing not only because SharePoint is becoming so widely used by smaller businesses, but also because of the way SharePoint most typically gets deployed within the Enterprise.

The research for our free white paper so SharePoint End User adoption showed that very often SharePoint is initially utilised by one team or workgroup within an organisation, before gaining more widespread organisational use.  Our new $199 Starter Pack Pricing means that our products will now fall within budget for a small team or workgroup deployment.

We have also introduced a new “3-pack” license, which is a mid way option between the single server license and the “unlimited use” site license.  Research amongst our existing customers showed that very many farms use 3 Web Front End servers and separate indexing and database servers, so our 3-pack license offers an ideal and affordable solution for many farm deployments.

Adding these options to our Free Non-Profit licenses and 25% educational discounts means that we now have a pricing structure that we hope offers an affordable solution for everyone.

We hope you agree, and if you do have any comments or suggestions please get in touch.

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