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?

Related posts:

1. Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items. This post shows you how to set up a filter...
2. SharePoint Alerts not working? This is one of the most common questions posed...
3. Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself How annoying is it when you have just created...

There is a great deal of confusion around some terms related to the different levels of SharePoint hierarchy. Some of this is buzword overload and some  has been brought about by inconsistent usage from Microsoft (and to be fair actually most of us in this industry).

So if you’ve ever wondered what things like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web Application, Site Collection and Top Level Site mean I am going to try and clarify the different terms without getting too technical as some of this stuff needs to be know by advanced, or power, users. I’ve missed out some of the more esoteric things like managed paths in the interests of readers sanity.

General Terms

Request

• When you load a page each element (including the page itself) makes a request to SharePoint and receives some data – which can be html, images, files etc.

Network Load Balancer (NLB)

• A device to distribute requests from your users browsers to the Web Front Ends

Web Front Ends – (WFE)

• A collection of servers that take requests from users (via the NLB), process them and return the data.
• This is the primary method for scaling – as the number of users grow you add more WFE’s.

Database

• The database servers store all volatile data (i.e. data that changes) in SharePoint.
• You have exactly 1 configuration database and 1 to many content databases.
• Each content database can only be on 1 server (more technically if you consider failover servers) but you can have different content databases on different servers – another method of scaling with increased load.

Authorisation and Authentication

• Authentication is the process of deciding WHO a user is.
• Authorization is the process of deciding WHAT they can do.
• IIS (the web server) handles Authentication alongside things like Active Directory and SharePoint handles authorization.
• Authentication methods include things like Anonymous, Basic, Forms, Integrated (NTML/Kerberos and Claims).

Farm

• A collection of servers (web, database, index) that together make up a SharePoint Installation – aka Topology.
• You can do all this (web/datababase/index etc) on a single server in “Simple Installation” mode in which case you don’t need a NLB. For many small businesses this is plenty enough.
• Medium sized businesses usually start with at least 2 Web Front Ends (WFE’s) and a database server.
• Multinationals can have some very complex setups involving dozens of components.

A common small SharePoint Farm topology - two WFE servers and a database server.

Levels of the SharePoint Hierarchy When you hear someone talking about ‘Scope’ this is what they mean.

Farm

• The entire installation as a whole. So if something has “Farm” level scope it applies to everything.

Web Application

• An IIS Website that has been configured to run SharePoint.
• Can only be created in the Central Admin UI (or via the STSADM tools etc)
• A Farm has one running the central administration site and 1 to many others running normal SharePoint sites.
• This is generally how the main part of the URL is defined – e.g. http://somesite.yourcompany.com and http://othersite.yourcompany.com will be separate Web Applications.
• This authentication method is set at the Web Application level – though you can have the same content (i.e. SharePoint site) delivered by two different web applications with two different authentication methods.
• Port and network card bindings, host headers and a host of other networky stuff is set at the Web Application level – so if you want external users, for example, to have access to a site that would apply at the Web Application level (you can apply more granular restrictions using authorization security though).
• The Application Pool (the account that SharePoint runs under and the resources that it can consume) are also set at the Web Application level.

Note – Used to be known as “Virtual Server” before the days of Virtualization technologies.

Site Collection

• Each web application has at least 1 Site Collection (but can have many).
• Each Site collection has exactly 1 ‘Top Level Site’.
• The Site Collection doesn’t actually contain anything itself - that is down to the Top Level Site.
• This is the level that things like the Recycle bin and Quotas are organised at.
• Each site collection can only use a single content database (though multiple site collections can us the same content database) – this has major design implications as there are maximum recommended sizes for a content database.

Top Level Site

• A Top Level Site is a site… at the top level… see – this terminology is not that confusing after all
• Most of the time we can use Top Level Site and Site Collection interchangeably - in fact Microsoft do this all the time.
• Each Top Level Site has zero to many sub-sites (simply called sites)
• This is the lowest level that many things can be scoped to, for example only the Top Level site contains a web part Gallery so you can’t say Collection X, Site A can have a web part but Collection X, Site B can’t.
• When you look at Site Settings in a top level site you will see the highlighted sections – in a sub site you will not. Both are called Sites in the UI.

Site

• (aka Web’s) – these are the actual sites that you use.
• A site can be a top-level site or a sub site of the top level site.
• A site can also have other sites – these are called sub-sites.
• Sub sites can also have other sub sites and so on.
• A site can inherit its parent’s permissions or define its own – more on this complex subject in a future article.

Finally a Site! - the thing that you actually use and what most of us think as "SharePoint"

References

• TechNet – Creating Your First Web Application, Site Collection and Web Site
• TechNet – Farm topology management

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Feature Receivers – the hidden details This post focusses on SharePoint Feature Receivers encapsulated in a...
2. New Pricing If you have visited our website recently you may...
3. SharePoint Site Templates: KISS guide to creating, saving and using A site is the key place within SharePoint to...

