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.

That has all changed now. For a start, we no longer “file” electronically. For the most part we just leave our stuff in a disorganized heap with a bunch of “tags” attached. Our electronic lives look a bit like a teenager’s bedroom. And yet, despite our virtual untidiness, we expect to be able to find things at the click of a mouse. We expect logical search results ranked for relevance, maybe displayed with images or other media and delivered instantly. And on the Web we get this with Google, but we’re rarely so lucky when searching within a Web site, or worse still when searching internal corporate data.

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:

1. Findability. The main pitfall with much enterprise search to date has been that you just couldn’t find things. Meta data is key to findability in enterprise search and problems occur because many unstructured documents are stored with no Meta data giving the search engine very little to work on. FAST has the ability to automatically and quickly generate Meta data for unstructured documents which would mean that the user will be able to actually find what they’re looking for.
2. Relevance. We’re all used to the sheer randomness of server search results. FAST should improve things here greatly. Not only does it have advanced linguistic capabilities, but it also offers contextual search capabilities which can tailor search results to user profiles. All this offers the promise of far more relevant search results.
3. Speed. How long have we all spent looking at that little spotlight icon endlessly scanning an empty screen as we wait for our file search results to appear? In this respect FAST lives up to its name. It promises to maintain speed and performance levels on searches of 100 million documents or more which will offer a real time saving for many users.

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?

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.

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?

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:

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?

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.

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.

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:

• a comprehensive guide to troubleshooting alerts

• third party alert enhancement and administration tool listing – with space for your reviews and comments.

• a “Getting Started” guide for new users

• and Tips and Tricks for Power users.

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.