We have started beta testing our newest product SharePoint TeamTime and we expect it to be finished in the next couple of weeks!

Sign me up! Wait… what is it again?

TeamTime is a time tracking site template for SharePoint. Users track their time by entering it into a timesheet (a.k.a. timecard) or by punching in and out of tasks.

You can then get an overview of everyone’s time logged using our custom reporting tool and embedded versions of PivotPoint and FilterPoint that come preconfigured in the site.

Tell me more!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a glimpse of what’s inside:

‘My Dashboard’

‘Analysis by Week’

To look in more detail at how it works (or just to see more pictures), you can have a glance at our manual: SharePoint TeamTime manual.

If you want to be notified when its released then signup here.

Whats a Beta test and can I help?

Its the final stage in testing a software product before its released into the real world. All the major bugs should have been squashed but there may be some minor problems left. The idea is to get broad feedback from ‘real’ users that will help pick up problems, omissions or things that are just a little confusing that you wouldn’t find otherwise.

Beta testing isn’t for everyone – these are the things you should bear in mind :-

• You need to be reasonably proficient with SharePoint.
• You will need an in-house deployment of SharePoint 2010 or 2007 – its not suitable for BPOS/Office 365
• You should have a “non-production” environment to test in.
• You will need to have some time free to give it a good test and provide feedback.

If you would like to help us Beta test this then please e-mail us: support@pentalogic.net

We have spent a lot of time over the past month working on the beta version of FilterPoint. Our team of professional testers have been working hard to check for compatibility with all versions of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and a wide range of browsers, as well as looking for bugs and challenging us on some aspects of the usability of the UI.

And we also owe a huge vote of thanks to our beta volunteers who have been testing out the product in the real world.  Our volunteers and not only uncovered some bugs, but also come up with suggestions for additional things that we could include in the first release.  Some of these we have already added and they include:

1. Date Picker- allows you to set filtering for a particular date using the familiar pop up calendar.
2. People Picker – allows you to use the familiar SharePoint people
3. Options for (All) and (Empty) Filters – allows you to control what you see when no filter is applied, and when there is no value in the field you are filtering on.
4. Default Values including [Today] and [Me] – very useful for getting quickly to your most relevant stuff.

We feel this has added useful new functionality to v1 and we have a long list of things we plan to put in v2.

We have now also set pricing for FilterPoint, which will be in line with our Planner and PivotPoint products:

$199 Starter Pack for up to 25 SharePoint users

$595 for a single server license

$1,395  for a 3 pack – ideal for farms, covering 3 web front end servers.

and Site Licenses from $2,975 – covering your for unlimited SharePoint users and servers in one geographical location.

FilterPoint will be available for purchase before Christmas – so register today for your 25% discount!

We’re pretty excited about this product as we think web part connections and dynamic filtering are a great ‘hidden’ feature in SharePoint so we want to build up a library of examples of how you can use this – do you have any use cases you would like to share with us?

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.

So as you can imagine we were all over the public beta version of SP2010 as soon as it became available last November. We were very pleased to see that whilst there are lots of fantastic new features in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft haven’t introduced anything within the Out of the Box functionality that undermines our own products. For users of SharePoint 2010 our PivotPoint, Planner and Reminder will continue to add valuable planning, reporting and alert functionality to the Out of the Box offering, and we have also spotted some interesting new possibilities for product development.

Over the past few months we have carried out extensive in house and third party testing on all of our products in the beta version of SP 2010. There are some significant changes in this latest version of SharePoint and we have been busy making sure that our products function properly with these changes.

But we know from past experience that there can be significant differences between the beta version of any piece of software and the final release candidate – that’s what a beta is for after all.  so we know we wouldn’t be finished until we saw the final release candidate – and last week we got it and were able to run our final set of tests.

So we can now say, with confidence “Yes, we are SharePoint 2010 ready.” SharePoint 2010 versions of all of our products are available to download from the website for existing customers who are upgrading to 2010 or new customers who are running or trialling a SP2010 deployment.

Although there is a lot of excitement about SharePoint 2010 we know that many people won’t be upgrading overnight. We know 15% of our clients are still using SharePoint 2003. SharePoint 2010 only runs on 64 bit servers. This means that anyone currently running on 32 bit servers will need to upgrade their hardware before they can upgrade to SP2010. Though this would be normal practice for many large corporate, for smaller businesses on tighter budgets it introduces extra costs and could be a potential barrier to upgrades.

So whilst we are now fully SharePoint 2010 compatible, all of our products also remain compatible with all previous versions of SharePoint and we intend of continue to support all previous versions for the foreseeable future.

And now we are done with compatibility testing for the time being we can get on with some new product development – which should be much more fun!

SharePoint 2010 will be available on general release in May. There are 8 versions and as yet Microsoft have made no announcements regarding pricing.

Update: CrossTab has now been renamed Pivotpoint

This web part gives a CrossTab view of a SharePoint® list helping you to summarize and analyze data.

(CrossTabs are more commonly known from Microsoft Excel® as a Pivot Tables – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table)

There are almost limitless ways to use a CrossTab – here is one quick example

CrossTab - Sales example

We take a Sales list and first generate a CrossTab showing sales by product over time. We can see a big increase in sales from £11,000 in October to £70,000 in November and most of that increase is due to sales of the “Can-o-matic” product.

The next CrossTab shows the same data by Product/Sales Team expressed as a percentage of total sales. We can immediately see that the Regional sales team and the “Can-o-matic” are a winning combination generating 65.4% of revenue.

Previously you would have to export this data to Excel or use MOSS Enterprise Excel Services to perform the same sort of analysis. Now using the CrossTab web part you can summarize and cross tabulate your data for easy analysis in all versions of SharePoint.

This is one of several new products in the pipeline that we are very excited about – if you would like to help with Beta testing then please get in touch