Posts Tagged ‘Planner’

SharePoint Archive Round-up

Date:June 17th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

As you’ve probably noticed we have had a few changes on our SharePoint blog in recent weeks.  We’ve been doing some work on making it a little more user friendly and a bit nicer to look at (hope we haven’t spoiled it with the photos!)

Whilst I was working on the blog I noticed that we have quite a few little gems hidden away in the archives. Old posts – things that were written maybe a couple of years ago, that those of you who are new to the blog might not be aware of, but might find useful.  The useful ones fall into a few categories – general SharePoint tricks, tips and ideas, and ideas and tips for users of our web parts.  So here they are, I hope you find them useful.

SharePoint tricks tips and ideas

Extend and customise SharePoint Task lists

Task Lists are one of the best loved and most used features of SharePoint and this post shows you how to better tailor them to meet your particular needs.

Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques

This article explores some of the uses of SharePoint Views and Filters.

Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns

SharePoint Out of the box doesn’t automatically distinguish between working days and weekends but if you are setting things like job duration or due dates you may need to – this article shows you how.

The Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Calculated Columns

This article explains why the often repeated trick for using [Today] in SharePoint calculated columns does not work, and suggests workarounds.

The … ehem… Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Filters

This one looks at the differences between SharePoint 2003 and 2007 when using [Today] in filters.

Setting a default duration for new SharePoint Calender Events

So you might be a medical receptionist scheduling appointments for doctors, appointments are always 45 minutes long unless the doctor tells you differently, how much easier would it be to just have SharePoint create an end time 45 minutes after the start time automatically?

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

It’s easy to think of occasions when you might want to filter a SharePoint list to show items falling in the current calendar month: “sales this month” springs to mind, or “subscriptions due for renewal this month”. This post shows you have to achieve this using calculated columns.

SharePoint Reminder Webpart Ideas

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time

Lots of people use Reminder to send an alert when a message is due soon or overdue.  Usually its fine for the message to go out at a fixed time before or after the event, for all list items, but there are occasions where you might want to vary the times at which you send your alerts.  For example, sending alerts for overdue helpdesk items: for high priority items you might want to send an alert when an item is 1 hour overdue, whereas for low priority an alert for items 1 day overdue might be fine.  This article shows you how.

Customize SharePoint Reminder Emails with Merge Data

Whilst SharePoint’s out of the box alert emails come in a standard format, with Reminder its possible to customize the alert emails you send by merging data from your list items.

Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items.

There are some situations where, when you are setting up a Reminder for the first time, you could end up sending out alerts for a lot of very old list items, this post shows you how to avoid doing that.

Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

If you are using Reminder to drive simple workflow you may very well want to send an email when a task is completed – maybe when a holiday request form has been filled in for example.  This post shows you how.

SharePoint Planner Webpart Ideas

Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Shows you a few of the things that aren’t possible with SharePoint OOTB gantt charts, but can be done with Planner.

New SharePoint Partnership – Pentalogic and LookOut Software

Date:April 9th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , , ,
Category: General, Partners Comments:0 ;
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_logo_sml


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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Tell Us Your SharePont Story and Win a Flip Video

Date:February 16th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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.

 ultra_pink_front_nousb

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.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Date:February 3rd, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:3 ;

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:

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2010: SharePoint New Year’s Resolutions

Date:January 18th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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.

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Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

Date:October 14th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: , , , , , ,
Category: Calculated Columns, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:1 ;

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

With Planner you can show multiple columns in the Category or on the Timeline of a Gantt chart by using a calculated column to merge fields together.

concat-columns
For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-


  • From your list click Settings > Create Column
  • Set a name such as “Category”
  • Choose Calculated for the type
  • In formula enter (where [Title] etc is the name of the columns you want to merge)
      =[Priority] & " : " & [Title]
  • Uncheck ‘Add to default view’ checkbox if you don’t want this appearing for the normal list view.
  • In Planner you can now select this column.

You can merge multiple columns together, for example :-

   =[Priority] & " : " & [Title] & " - " & [Assigned To]

You can also use SharePoint standard functions and formula (many similar to excel) such as :-

   =Text([Start Time],"mmm-yyyy") " : " & [Title]

Which would prefix the Title with Month and year, like so  October-2009 : Your title here

To display the the duration in days you could use

   =DATEDIF([Start Time],[End Time],"d") & " Days"

See some more examples of common functions

Grußworte Deutschland! German Version of Pentalogic Planner for SharePoint

Date:August 18th, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: , ,
Category: SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

We are happy to be able to let you know that a German version of the Pentalogic Planner web part for SharePoint is now available.

Although Planner was already partially localized for German, so that German end users would have see Month and Day names in their own language, administration and set up screens were previously only available in English and French.

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New version of SharePoint Planner webpart (2.5.4)

Date:July 7th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: , ,
Category: SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

A new version (2.5.4) of SharePoint Planner webpart is available to download with the following minor changes :-

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New version of SharePoint Planner Webpart (2.5.3)

Date:June 15th, 2009 Author:Ryan Tags: , ,
Category: SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

A new version (2.5.3) of SharePoint Planner is available to download with the following changes :-

  • Milestones are now colour coded along with Timelines
  • Correction to an error that occurred if a users regional settings (e.g. dd-mm-yyyyy) were different to a sites (e.g. mm-dd-yyyy).

You can simply download and install the new version – there is no need to remove the old version first.

Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart

Date:October 30th, 2008 Author:Ryan Tags: , , ,
Category: SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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.

Planner Gridlines Example

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.

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