Customers who use our SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit often ask about the best way to deal with public holidays.  Public Holidays tend to affect the whole team.  So you want them clearly marked on your Vacation Planner dashboard, but you certainly don’t want to have to enter each public holiday for each team member as a separate event.  And you probably also don’t want to be firing off absence approval requests for each holiday either.

So here are our suggestions on the best way of handling Public Holidays within the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner Toolkit.

First you need modify your list.  Go to list settings and open up your “Reason” field.  In addition to your existing reasons for absence add a new reason – Public Holiday.

Then open up the settings for your “Requested By” column and make sure you have “Allow Multiple Selections” checked.

Now you need to modify your Planner web part.

So, “Edit Shared Web Part” then, under your “Category”  picker, check the “split multiple selections box”.  This is key if you want to be able to create just one event for each public holiday but have it show up against each of your team members.

Now go down to the Planner Colors section of the Toolpart and update your color coding by column section to include an extra color code for your new Reason for absence that you created in your list – Public Holiday – I am going for a nice orange.

Now check your PivotPoint web part. For this to work you are going to need PivotPoint 2.1.4 or above.  Download it here if you don’t have it already (free to all PivotPoint v2 customers, or v1 customers with Premium Support). In the Toolpart make sure that in the “Split Multiple Values” dropdown you have chosen “Split Records”.  This will ensure that when we enter a 1 day public holiday for 4th of July, for example, 1 day gets entered against each team member in the pivot table.

Finally, before we start adding events, to ensure that we don’t accidentally fire off approval requests and notifications all over the place, access the Reminder web parts that you have set up and in the “Reminder Testing”  section at the bottom of the Toolpart enter your own email address so that any emails generated whilst you are adding the public holidays go to you.  This will be a better solution than simply switching the Reminders off as you work, as it will mean that if any “real” requests are submitted whilst you are working you will be able to redirect them, rather than them being lost.

Add a Public Holiday

So, from your Planner dashboard add a new item.  Let’s do 4th July. Set it up as an all day event.  Set yourself as “approved by”, you will need to approve the event before it will show up in people’s dashboards.  Now add your whole team to the “Requested By” field.  It’s easiest to do this using the Address Book.  Now ensure you have selected “Public Holiday” in your Reason field.  Approve the request.  Discard all the “Request approved” notifications that are redirected through to you.  And now you will see your public holiday, nicely marked against each of your team members.  Repeat as needed for all of your other public holidays, remove the redirect from your Reminder emails and then you can relax for another year!

I hope this helps you in using Vacation Planner.  If you have any questions or requests about the Vacation Planner we would love to hear them.

SharePoint Workflows are one of the magic parts of the solution – the bits when even the most cynical and sceptical end user gets to see the benefit.

Instead of emails and bits of paper flying round your organization, getting lost, forgotten and falling between the cracks, everything is managed and driven centrally by SharePoint.

There are a whole load of scenarios where you could use workflows:

• Vacation approvals
• Expense claims
• Purchase order Authorisation
• Timesheet approvals
• Invoice payment approvals
• Helpdesk escalations

SharePoint can handle all of these processes seamlessly and automatically.  Seeking appropriate approvals, escalating, notifying, referring back and reminding as needed, whilst keeping all documentation secure in one central location.

So, that’s the upside.  The downside is that to create a SharePoint workflow you need to use either SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio.  Whilst SharePoint Designer isn’t all that hard to master it is a very powerful tool and capable of doing serious damage in the wrong hands, for this reason many organizations keep it looked firmly away from most users.  Visual Studio on the other hand really is hard to master – strictly for the mega-brains in your IT department.  So this means that cooking up a bit of Workflow magic out of the box is out of the question for most SharePoint users.

The alternative is to use SharePoint Reminder to create your SharePoint workflows. Using SharePoint Reminder and some clever filtered list views you can easily create multi stage workflows to cover any of the scenarios listed above.

This use case walks you through how to create a 2 stage supplier invoice approval workflow, using SharePoint Reminder and a standard SharePoint document library.