Last year, when I first started having dealings with SharePoint, I was mightily confused by all this “MOSS”, “WSS”, “SPS” -stuff.   What did all these acronyms stand for? What was the difference between all these different versions of SharePoint? And did it really matter?

Well, one year on and I’m slightly less confused, but only slightly!  So I thought it might be useful, for me and for anyone else out there who suffers similar confusion, to list out the different versions of SharePoint, their usual acronyms and key distinguishing features – I hope it helps:

So, in the begining, back in 2001, SharePoint emerged as two distinct products.  SharePoint Team Services was a bottom up team collaboration product, SharePoint Portal Server was a top down, portal, search and document management product.

By 2003 Microsoft had gathered that although customers liked both products what they would really like was the capabilities of both, combined.  So in 2003 what most of us would recognise as SharePoint: collaboration, search, content management and portal capabilities all under one roof – was born.

WSS was the basic version, free with Windows Server OS. SPS, the premium version, built on the foundations of WSS, incorporating extra functionality primarily around the areas of search and document management. Jason Masterman and Ted Pattison writing in MSDN Magazine put it quite neatly:

In essence, WSS gives you a place to put all your content while SPS provides the means to navigate and search through your content when you need it.

In 2007 much the same formula was followed, with Windows SharePoint services as the free version for windows server users and Microsoft Office SharePoint Services the premium version.  The MOSS designation references the greater level of integration with the Office suite.

In SharePoint 2010 it’s all change again and Microsoft have dropped references to both Office and Windows, leaving SharePoint to stand alone in 3 basic flavours: foundation, the free version, Standard – the premium version, which adds lots of functionality primarily around the area of search, and Enterprise – super premium, where the extras are pricipally in the area of content management.

This is very much a whistle stop tour, not an attempt to give an all encompassing overview of what is in each of the many SharePoint versions we have seen over the years – but we hope it might help you to at least get the acronyms straight!

Related posts:

1. New for 2010 – Premium Support We like to think that the standard support we...
2. We’re now a Microsoft Certified Partner – with Software that “Works with Windows Server 2008″ SharePoint webpart specialists Pentalogic Technology have achieved Microsoft Certified Partner...
3. SharePoint 2010 Ready – PHEW! Well, OK so it probably hasn’t been quite as...

As you’ve probably noticed we have had a few changes on our SharePoint blog in recent weeks.  We’ve been doing some work on making it a little more user friendly and a bit nicer to look at (hope we haven’t spoiled it with the photos!)

Whilst I was working on the blog I noticed that we have quite a few little gems hidden away in the archives. Old posts – things that were written maybe a couple of years ago, that those of you who are new to the blog might not be aware of, but might find useful.  The useful ones fall into a few categories – general SharePoint tricks, tips and ideas, and ideas and tips for users of our web parts.  So here they are, I hope you find them useful.

SharePoint tricks tips and ideas

Extend and customise SharePoint Task lists

Task Lists are one of the best loved and most used features of SharePoint and this post shows you how to better tailor them to meet your particular needs.

Advanced SharePoint View and Filter techniques

This article explores some of the uses of SharePoint Views and Filters.

Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns

SharePoint Out of the box doesn’t automatically distinguish between working days and weekends but if you are setting things like job duration or due dates you may need to – this article shows you how.

The Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Calculated Columns

This article explains why the often repeated trick for using [Today] in SharePoint calculated columns does not work, and suggests workarounds.

The … ehem… Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Filters

This one looks at the differences between SharePoint 2003 and 2007 when using [Today] in filters.

Setting a default duration for new SharePoint Calender Events

So you might be a medical receptionist scheduling appointments for doctors, appointments are always 45 minutes long unless the doctor tells you differently, how much easier would it be to just have SharePoint create an end time 45 minutes after the start time automatically?

How To Use Filters in SharePoint to show items in the current Calendar Month

It’s easy to think of occasions when you might want to filter a SharePoint list to show items falling in the current calendar month: “sales this month” springs to mind, or “subscriptions due for renewal this month”. This post shows you have to achieve this using calculated columns.

SharePoint Reminder Webpart Ideas

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time

Lots of people use Reminder to send an alert when a message is due soon or overdue.  Usually its fine for the message to go out at a fixed time before or after the event, for all list items, but there are occasions where you might want to vary the times at which you send your alerts.  For example, sending alerts for overdue helpdesk items: for high priority items you might want to send an alert when an item is 1 hour overdue, whereas for low priority an alert for items 1 day overdue might be fine.  This article shows you how.

