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.

A happy New Year to you – and 2010 looks like being an exciting one in the wonderful world of SharePoint

Here at Pentalogic we have a good crop of SharePoint 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?

Update: CrossTab has been renamed PivotPoint

Our newest web part for SharePoint is a data analysis tool called “CrossTab”

We really like it: it works a bit like an Excel pivot table but has some extra functionality that helps you to unlock the data patterns and trends in SharePoint lists.

But nobody except us seems to get it.  So we have prepared a quick video demo to show you how it works.

Have a look at it and let us know if you “Get” CrossTab, or if we are on our own on this one!

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