Reminder only drives simple workflow, it doesn’t have the advanced logic of SharePoint OTTB Workflows and it won’t do things like automatically updating lists or other systems.  But for a lot of your day to day processes, you might find that it does just what you need.

We have noticed that lots of you seem to be upgrading to SharePoint 2010 now.  And lots of you are asking what you need to do to upgrade Reminder.

We know the whole process of upgrading your whole SharePoint installation to a new SharePoint version can be quite stressful.  So we have put some work in to trying to make the bit of that upgrade that relates to Reminder as simple and painless as possible.

We have put together a step-by-step guide to painless Reminder upgrading, which you can see here.

In summary:

• If you hold a commercial license for SharePoint Reminder there will be no charge for moving to 2010, unless you are adding additional servers to your installation.
• You should be able to move to 2010 without losing any of your existing Reminder settings.
• If you are moving to a new server we may need to issue you a new license key, there will be no charge for this as long as you are de-commissioning your old server.

Read the full guide to a smooth Reminder 2010 upgrade here.

And if you have any questions or queries please do let up know.

We all know how great SharePoint Reminder for sending internal reminders and driving simple workflow. But have you tried it yet for managing the bits of your processes that happen outside of your organization? Sending emails to customers, suppliers or other contacts who are not members of your SharePoint deployment, or even members of your organization.

This is really easy to do and there are lots of places you might use this. Let’s look at some of the issues you’ll need to bear in mind.

General Tips

When you are sending emails to people outside your organization you need to ensure that:

• you can actually send external emails from SharePoint
• the email comes with a recognizable “from” label.
• any replies go to an address where they will be dealt with.
• don’t send a hyperlink to the list item in your email

First,  to be sure that your STMP server allows relaying to outside addresses then you may want to use the diagnostics tool to send a test email to a private email address. – http://www.pentalogic.net/sharepoint-products/reminder/reminder-manual?p=configurationtool%2Fdiagnostics.htm

When sending emails to people outside your organization you will want to make sure that what shows up in the inbox is recognizably from you.  You don’t want your customers getting emails from “SP2010 Intranetxyz”, or some other random label. SharePoint automatically labels outgoing emails with the name of the site or subsite they have come from.  So for this example we are going to set up a sub site called “Locks and Latches CS” so that all of our emails to customers and suppliers will be clearly identifiable as coming from Locks and Latches Customer Services.

When a customer or other external contact replies to your email it’s important that that reply gets routed to an address where a real person is going to read it and deal with it.  You can write “please contact service@zyz.com in the body of your email until you are blue in the face – but you can be sure that a good percentage of customers who want to reply to you are just going to ignore that and click on “Reply”.  By default SharePoint will route all replies to emails it has generated to one central address – one address for the whole SharePoint deployment.  This address typically gets lots of mail, and often doesn’t get very closely monitored, so in Reminder we have the ability to override that and specify a “Reply To” address for each Reminder you set up.  For this example we are going to have all replies go to customer.services@locksandlatches.com.  If in your own set up particular people are responsible for their own order you might choose to have replies going to the person who created the order record “Created By” or maybe the account manager for that customer “Assigned To”.  The main thing is that you ensure replies go to an email address which is monitored, and where they will be responded to.

Don’t send out dead end links or useless information. Both SharePoint’s built in Alert Me feature and SharePoint Reminder send out a hyperlink to the relevant list item in the alert/Reminder email by default.  If you are sending emails to external contacts this link will very likely be of no use, as the contact probably won’t have permissions to view your SharePoint site.  In SharePoint out of the box alerts you can’t customize your alert emails, but in Reminder you can, so when sending emails to an external contact remember to uncheck the “Include Hyperlink” box.

Reminder Set Up

In this example we have used Reminder to send an email to a customer each time a new order is received.  The set up of a Reminder when sending an external email is really much the same as the set up of any other Reminder.

In this example Reminder is set to watch our orders list.  It’s set to watch the “Order Received” column, and email the address in the “customer email” column when “Order Received” is “Due Today”  – or equal to today.  Reminder is checking the list every hour, which means customers should get a confirmation email within an hour of their order being received.

Because “customer email” is simply a text field, and not recognized by SharePoint as containing an email address you will need to check the “Show all fields” box.

