We’ve just released a new version (v1.1.3) of our FilterPoint web part for SharePoint. We have had plenty of user feedback over the past few weeks and this new version has some added features and functionality that we hope you will all find useful.

As you know, FilterPoint already gives you the ability to set default values globally, to help get users to the most relevant information quickly.

And now new functionality in v1.1.3 will help each user get to their own individual information more quickly too.

There are 2 ways FilterPoint does this.  First by re-loading the last used filter values when you revisit a page.  And secondly by looking for FilterPoints on different pages that filter on the same fields, and getting them to fetch records with the same values.

So how could this help you?

Well, let’s take the example of 2 national sales account managers.  Freda’s biggest client is Big Corp and Sophie’s most important customer is Enormous Inc.  They each want to know what is going on with their key accounts on a daily basis.

So Freda and Sophie both look at dashboards that show sales activity, financial account status, cases and help tickets etc.  Freda always filters to see the stuff on Big Corp and Sophie always filters to see what’s happening with Enormous Inc.

Because FilterPoint will now save filter values between visits to a page each account manager will see information on her main client account as soon as she opens a page – so long as that was the last thing she looked at when she last visited the page.

Even better, once one FilterPoint is set up to filter for “Client = Big Corp” by Sophie, all other FilterPoints on the site will also look for information on “Client = Big Corp” and display this for Sophie, so long as this field and value exist in the lists and web parts they have been applied to.

These two new features should be a real time saver for many users.

In addition, there are other new features in FilterPoint v1.1.3:

• Allow you to send multiple filter options to list view web parts when using multi-choice fields.
• Allows you to use vertical as well as horizontal orientation and
• Adds better error handling for situations where a List, Field or View that FilterPoint is using is later deleted.

If you’re an existing customer or trial user you can download and upgrade to the latest version.

And if you haven’t yet tried FilterPoint why not download a 30 day free trial now?

After many months of work we are delighted to announce that FilterPoint is now available to purchase.

Filtering is one of the things that any serious SharePoint user is going to need to do at some point. As you put more data into SharePoint lists become longer and you will need a quick and easy way to get to the items you are looking for.

When you create applications and dashboards, bringing together information from different data sources and displaying it in different ways with Web Parts adding filters will make your applications and dashboards dynamic – giving users the information they need, when they need it.

But when you start filtering you are going to quickly come across things that you wish you could do with SharePoint’s built in filters, but frustratingly just can’t.

So in the same way that we built Reminder to improve on the functionality of SharePoint Alerts, and Planner to improve on Gantt charts and calendars, we have built FilterPoint to give a little more power to your SharePoint filtering.

If you are working with SharePoint 2010 Foundation or WSS your filtering options are limited to static filtered views. Filtered views are great for getting at data sets that you want to see regularly – like “this month’s sales” for example. Set the view up once and it’s there whenever you need it.

But what if you have 100 clients and want to be able to look at “this client’s sales” for any of them? Setting up a filtered view for each client, and navigating to it is going to be quite a drag.

With FilterPoint your filter can be set up in seconds, allowing users to flip between the different data sets they need with just a couple of clicks.

With MOSS and 2010 Enterprise you get more filter power. But we still felt there were some things missing. So for example even with MOSS filters you can’t:

• Set up several Filters within one filter web part
• In 2007, send many filters to one filter consumer list or Web Part (e.g. filter on both customer and product).
• Use different styles of filter, like Free Text, drop down lists or Radio Buttons
• Clear filters with a single click.

So even though MOSS offers more filtering options, there are still some significant gaps and we believe that FilterPoint goes a long way towards filling these.

Of course FilterPoint isn’t the only 3^rd party filtering web part on the market and you can see how we match up to the competition by taking a look at our comparison chart here.

When we were looking at the competition one thing we noticed was that some of the most useful filter Web Parts – the ones offering the most functionality – were incredibly complex to set up. You would need the patience of a saint and a PhD in SharePoint (if such a thing existed!) So we have worked very hard to keep the setup of FilterPoint quick and simple. Take a look at our short on-line demo here, and let us know whether we have succeeded.