Customize SharePoint Reminder Emails with Merge Data

Whilst SharePoint’s out of the box alert emails come in a standard format, with Reminder its possible to customize the alert emails you send by merging data from your list items.

Tip – don’t send SharePoint email alerts for old items.

There are some situations where, when you are setting up a Reminder for the first time, you could end up sending out alerts for a lot of very old list items, this post shows you how to avoid doing that.

Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed

If you are using Reminder to drive simple workflow you may very well want to send an email when a task is completed – maybe when a holiday request form has been filled in for example.  This post shows you how.

SharePoint Planner Webpart Ideas

Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart

There may be times when you want to display timeline or category information from more than one list column in a gantt chart. For example in the chart below we have taken information from the “priority” and “title” columns of a list to populate the category labels.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Shows you a few of the things that aren’t possible with SharePoint OOTB gantt charts, but can be done with Planner.

Related posts:

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

Warning -  this post is somewhat techie so if you’re not a developer you may want to go find something more interesting to do!

I’ve been doing some work with SharePoint Feature Receivers recently and found the official documentation to be somewhat … lacking.

SharePoint Feature Receivers allow you to run code when a Feature such as a web part or template is installed, activated, deactivated and removed. They are often used for installation/setup tasks that can’t be done using XML incantations in Manifest.xml, Elements.xml and Feature.xml.

I am not going to give a step-by-step guide to Feature Receivers (see the excellent How to add a Feature Receiver to a Feature from SharePoint dev wiki) but plan to detail information that I was struggling to find anywhere else.

I am only going to cover the scenario of a Feature encapsulated in a solution package and not installing features directly using STSADM -o InstallFeature as that requires the files are manually placed in the 12\Template\Features\ directory so is not as friendly as distributing .wsp files and is not something that you can really give to customers/server admins.

Scope

SharePoint Features can be targeted at the Farm, Web Application, Site Collection or Web Site scope. The target will effect things like where you can manage the feature activation from in the UI and at which point (and how many times) the Feature receiver events are called.

SharePoint Feature lifecycle

SharePoint Administration Timer Jobs

Deployment and Retraction actually setup a timer job (which can be executed ‘immediately’ or at a specified time. If the “Windows SharePoint Services Administration” Service is not running then you will be warned that these jobs will not be executed and you can force execution by running STSADM -o ExecAdmSvcJobs on all servers in your farm.

Windows Identity

You can’t be sure which windows identity a feature event receiver will be running under as you don’t know if it will be called by STSADM (cmd.exe), “Windows Share Services Administration” timer service (WSSADMIN.EXE) or the WebUI (w3wp.exe with the app pools identity) – so ensure you are not relying on privileges (for example) that may be given to a logged on domain admin when using STSADM but not the app pools identity.

SharePoint Context

Because you can’t be sure where the FeatureReceiver is being called from (command line, timer service, web ui) you can’t use the normal method of getting a SPSite/SPWeb object.

SPSite site = SPContext.Current.Site;

SPWeb web = SPContext.Current.Web;

Instead you can access the context through SPFeatureReceiverProperties.Feature.Parent see Matt’s handy extension method (beware though, it doesn’t cover Web Application or Farm scopes)

Note – you only get a SPFeatureRecieverProperties.Feature reference with FeatureActivated and FeatureDeactivating – its null for Installed and Uninstalling.

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Terminology – Farms, Web Front Ends, Web Application and Sites Find out what SharePoint terms like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web...
2. Don’t get Public Key Blobs and Tokens mixed up! Introduction When developing web-parts for Microsoft SharePoint, a developer...

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.

Related posts:

1. Tip – Sending an SharePoint email Alert when a Task is completed This post shows you how to set up a SharePoint...
2. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – Setting a variable Due In or Overdue By time This post gives 3 different methods for setting a variable...
3. Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder Webpart v1.6 – now supporting Sharepoint recurring events v1.6 of Pentalogic Reminder Webpart for SharePoint is now the...

You know how satisfying it is when you read something, instinctively know it’s right, then have something happen that gives you concrete proof?  Well we had one of those moments this week – and I wanted to share. We read quite a few business blogs and for down to earth, quality advice Jason Cohen is our man – Joel Spolsky sometimes comes up with the goods, but he can be a bit full of himself, we don’t get Seth Godin at all – seems to have made a great career out of stating the blindingly obvious – but Jason; on the money, pretty much every time.

So this week’s post from Jason was on the importance of good tech support – and the prevalence of tech support which is anything but good.  Done right, Jason says, tech support is sales. We read the post, nodding sagely in agreement.

Then that evening we had a support call from a customer who was trialling our Reminder web part for SharePoint.  The customer had quite a few questions and we were on the phone for around an hour.  Once we had sorted out his questions about Reminder he tells us that he is trialling our product along with a similar product from one of our competitors – but he can’t get the competitor’s product to work and he can’t get any response from their tech support.  So, as we are so helpful, could we possibly help him to get our competitors product working as well?