Customize your emails with merge data from your list, just as you would with a Word Mail merge.

And away you go, SharePoint Reminder emails for your customers.

Where Else Might I Use This?

There are loads of places where you could use this with customers, suppliers or other external contacts:

1. delivery notification emails for customers
2. overdue invoice emails for customers
3. stock re-order emails for suppliers.
4. meeting reminders for contacts.

to name but a few.

And if you have other examples of using Reminder to send emails to external contacts we would love to hear them.

Our Reminder Web Part – which adds advanced email alerting features to SharePoint – has recently been updated.

The main new feature in version 1.7.9 is support for host-named site collections (aka host header based site collections).

A host header is the main part of a url – such as www.pentalogic.net or sharepoint.yourcompany.com

Normally SharePoint uses separate Web Applications for different host headers and whilst you can use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to map two different urls to the same site (e.g. sharepoint for internal access  and http://sharepoint.yourcompany.com for external access to the same site) you can’t have entirely different sites served by the same web application on different urls.

Why does this matter to you?

Well, for the vast majority of you it doesn’t! In fact you can’t create host header site collections using SharePoints Central admin tool – you’ve got to break out the command line STSADM or powershell.

For most installations you’re likely to have a scheme such as sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/HR and sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/Finance etc  and you may perhaps use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to give alternate urls for the same content. e.g. a shortcut of sharepoint/sites/HR and sharepoint/sites/Finance.

However, you can’t use AAM to serve different content from different host headers using the web application. So if you want to have customer specific sites such as CustomerA.yourcompany.com and CustomerB.yourcomany.com (a very common requirement for hosting companies) then you have to create separate web applications for each host header.

The problem is that this doesn’t scale very well above approximately 20 web applications and instead you’re advised to use host header site collections.

• Host-named site collections – 2010, 2007
• Shared Hosting solutions on WSS 3.0 (Word)

In addition we’ve also included corrections to errors caused by mixing field names and formatting in the Rich Text Editor and separating multiple email addresses in rich text fields with new line characters were also included in this new version.

You can download the latest version and update without loosing any settings – upgrade instructions are included in the manual.

This is Part 4 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

In parts 1 through 3 of this series we have laid the foundations for our tailor made Staff Vacation and absence planning system.  We have set up the basic SharePoint list, defined a number of list views, and set up dashboards using SharePoint Planner and PivotPoint webparts.

Now we are going to add the “moving parts” to the system and set up a simple approval email workflow using SharePoint Reminder webpart.

We are going to have 3 steps in our system :-

• One email to a staff member’s line manager when a new request for absence has been submitted.
• One email to the staff member and let them know whether their request has been approved or rejected.
• One email to the line manager the day before a staff member is due to be absent from work as a reminder.

SharePoint has “Alert Me” emails and  a workflow engine built in but the Alert Me is a little too limited and for workflows you need to fairly techie and modify them using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio which can be overkill for these simple email alert. See part VI for more details.

If you don’t already have SharePoint Reminder Webpart you can download the free trial version and view the installation instructions.

Absence Request Email

To set up your first Reminder add the webpart to a convenient web part page in just the same way as you added the Planner web part.  Remember, with the Reminder, there will be no need for the team to actually see the web part, once it is set up all the work goes on behind the scenes.

Now go to “Modify Shared Web part” and set the web part up.

Watch List: Staff Absence Planner

For this Reminder you do not want to show all columns, or expand recurrences, so leave both these boxes unchecked.

Read Records that are: “Pending” we want to look at new requests that have not yet been approved or rejected.

You can find more information on Reminder’s “Watch List” settings here.

Email Reply To: this feature allows recipients of a Reminder email to reply to a specific person.  So in this case, you might want replies to go to the person specified in the “requested by” column, so that an authorizing manager can query a request directly with their team member, before choosing to approve or reject it.  If you don’t want to get that fancy at this stage, you can choose to leave this section blank.

Email To: “Authorized by” we want to email the line manager who will authorize the absence request.

You can then ignore the CC, BCC, all users in a group and “Don’t email Last Modifier” options.

