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.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available New version 1.7.8 of SharePoint Reminder webpart is now available...
2. Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques Advanced SharePoint view and filter techniques focusing on the task...
3. 5 Things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Alerts SharePoint Alerts: an overview of capabilities, limitations and enhancements offered...

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 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.

LookOut’s CRM Template builds upon the the best of SharePoint adding relationship capability with great client and sales management functionality.  But there are some things that SP just doesn’t do all that well – and as most of us know, Alert Management is one of those things.

LookOut evaluated several options to improve the Alert situation when they came across our Reminder.  Clearly timely responses to customer issues are a fundamental part of Customer Relationship Management, so Lookout needed a flexible and adaptable Alert tool. The Pentalogic Reminder provided the functionality that LookOut was seeking.  They like the date based alerts, reminders of due soon and overdue items and the flexibility offered by using Reminder with views and filters.  They especially like the custom message capability and the way Reminder can be used as “light workflow” that are super simple to create and yet have great efficiency benefits for their clients.

Once LookOut was sold on Reminder, they turned their attention to our other products – PivotPoint and Planner.  A quick demo of the features and functions had LookOut seeing all sorts of uses for these products. They think Planner will help with things like scheduling sales teams’ diary’s and PivotPoint is great for turning CRM list data into real time business intelligence dashboards.

In the process of figuring out how our software is going to work with theirs LookOut suggested uses for our products that we would never have thought of – and spotted some obvious opportunities for new features that we were probably just too close to the products to see for ourselves.  In fact we are due to launch our first new feature as a direct result of a Lookout suggestion next week, so we owe them a big vote of thanks already.

LookOut is due to launch their Stakeholder & Issue Management Template for SharePoint in the second quarter of 2010.  This will be the first SharePoint product of its kind, and we are really looking forward to seeing how our products will add value to this application’s unique environment.

For more information on LookOut’s CRM and SRM SharePoint relationship products visit: http://www.lookout-software.com or email Alan Heather at: aheather@lookout-software.com

Related posts:

1. We’re now a Microsoft Certified Partner – with Software that “Works with Windows Server 2008″ SharePoint webpart specialists Pentalogic Technology have achieved Microsoft Certified Partner...
2. 2010: SharePoint New Year’s Resolutions A happy New Year to you – and 2010...
3. Tell Us Your SharePont Story and Win a Flip Video One of our New Years Resolutions for 2010 was...

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.

Related posts:

1. Case Study – Bowerman and Brooke Choose Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder for Job Tracking System So here we are on track with at least...
2. And the Winner Is . . . ! No, it’s not more about the Oscars, it’s our...
3. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available New version 1.7.8 of SharePoint Reminder webpart is now available...

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?

Related posts:

1. Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart This post shows how to use CSS to add gridlines...
2. Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart This post shows how to show data from more than...
3. SharePoint Archive Round-up A collection of links to useful SharePoint tricks, tips and...

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?

Related posts:

1. Tell Us Your SharePont Story and Win a Flip Video One of our New Years Resolutions for 2010 was...
2. SharePoint 2010 Ready – PHEW! Well, OK so it probably hasn’t been quite as...
3. 5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget what it...

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.

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

Related posts:

1. Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart This post shows how to use CSS to add gridlines...
2. SharePoint Calculated columns – Adding hours onto a date field A customer recently contacted me with an interesting question....
3. New version of SharePoint Planner Webpart (2.5.3) Version 2.5.3 of SharePoint Planner webpart is now available with...

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.

Over the past few weeks we have been working on a translation with one of our German customers and Planner v2.5.6, fully localized for German, is now available to download.

Depending on how SharePoint is setup you may have to perform some additional installation steps to enable the French or German language packs – please follow the instructions in the Languages FAQ.

And as ever, if you do have any suggestions, feedback or thoughts for us please do get in touch.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Planner Webpart – New Version 2.5.0 Now Available v2.5.0 of Pentalogic SharePoint Planner webpart is now available, the...
2. New version of SharePoint Planner Webpart (2.5.3) Version 2.5.3 of SharePoint Planner webpart is now available with...
3. New version of SharePoint Planner webpart (2.5.4) New version of SharePoint Planner webpart has enhanced functionality around...

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

• The Mark Weekends feature will now pick up your non working days and hours from SharePoints Regional Settings (WSS 3.0 / MOSS 2007 only)
• The This Week period settings will pick up the start of the week from regional settings

Regional Setting in WSS3.0

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

Thanks to Michael C and Michael S for these suggestions!

Related posts:

1. New version of SharePoint Planner Webpart (2.5.3) Version 2.5.3 of SharePoint Planner webpart is now available with...
2. SharePoint Planner Webpart – New Version 2.5.0 Now Available v2.5.0 of Pentalogic SharePoint Planner webpart is now available, the...
3. Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart This post shows how to use CSS to add gridlines...

Related posts:

1. New version of SharePoint Planner webpart (2.5.4) New version of SharePoint Planner webpart has enhanced functionality around...
2. SharePoint Planner Webpart – New Version 2.5.0 Now Available v2.5.0 of Pentalogic SharePoint Planner webpart is now available, the...
3. Adding gridlines to the SharePoint Planner webpart Gantt chart This post shows how to use CSS to add gridlines...

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!

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Planner Webpart – New Version 2.5.0 Now Available v2.5.0 of Pentalogic SharePoint Planner webpart is now available, the...
2. New version of SharePoint Planner Webpart (2.5.3) Version 2.5.3 of SharePoint Planner webpart is now available with...
3. Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart This post shows how to show data from more than...