We’ve also tried to keep the prices competitive. Our Starter Pack license comes in at $199 and a Single Server License is $595.

And of course, like all of our products FilterPoint comes with a 30 day free trial and a no quibble money back guarantee.

And for existing customers we are offering a 25% discount for purchases made by 31st March 2011.  Email sales@pentalogic.net for your discount code.

So why not give it a try today?

As FilterPoint is our new baby we are very keen to know what you think of it – so please let us have your comments and feedback.

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 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.

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.

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 – just setup a new view with a filter to only show those records where Scheduled Delivery Date is greater than Estimated Delivery Date.

But of course you can’t do this because in SharePoint view filters you can only use one field per filter expression - the other operand has to be fixed (like the string “27th March 2010″) and you get this helpful error message :-

"Filter value is not in a supported date format" or "Fitler Value is not a valid Number"

This will happen any time you are trying to setup a SharePoint view filter to compare one field to another.

The workaround is to use a calculated column to compare the field – then filter on the comparison.

So in our example we setup a new Calculated column called “Days Late” Set its type to be Numeric and the formula to be =IF(ISBLANK([Estimated Delivery Date]) , "", [Scheduled Delivery Date]-[Estimated Delivery Date]) The key part of the formula is the [Scheduled Delivery Date]-[Estimated Delivery Date]. The IF and ISBLANK stop the calculation being performed for empty date values – otherwise SharePoint will assume 1st Jan 1900 and show values like 40,000 days early! (If you copy this formula into your calcualted column and get “The formula contains a syntax error or is not supported.” errors check that you haven’t got any extra spaces anywhere and that the field names are correct) So the result of this formula will be the number of days its going to be late - if its on time then it will be a zero and if its going to be early its a positive number of days (aka negative days late!)

The next step is to setup a new view for Delayed Orders and set the filter to only show items when the Days Late column is greater than 0. You may also want to filter out those deliveries that have already happened – you can do this by adding Status is not equal to completed or “Actual Delivery date is ” or whatever works with our data.

Automated Emails each time a delivery date slips

For a bonus point I told them how they could setup a Reminder Web Part that would watch this view and send out automated emails to the account manager (or even directly to the customer) when an orders delivery date slips – you can even set it up so that if date slips again another email is sent. Tips You can use this technique when you are comparing other type of fields in SharePoint such as Numeric or Currency or even text based fields – First use a calculated field for the comparison then filter on the result of the calculated field. You can’t use this type of technique for showing the number of days between a date and [Today] – not even with the infamous fake Today column trick because it doesn’t work. But you can use Today in the filter part so you can use filters for view such as tasks that are due in the next 7 days or overdue by 7 days or more.

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?

Wrong!

What we want to do is “not send alerts to me, for items assigned to me, when I have created or amended an item myself”

So, lets have a look at a Task List first:

OK, so that’s fine, just select “Alert Me “  from the “List Actions” drop down and then from “Send me an alert when”  we need to select the “Someone else changes an item assigned to me” option.  Nice and easy.

So now lets look at a Project Tasks list:

Oh dear, the option we need “Send Alert when Someone else changes an item assigned to me” simply doesn’t exist.  Even though there is an “assigned to” column in the list.

It’s the same story with any other list – there is no simply one click mechanism to turn off alerts to yourself.

So how do we do this then?

Well you need to set up a filtered view.

Call it something like; “My Items, Modified by others”.

Set up the filter so the Assigned to” column is equal to [Me] and the “Modified by” column is not equal to [Me].  Like this:

Then, when you go to set up your Alert you get this option:

So, it’s do-able, but its a bit of a hassle.  In order to simply switch off alerts to yourself, for items assigned to you that you have just created or amended you need to create a filtered view which you wouldn’t really need for any other reason. And the alert will have to be set up individually for each user of the list who needs this functionality.

This annoying little glitch doesn’t just apply to SharePoint out of the box alerts, as far as we are aware you will also have the same problem in all the 3rd party alert enhancement tools on the market.