For the Subject of your email choose something like “Absence Request Authorization Required”

Now to edit the email message.  Click on the “Edit Message” Button and a Text Editor box will appear, very much like a Microsoft Word window.  You can use Rich Text formatting such as bold, colors and different font sizes in your message.  You can also use the drop down at the bottom of the window to insert merge data from fields in your list, just as you would with a “Mail Merge” in word.

You can find more information on formatting the content of your Reminder email here.

For “Send When” choose “Always”.

Then for “Send Email” choose “once” – we are going to assume that our line managers are efficient and will respond to requests the first time round, without repeated nagging!

You will find more information on Reminder’s “Send When” options here.

In the “Check List” section, set Reminder to check the list once per hour, and you are done.

Request Approved/Rejected Reminder

The set up of the next two Reminders is very similar.  For our “Absence Request Approved/Rejected” Reminder the only things that you will change are:

Read Records that are: for this one choose “approved” and “rejected”.

Email To: choose “Requested By”

Choose a new email subject and edit the email text, you will want to include “approval status, and I have also included “Authorized By” to include the line managers name, and “Approver Comments” to include any explanatory notes that the line manager has made.

For “Send When” we are again choosing “Always” and “Once”. This will send one email for all approved and rejected items on the list.

“Staff off work tomorrow” Reminder

For the third Reminder, which warns the line manager of an imminent absence, the setup is again quite similar.

For this one we want to Read Records that are “Approved”, send the email to the person in the “Approved By” column.  Rather than sending an email “Always” in this case we want to send an email when “Start Time” is “Due Soon”.  I have set Due Soon to “Within 1 Day” but as you can see you can choose whatever timescale works for you.

So that’s the setup complete.

Final installment: take a look at the system working, and see how much of this we could have done with SharePoint out of the box.

SharePoint offers a great foundation for non-programming business people to build applications around our business processes, just the way we want them.  This guide will show you how to build your own SharePoint staff vacation and absence planning system.

Staff vacation and absence planning can cause trouble and strife in any organization.  The good old wall planner can work for staff who are all in the same physical locations . . .

. . . . until you approve an absence then forget to enter it on to the planner, and then allow someone else to book vacation at the same time, leaving your department under staffed.

. . . . .or until you forget that Sam has booked a week’s vacation and call him up furious on Monday morning asking why he isn’t in work.

. . . . . .or authorize Jenny’s week off in the Caribbean only to get a thorough ticking off from HR because you have allowed Jenny to exceed her annual leave entitlement.

I’ve been guilty of all these crimes in my time. So I was pleased to find that with SharePoint we can make things a little more organized, and using our PivotPoint, Reminder and Planner web parts together we can set up a slick little Vacation Planning system in just a few minutes.

So, what we are aiming for here is:

• A dashboard “Absence Planner” display, which will be accessible to all staff via SharePoint.
• A personal and managers “Absences to Date” dashboards.
• An automated Absence Request approval system
• An email reminder to line managers of imminent staff absence.

To be clear: this is not a ready made “Vacation Planning” template or application, its a guide showing how you could build your own system, using some of SharePoints built in features and then add a little pizazz with our web parts. Its going to take a little work to set this up for your organisation but then it should be a better fit than a packaged solution.

Setting up the Vacation Planner should take you about an hour if you have our webparts already, a little more if you need to download them.  So we have broken this guide up into 4 parts, which we will be publishing over the next 5 days:

Today – set up your Staff Vacation and Absences list and filtered views

Part 2 – set up a Staff Vacation Planner dashboard with SharePoint Planner webpart

Part 3 – Set up Absences to date dashboard with SharePoint PivotPoint Webpart

Part 4 – Set up a absence request and approvals workflow with SharePoint Reminder Webpart

Part 5 – see the system in action, and see how much of this you could achieve with SharePoint out of the box.

For those of you who can’t wait that long, you can download the full PDF guide and a 30 day free trial of the webparts here.

First set up your List

We are going to use a Calendar List, add some extra columns, and switch on Approvals.

So, from which ever section of your site you want choose select Site Actions from the top right of the page, then from the dropdown, select Create then from the Tracking tab, select Tasks.

