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.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide – Part 1 Create a SharePoint staff vacation Planning system with Pentalogic Planner...
2. SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide part 5 – the system in action and Out of the box options. See the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner system in action with...
3. SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide part 2 – set up a “Wall Chart” Dashboard Create a SharePoint Staff Vacation and Absence Planner Wall Chart...

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.

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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?

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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.

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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

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No, it’s not more about the Oscars, it’s our Case Study Competition – just as important to us, but maybe Jeff Bridges wouldn’t share our view. Random aside: Did you know that this is (allegedly) the first year in over 20 years that award presenters at the Oscar’s have used the phrase “and the winner is”?  “And the winner is” was banned at the 60th Oscars, for fear of offending the “non-winners” (didn’t they used to be called losers??).  Presenters have been saying “and the Oscar goes to . . .” ever since; until this year, when, presumably due to popular demand, the traditional phrase is back in place.

Anyway, enough of all this.  Our winner is Adam Venn of Bridges Engineering in Bath, England.  Adam wins something far more useful than a little gold-plate statue.  He gets a swanky new Flip video camera, which he tells us will come in very handy for filming the first baby that he and his wife and expecting any time now. So thank you to Adam. Bridges have been using Reminder since 2007 and Adam has sent some really interesting information on how they use it.  As we expected they are doing things over there that we never even thought of.  We will be publishing a full case study in a couple of weeks. Thanks also to everyone else who sent in case studies. We will be publishing them all over the next few months.  If you have a case study that you would like to share with us it’s not too late, just email me clare.stone@pentalogic.net with brief details and I will get in touch to get the full story from you.  There are no prizes in it now – but we would still love to hear from you.

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So here we are on track with at least one of our SharePoint 2010 New Year’s Resolutions – and its only March!

We wanted to get some more insight into how people use our products out there in the real world, and so we asked you to send in case studies.  In fact we launched a little competition to encourage you – winner to be announced in the next blog post.

We have been delighted with the response, and here is the first in what we hope will be a long running series.

Wade Peterson is Director of Practice Support at leading US law firm Bowerman and Brooke.  Here Wade explains how they chose our Reminder to enhance their Litigation Support Job tracking system and how Reminder and SharePoint help them with the vital task of ensuring they deliver on time, every time.

Wade needed something that would work like Outlook Reminders – providing date based “due” and “overdue” reminders to team members – but from within SharePoint.

Read the full case study here.

We love to read your case studies – it gives us ideas for product improvements, and we think it gives other customers new ideas on how they might get more out of SharePoint and our products.

So, if you would like to share your story, please drop me a quick email:  clare.stone@pentalogic.net – we’d love to hear from you.

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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.

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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?

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Customers tell us that because of the flexibility of Reminder, and the huge number of different ways in which a SharePoint installation can be set up: getting Reminder correctly set up and configured for the first time can be a bit of a challenge.

To help with this, in Reminder v1.7 we have added a Setup Diagnostic Wizard that will check for many of the common set up and configuration problems for you and suggest possible configuration changes to fix them.

The Wizard will check for a variety of common issues like:  problems with SharePoint outgoing email settings, non-matching authentication settings or insufficient account permissions – which are all frequent causes of trouble during the set up process.

To use the Wizard, go the the Configuration Tool in the “Start Program” files, and click the “Run Diagnostics” Button.

You will then see a window like this:

with any potential problem areas marked with a red cross and suggested remedies listed underneath in blue.

For further information on setting up and configuring Reminder please visit the on-line manual.

We hope this will help many users to solve simple set up issues on the spot, but if you are still having difficulties our free telephone and email support is always available.

We hope you find the tool useful and we look forward to hearing your feedback.

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