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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. |
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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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Along with many others in our part of the technology industry, we’ve spent the past few months with our heads firmly buried in SharePoint 2010, getting our products compatible, and along the way getting really familiar with the wealth of new features on offer.
So as we’re now at the “been there, done that” stage with SP 2010 we thought it might be useful to share our thoughts on what the killer features are, and where to watch out for the white elephants!
This week — killer features.
There’s a lot to get the developers excited: Just do a quick Google search and you’ll come across bags of blog posts on all the great new developer features. But here we want to take a slightly different tack and focus on the features that we think will make the most difference to the end user.
Our vote goes to FAST search.
In days gone by, we used to store things electronically and search for things electronically in much the same way as we store and search in the real world. We’d store things in the appropriately labelled folder in the correct virtual “drawer” of a virtual file cabinet. When we needed to find things electronically, we’d then be relatively happy to trawl through our virtual file cabinets until we located the item we needed.
Google’s magic relies on links to pages being like votes. Given enough votes the best content for any subject becomes apparent. But you don’t get the same high level of interlinked content inside organizations so this doesn’t work as well. Hence the scenario we’ve all faced of being unable to find that document that we know is hiding somewhere.
So, going back to our virtual teenagers bedroom, if we search for “Xbox” on Google it will most likely direct us first to the console, or the controllers or maybe our current favorite game – because those are the things that are being used most (linked to most), so Google reckons they are most likely to be what we are looking for.
If we search our virtual bedroom for “Xbox” on a corporate search it is just a likely to send us to the Xbox packaging gathering dust under the bed, or the Xbox receipt stuck in a book we gave up reading six months ago. Because – well – they both say “Xbox” on them, don’t they?
FAST search for SharePoint 2010 has the potential to change this. FAST was the Norwegian company that provided the technology behind Alltheweb and Lycos (Remember them?). Acquired by Microsoft in 2008 FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is?? the first FAST product deployed by Microsoft, and if the integration of FAST with SharePoint delivers all that it promises it should offer the end user plenty to smile about.
There are a huge number of features we could talk about, but these are the three key things we think end users will really notice:
FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 is an add-on, not part of the out-of-the-box solution, and there are those pundits who believe the OOTB search has been improved so much in SharePoint 2010 that for most deployments the investment in FAST cannot be justified. We disagree and feel that the improvements in the end user experience will result in higher usage rates and so improved productivity.
So. FAST search is definitely on the top of our list of killer features in SharePoint 2010 – what’s on top of your list?
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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. |
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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:
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? |
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| 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! |
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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: |
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| you’ve got no way of seeing exactly when they are, who should be attending – like this view from our Planner: |
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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!
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!
Recurring or repeating events are a mainstay of calendar usage. Let’s try adding a regular weekly project meeting to this one.
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?
Wrong! Although you do get some ability to zoom in and out with SP 2010 in the current beta at least, the rest of the omissions remain as is. But maybe things will change with the release candidate?
So, those are our top 5 “missing in action” features for SharePoint Gantts, what are your most annoying missing features?
A happy New Year to you – and 2010 looks like being an exciting one in the wonderful world of SharePoint
Here at Pentalogic we have a good crop of New Years Resolutions. We thought we would share them with you now – so that you can hold us to them if our resolve waivers down the line.
So here they are:
OK, so we’re never going to stick to those, lets focus on something realistic.
So, those are our new years resolutions – what are yours?
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Some of you may have noticed that with the introduction or our new website we also seen to have lost a product – CrossTab. Don’t Panic! It’s still there, we just changed the name. And why have we done that? Well with the exception of us here at Pentalogic, and a few hard core number crunchers out there no one seemed to understand the old name. Not that many people seemed to know what a Cross Tab is. And if you Google it this is what you get:
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Phew, sounds like hard work! Actually it’s pretty simple – it’s just what an Excel Pivot Table does – which is why we have changed the name to “PivotPoint” – which we hope will make sense to a lot more people. Like a Pivot Table, Pivot Point is one of the handiest little data analysis tools you could wish for. Use it to get a quick a quick and easy to interpret summary of the numerical data in your SharePoint lists. Since we were somewhat lacking in inspiration when it came to finding a new name we picked the brains of lots of SharePoint users and experts. The suggestions for PivotPoint came from Kirill Kirg in the MOSS group on LinkedIn. So many thanks to Kirill! And as always, if you have any comments or suggestions please do get in touch. |
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We like to think that the standard support we offer as a part of our licensing is pretty good. We are after all one of the very few companies in this market place offering all customers free telephone and email support. All backed up by our full 90 day money back guarantee for anyone who is not fully satisfied.
