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.

Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget what it was like to be a new SharePoint user.  Sometimes you need a wakeup call to remind you of the “WOW” moments of delighted surprise when you discovered an amazing new feature, and the “AAAGGGGGHHHH!” moments of frustration, when you hit upon something SharePoint obviously should do, but for some inexplicable reason just doesn’t.

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?

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 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 – an option to use horizontal gridlines has now been built into version 2.4

Alessandro from Italy contacted us wanting to know if there was a way of adding gridlines to SharePoint Planner so it’s easier to visually connect up the column on the left with the corresponding timeline.

With a few Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) ninja moves you can change the display from something like this.

The following snippet does the trick and can be added to an individual page using a Content Editor Web Part thereby changing just the Planner web parts that appear on that page.

DIV.SharePointPlanner2 TABLE.plgx_Default TR TD
{
border-bottom : 1px solid #B9D1F4;
}

Alternatively you can add it to the SharePointPlanner.css file that all planner web parts use or download one that’s already been edited. There can be multiple copies of this file depending on how you install SharePoint and Planner and they can be in different places so it’s best to do a file search and replace them all.

If you are a CSS Ninja then you can make other changes to the appearance and you will find some helpful comments in the CSS file to guide you.

But remember – if you reinstall or upgrade to a later version of Planer you will lose any changes so do keep a copy of your modified files.

We are considering adding this as an option to the configuration tool part so if you think it would be useful then let us know.

And if you’ve got any other questions or suggestions we would love to hear them!