There are many instances where you might want to view a set of SharePoint list records which have been filtered on a comparison between values in 2 columns.  You might want to view a list of all sales reps who have failed to hit their targets: Actual SalesCredit Limit, or employees who have not used their full vacation entitlement: Vacation Entitlement>Days taken.

A customer recently contacted me with just this type of question :-

They use a SharePoint list to keep track of orders waiting to be manufactured and delivered – so amongst other fields they have Scheduled Delivery Date (which they have promised to a customer) and the Estimated Delivery Date which is kept up to date with the latest estimate. Most of the time the two agree but sometimes for various reasons the delivery date slips.

They have been using Reminder to send out automated emails for upcoming orders and ones that had just been missed but they wanted to setup a view that would show only orders where the Estimated delivery date was later than the date they had told the customer. Account managers could then use this list to keep customers up to date – “There is a delay on that order we have scheduled for you for next month, we estimate it will be ready on the 17th”

Sounded pretty simple to me and I confidently told them how they could do it Read the rest of this entry »

Last week we had an email from a customer who was confused about his options for SharePoint 2010. He was planning to move his 5 WSS site across to SharePoint 2010 Foundation – but had found this document from Microsoft:

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Licensing-Details.aspx

which seems to suggest that sites and Workspaces were not available in Foundation, only in SharePoint 2010 standard edition or above.  Well we knew this wasn’t right;  but that wasn’t what the info from Microsoft seemed to be saying.

This gave us a reminder of just how confusing our friends at Microsoft can make things.  So we thought we would gather together some handy resources for all of you who may be thinking of moving over to SharePoint 2010. As always we have focussed mainly on users and administrators.  I hope you find it useful.

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You know how satisfying it is when you read something, instinctively know it’s right, then have something happen that gives you concrete proof?  Well we had one of those moments this week – and I wanted to share. We read quite a few business blogs and for down to earth, quality advice Jason Cohen is our man – Joel Spolsky sometimes comes up with the goods, but he can be a bit full of himself, we don’t get Seth Godin at all – seems to have made a great career out of stating the blindingly obvious – but Jason; on the money, pretty much every time.

So this week’s post from Jason was on the importance of good tech support – and the prevalence of tech support which is anything but good.  Done right, Jason says, tech support is sales. We read the post, nodding sagely in agreement.

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A customer recently contacted me with an interesting question.

They were using a SharePoint task list to help schedule jobs for field engineers but rather than have a Start Date and End Date field they wanted to have a Start Date and Duration field and automatically work out the End Date.

So End Date = Start Date + Duration

They were then planning to display this using Planner in the By Category view which is idea for resource booking as it makes it easy to see when a resource is booked or free (SharePoints built in gantt chart can’t do this swimlane style of view and doesn’t support using calculated columns).

Now this is easy to do if the Duration is specified in days – in fact you just use the equation above – but what if Duration is in hours or minutes?

First port of call is this page from Microsoft showing examples of common date time formula you can use in SharePoint calculated columns hmmm, adding days OK… adding months Check… adding years OK too….but nothing about hours. Back to the drawing board.

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With all the furore surrounding the business release of SharePoint 2010 it would have been easy to miss the launch (or relaunch) of another little Microsoft product in the SharePoint space which quite neatly addresses some of my personal SharePoint bug bears.

Wonderful though SharePoint is there are always a few things we wish it would do better.  Personally I have always been a little frustrated by the limitations on sharing with people outside of your own organization, the difficulties around working off-line and with the difficulties of moving documents from your PC and other applications, into, and out of SharePoint.

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Well, OK so it probably hasn’t been quite as much effort as climbing Everest – but sometimes it’s felt that way! Last week Microsoft made the “final” release version of SharePoint 2010 available to developers and large corporates.  So we have been able to get on with our “final” set of compatibility tests and we can now announce that all of our products are SharePoint 2010 Compatible.

When you make software that works on a particular platform – whether it’s Windows, SharePoint, or the iPhone – the introduction of a major new version is really exciting, but it can also be very stressful. The introduction of a new feature might open up lots of new possibilities, but it could equally well present new problems for the way your own software works with the platform, or even make your application completely redundant.

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A site is the key place within SharePoint to bring together all the people, content and activities associated with a particular process, project or group.  And if the process or project is regularly repeated within your organization having a site template for it saves a lot of time and helps to ensure consistency and facilitate continuous improvement.

There are any number of scenarios where you might use a SharePoint site template, for this example we are using a recruitment process, but you could equally well set one up for any regularly repeated process or project you manage: training courses, audits, conferences and sales exhibitions, product testing, office moves, procurement, risk assessment, staff appraisals – the list goes on.

SharePoint comes with some Out of the Box Templates, there are other available on-line, free or to purchase.  But all of these are “off the peg” options: great if you are short on time, but they’re not going to be a perfect fit for your business processes.

To get a SharePoint template that fits your processes perfectly you are going to have to make your own – and thankfully it’s exceptionally easy to do – so here’s how.

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How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

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We are really pleased to let you know about our latest Strategic Partnership with a SharePoint relationship management development company, LookOut Software of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

LookOut has been in the CRM software business since 1994.  In 2007 they were introduced to SharePoint and made the decision to change development platforms and haven’t looked back since.

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This is the first in a series of interviews with our partners  – giving insights into what’s happening in their part of the world and in their part of the world of SharePoint. And our first interviewee is Veronique Palmer. We first met Veronique in discussions on the SharePoint Experts Group on LinkedIn, which she co-manages and moderates.  Veronique is based in Johannesburg, South Africa and is owner and founder of Lets Collaborate.

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