So for our Reminder we decided to eliminate the problem:

Ticking the “Don’t email the last modifier” box will solve the problem in one click, for everyone on the list.  We hope it makes you working day just a little bit easier.

This feature comes with newly released Reminder v1.7.6.

Victor from New York asked

Is there a way to configure a Reminder webpart to send an email when task item status in the task list is set to “completed”?

Sure there is!

In this case the trick is to use a SharePoint Views to filter out the tasks you are interested in.

In the “Tasks due and Overdue” example we show now to use the built in Active Tasks view to send email alerts only for overdue tasks that are not complete.

For this requirement we are going to setup a new View to just show the Completed tasks

• Create a new View using a filter of “Status = Completed” – call it something imaginative like Completed Tasks.

• If you are not familiar with SharePoint views then this link should help

• Then you would setup a Reminder web part to watch the Complete Tasks view

• Set Send When to Always – because you want an email alert to be sent as soon as a Task is complete, regardless of any Due dates

• Set-up a recipient, subject and message  (remember that you can customize the contents of the email alert)

• Leave everything else as default (send email once and check list every 1 hour) and then you should be good to go – one email for each completed record will be sent within an average of 30 minutes (1 hour / 2) of its status being changed to completed.

This will send out emails for any completed tasks that are already in your list and some may be quite old – so you might want to look at this tip on how to stop emails being sent for old items.

Reminder is pretty flexible but this also means that its not always obvious how to set something up. The Common Scenario examples may give you the answer you need but you can always contact us, describe what you are trying to do and we can give some pointers.

Introduction

We discussed in a previous article how to customise SharePoint’s built in Task List and briefly looked at the power of Views with Filters. In this article we will build upon that by demonstrating some advanced use of Filters.

This article assumes that you are already familiar with Views and Filters – if not please review the previous article.

Overdue Tasks

To show a task lists Overdue tasks use the following Filter :-  Status – is not equal to – Completed And Due Date – is less than – [Today] Note – [Today] is a special marker that SharePoint understands as the current date.

My Overdue Tasks

Add the following to the Overdue Tasks filter  Assigned To – is equal to – [Me] Note – [Me] is a special marker that SharePoint understands as the current user.

Items added in Last 7 Days

It would be nice to be able to enter something like

• Created – is less than – [Today] – 7

in the filter, but alas its not quite that simple!

[EDIT - This work around was written in early 2006 and WSS 2 / SPS 2003 wouldn't accept this - in WSS 3 / MOSS 2007 you can now use a FILTER formula like [Today]-7 as long as you keep the spaces out!]

The workaround is to create a Calculated column and then filter on that column.

Select Modify Settings and Columns, then Add a new columnGive the column name something like “Filter 7 Days” and select a Calculated column
Enter a suitable DescriptionIn the Formula box enter “=Created+7″Choose Date and Time format and Date Only  Clear Add to default view as we don’t want this field to appear on any of the views
Create a new viewSetup a filter to show only :-  Filter 7 Days – is greater than or equal to – [Today]

Items Due in the next 7 Days

[EDIT - This work around was written in early 2006 and WSS 2 / SPS 2003 wouldn't accept this - in WSS 3 / MOSS 2007 you can now use a FILTER formula like [Due Date]-7 as long as you keep the spaces out!]

Select Modify Settings and Columns, then Add a new columnGive the column name something like “Filter Coming Due” and select a Calculated column
Enter a suitable DescriptionIn the Formula box enter “=Due Date-7″Choose Date and Time format and Date Only  Clear Add to default view as we don’t want this field to appear on any of the views
Create a new viewSetup a filter to show only :-  Status – is not equal to – Completed And Filter Coming Due – is less than or equal to – [Today] And Due Date – is greater than or equal to – [Today] This will ensure that the view only displays Uncompleted items that are due in the next 7 Days but are not Overdue.

Items due in the current Calendar Month

If you need to filter for a Calendar Week/Month (rather than a rolling 7/30 day period) then this post details how

How To Use Filters in SharePoint to show items in the current Calendar Month