However some customers have requested a higher level of support and for this reason we have now introduced optional Premium support, for an annual fee.
The main benefits of Premium support over and above our standard support package are guaranteed response times on support calls and free major version upgrades. The major version upgrades could well prove to be particularly useful as we are planning new major version releases or both Planner and Reminder in 2010.
You can see full details of our Standard and Premium Support packages here. If you are an existing customer and would like to upgrade to Premium Support please contact sales@pentalogic.net for a quote.
Whilst Premium Support will offer an enhanced service we would like to reassure you all that we remain committed to offering the highest possible standard of support to everyone: Premium Support Subscribers, standard license holders and those using the trial versions.
As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions on this new service.
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Across all of our products we have also introduced 2 new pricing options, which we hope will help to make our software more affordable for a lot of customers. Firstly, we have introduced “Starter Packs” for each of the products, priced at $199. With these we hope to make our software an affordable option for smaller businesses and small SharePoint installations. The starter pack license can be used for SharePoint installations using a single Web Front End (your database server can still be separate) and up to 25 users. We thought it was important to introduce this level of pricing not only because SharePoint is becoming so widely used by smaller businesses, but also because of the way SharePoint most typically gets deployed within the Enterprise. The research for our free white paper so SharePoint End User adoption showed that very often SharePoint is initially utilised by one team or workgroup within an organisation, before gaining more widespread organisational use. Our new $199 Starter Pack Pricing means that our products will now fall within budget for a small team or workgroup deployment. We have also introduced a new “3-pack” license, which is a mid way option between the single server license and the “unlimited use” site license. Research amongst our existing customers showed that very many farms use 3 Web Front End servers and separate indexing and database servers, so our 3-pack license offers an ideal and affordable solution for many farm deployments. Adding these options to our Free Non-Profit licenses and 25% educational discounts means that we now have a pricing structure that we hope offers an affordable solution for everyone. We hope you agree, and if you do have any comments or suggestions please get in touch. |
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Finally our new website is up and running – and we are sooo pleased with ourselves! As I am sure those of you who are regular visitors to the site will agree, an overhaul was very much needed. The old site has served us well for nearly 5 years now, but it was never going to win any beauty contests. We wanted to improve the look and usability of the site but we also wanted to improve some of the “behind the scenes” functionality. We have upgraded our content management system – which will mean that it is easier for us to keep the content of the site up to date. We have also worked on our image management – so that even though the site now has a lot more going on visually, it should still be fast-loading for users, whatever part of the world you happen to be in. |
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We have added a new “Knowledge Base” section which we hope you will find useful, and which we will be adding to over time. Though we have the technical know-how in house to put together a website no one would call us artistic, so we knew we needed to find a good designer to work with. This proved surprisingly challenging and we kissed an awful lot frogs before we finally found Suman Shrestha, in Kathmandu, Nepal, who has done a great job for us. We hope you like the new site, and find it easy to use and a bit more interesting to look at and we would really appreciate hearing from you if you have any comments, suggestions or feedback for us. |
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This is one of the most common questions posed in SharePoint forums.
SharePoint built in Alerts are one of the best used features of the system – but also one of the most problematic. There are just so many different ways they can go wrong! And when they do go wrong the internet advice available on how to put them right is very fragmented and often confusing. All manner of suggestions come up – many of then not appropriate to the particular problem the user is having.
So, we have had it in mind for a while now to put together a comprehensive guide to trouble shooting Alerts. Something with a logical flow – which hopefully has all the information you need to solve the problem set out clearly in one place. Producing this has turned out to be quite a mammoth task – but now we think we are there – and the trouble shooting guide is the centrepiece of the new www.sharepointalert.info website.
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Over the years we also have amassed quite a store of hints and tips on how to make best use of SharePoints built in Alerts, as well as a good knowledge of the alert enhancement products on the market – so this is all on the site as well.
The site is a work in progress, but already includes:
We want the site to be interactive – so there is space on every page for comments-we hope you will let us have your feedback, or even contribute an article!
N.B. SharePointAlert.info is an information site for SharePoint’s built in “Alert Me” feature. If you are looking for information on Pentalogic Reminder – you should still visit our on-line manual, or get in touch for free telephone and email support.