Call your list whatever you want – Staff Absence Planner works for me, decide whether you want it to display in the quick launch menu  – probably no need as few people will need to access the list that way once we have our system set up.  Then select no in the Alerts option.  Click OK and you list is set up.

Now go to the Settings tab in your list and first of all choose Create Column. We are going to add a few extra columns to the list. Add the columns Requested By and Authorized By, the column type for both of these is “Person or Group” and you want them both to display in the default view. Make these mandatory fields by clicking Yes for Require that this column contains information. Now we are going to add a column to show the reason for the absence – annual leave, maternity leave, training, sabbatical, whatever.  The column type for this column is going to be Choice and again we are going to made completion of this field mandatory, and show the field in the default view. Finally a column for the number of days of each absence, we want this to be a number column, I have set the minimum value to 0.5 days and the maximum to 30 days, and again we want it to be a mandatory field.

Next let’s switch on Approvals.  Back in the Settings tab of your list choose List Settings and from the General tab choose Versioning Settings. In Content Approval click Yes and we are done with the list set up.

Set up Filtered Views

Now for the filters.  If you haven’t made much use of filters before it may be worth having a look at these resources:

SharePoint filter techniques articles

Filters can really enhance the power of SharePoint lists, and we are going to use 3 here in our vacation planner.

#1 – Approved and Pending Absences for Planner

We want our Planner to provide a dashboard display for all staff, showing absences requested and approved.  So that staff can see when it will be possible to book an absence and managers can decide whether they wish to approve a staff absence request.

Our list actually contains 3 approval status’s “Pending”, “Approved” and “Rejected” we don’t need to display absence requests that have been rejected on our Planner, so we are going to set up a list view to show just “Pending” and “Approved” requests.

Go back to Site Settings and choose Create View.  From the menu here choose Standard View. N.B.  This choice is very important – Planner only works on Standard views. In the Create View Page add a name for your view, we have used Staff Absences – Approved and Pending. In the Audience section be sure you have checked Create Public View this again is an essential for Planner to work.  In the column section choose the columns that you wish to display to people who are creating or entering a list item.  This will not impact of the Planner display.

We are then going to skip over the “Sort” section and from the Filter section choose Show Items only when the following is true.

Column Approval Status is equal to Pending OR column Approval Status is equal to Approved.  Click OK and we are done with the filter.

#2 – Approved absences for managers “Absences to Date” Dashboard

Set up of this is exactly the same as the last one, except we are going to call it “Absences to Date” and just show items where column approval status is equal to approved.

#3  – The Magical [Me] Filter, for “My Absences” Dashboard.

If you haven’t used this filter before you are going to love it!  It shows whoever is logged in just the list items relating to them, so its ideal for our “My Absences” dashboard view, but also has a whole host of other uses.

We need a Standard, public view again – yes even though it’s “My Absences” it’s still a public view or other people won’t be able to use it.  Call it My Absences then head down to the filter section and choose to show items where column Requested By, is equal to [Me].

So, now we have laid the foundations for our system by setting up the basic list and filters.

In Part 2 we will create a “wall chart” dashboard, using SharePoint Planner webpart.

We often hear that communication is key to the success of any enterprise or organization. Making people aware of “what’s going on” is an essential.  So for a collaboration platform like SharePoint tools for telling people what’s happening are a central part of the setup.

SharePoint has it’s built in “Alert Me” feature.  New users seeing this often expect it to deliver functionality similar to that which comes as standard in MS Outlook.  But that isn’t what SharePoint Alerts do.  They tell you when something is added or changed.  This is great for document or content management, but not so good for managing calendars or tasks or projects – when you might prefer to be alerted when something is about to happen, or is overdue – or you might actually want to alert someone else, not yourself.

So here’s a little look at some of the things you might expect to be able to do with SharePoint Alerts but can’t.  And some suggestions as to how you might get round these shortcomings.

#1: Date Based Alerts

“It’s Jenny’s Birthday tomorrow”

“Your meeting starts in 10 Minutes.”

“Your expenses claim Submission is now overdue.”

How handy would this be?  You could do all of this in Outlook. But it’s just not how SharePoint Alerts work.  They don’t recognise or react to dates.

SharePoint Reminder web part however, is a different story.

As you can see, with Reminder you have the flexibility to send due soon and overdue emails for all of your tasks and events.  And you have a great deal of flexibility in terms of choosing the timescales that you wish to work on with setting for everything from months to minutes.

#2: Customize Alert Emails.

SharePoint sends out standardized alert emails which you can’t edit. Here’s one that has been sent out on a staff absence list to a line manager who needs to approve a requested absence:

Maybe it’s just me, but from this email I would find it very hard to figure out exactly what it is I am meant to do.  And there is no way to edit the email set up without getting into coding.

The email below on the other hand has been generated by SharePoint Reminder web part, triggered by the addition of the same item to the same list:

OK, now I know what I am supposed to be doing with this!  It’s an email addressed to me, with a meaningful subject line, a relevant selection of data from the list, free text that tells me what I should be doing with it and even color and bolding to highlight important points.  All this is achieved from within a simple WYSIWYG text editor.

For full details on customizing your alert emails check out the manual.

#3 Choose who you send alert email to

With SharePoint out of the box alerts, unless you are set up as a SharePoint site owner, the only person you can send alerts to is yourself.

So this means for example that if I have a list for absence requests and I want line managers to receive an alert every time a new staff absence request is added, I have to get each of the managers to turn on those alerts themselves, or get the SharePoint administrator to do it.

With SharePoint Reminder on the other hand, I have huge flexibility in terms of who I send my alerts to:

I can email to any email address in a column in my list.  So in this case I can choose to send my absence request emails to the line manager who needs to authorize that absence.  If the people I want to send my email to are part of my SharePoint installation – registered SharePoint users – the relevant column only needs to contain the person’s name and SharePoint will select the relevant email address.

But it gets even better.  I can choose to send email to people outside of SharePoint and outside of my company.  So for example if I had an order status list with included a column for customers email addresses I could choose to have Reminder send the customer when an email when their order has been dispatched.

Reminder has even more options for who you can send your alert emails to – check out the manual to see all the possibilities.

#4: Send Alerts to People Even if They Don’t Want Them

You know the kind of situation  – department managers really need to know every time there is a new customer complaint relating to their department – but actually some managers would rather not here about it,  With SharePoint’s Alert Me feature each user manages their own Alerts.  So the department manager who really doesn’t care how hacked off customers are with him and his team can just choose to switch off these Alerts.

So any one of your department managers can choose to just opt out of receiving alerts from the list, and you, as the Customer Complaints Manager will never be any the wiser.

With Reminder, you as the Customer Complaints Manager are the owner of the Alert, you set it up to go to whoever you want it to go to. A combination of permissions and visibility of the web part page make it much more difficult for anyone other than you to tamper with the setup.

The key difference is that whilst out of the box Alert Me lets you manage your own alerts, Reminder can be much more effective as “the office nag” – setting up alerts and reminders for relevant groups based around your business processes.

#5: Reply to a Real Person

How often have your replied to an email only to have your response bounce back  – telling you that the address you are writing to is a “no reply” address? This is very likely what will happen if you ever try to reply to a SharePoint “Alert Me” email.  SharePoint is set up so that replies to emails it generates can only go to one address, for the whole web application (that will usually be your whole organization, or site).  So organizations often set this up as a “no reply” address, or some sort of a dump box address, as it is likely to get so many emails that it will become completely unmanageable.

Clearly there are lots of occasions where this will not be ideal – the customer orders scenario we talked about above for example.  You clearly wouldn’t want an email from your customer, telling you that their order still hasn’t arrived, to bounce back, or just disappear into a black hole.

With Reminder you can choose who responses to each alert go to:

Replies can go to someone named in one of your list fields (the Account Manager perhaps?) or you can manually enter an email address for all replies to a particular alert to go to.  Either way you have the ability to ensure that a reply to an alert email will be received by a real person who can act on it.

So these are my top 5 things I always thought I should be able to do with SharePoint Alerts – what are yours?

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.

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