Well, we like to think we’re helpful, but not that helpful, so we had to politely decline on that one.  Still, within 24 hours we had a nice $1,200 order in from the customer – who had still had no response from the other company, so had given up on the whole product comparison idea and just decided to go with us.

Oh we did feel smug!

I still don’t really get the IT industry’s attitude to speaking to customers and prospects.  I’ve worked in other places – finance, travel, property – where we grabbed every opportunity we got to talk to potential customers (some of the time they were trying to avoid us ).  If someone’s thinking about buying your product and wants some advice on how it works you talk to them – wow them with your products features and your company’s super-helpful attitude – right?

Wrong in the world of IT is seems.  Here are a few support policy quotes from other vendors in the SharePoint webparts market:

“Unlimited email support with a 2-3 day response time”

“Access to our extensive knowledge base”

“Per incident support $180 per hour”

“Post your question to our support forum”

I still find it scary and a little sad that the simple willingness to just answer the phone and talk to people who want to give you their money  – or indeed people who have already given you their money – is such a differentiator in this industry.

Tech support like any kind of customer service can sometimes feel like a bit of a grind – you tend to hear a lot of the same questions, and often the calls for help come at the worst moments – like 6pm on a Friday evening when you’re just heading out for a nice cold drink.  Here our developers do the tech support and it’s always the way that the trickiest support calls come when they are deep in coding mode.

Sometimes you need an incident like this, or a blog post like Jason’s to give you the motivation to keep up the work.

What Jason’s blog post and our experience showed us was a) just how bad tech support can be in our industry, and b) how if you do it right, tech support really is sales.

As you’ve probably figured out this whole tech support issue and just why it’s sometimes so bad in our industry is one of my personal crusades, so I would love to hear your best and worst tech support experiences – either as a user or a provider.

Related posts:

1. New for 2010 – Premium Support We like to think that the standard support we...
2. Case Study – Bowerman and Brooke Choose Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder for Job Tracking System So here we are on track with at least...
3. SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available New version 1.7.8 of SharePoint Reminder webpart is now available...

A customer recently contacted me with an interesting question.

They were using a SharePoint task list to help schedule jobs for field engineers but rather than have a Start Date and End Date field they wanted to have a Start Date and Duration field and automatically work out the End Date.

So End Date = Start Date + Duration

They were then planning to display this using Planner in the By Category view which is idea for resource booking as it makes it easy to see when a resource is booked or free (SharePoints built in gantt chart can’t do this swimlane style of view and doesn’t support using calculated columns).

Now this is easy to do if the Duration is specified in days – in fact you just use the equation above – but what if Duration is in hours or minutes?

First port of call is this page from Microsoft showing examples of common date time formula you can use in SharePoint calculated columns hmmm, adding days OK… adding months Check… adding years OK too….but nothing about hours. Back to the drawing board.

The key bit of knowledge is that SharePoint stores all date/time values internally as the number of days since Jan 1st, 1900. So the number 100.5 in a date/time field is 100 days and 12 hours from 1st Jan 1900 at 00:00

Armed with this we get the following formula (where Duration is in hours) =[Start Date]+([Duration]/24) So what’s happening here? ([Duration]/24) turns the number of hours in Duration to fractions of a day (e.g. 1 hr is 0.0416 of a day) Then we add that number to the Start Date and finally as our calculated column is defined as a date/time field SharePoint is turning the number (e.g. 40,296.50) back into a readable date/time value. Job done! Tips This will work with Durations greater than 24 or even 1/2 hours etc. If you want to specify Duration in minutes then instead of /24 above you would use /1440 (the number of minutes in a day). You can use this for anything that has a duration – tasks, service jobs, meetings, flights, equipment booking etc. Further reading Common Date Time formulas for SharePoint

Related posts:

1. Working Days, Weekdays and Holidays in SharePoint Calculated Columns This post shows you how to work with weekdays and...
2. The Truth about using [Today] in SharePoint Calculated Columns This post offers workaround for using values like [Today] and...
3. Tip – Showing multiple columns in SharePoint Planner Webpart This post shows how to show data from more than...

Well, OK so it probably hasn’t been quite as much effort as climbing Everest – but sometimes it’s felt that way! Last week Microsoft made the “final” release version of SharePoint 2010 available to developers and large corporates.  So we have been able to get on with our “final” set of compatibility tests and we can now announce that all of our products are SharePoint 2010 Compatible.

When you make software that works on a particular platform – whether it’s Windows, SharePoint, or the iPhone – the introduction of a major new version is really exciting, but it can also be very stressful. The introduction of a new feature might open up lots of new possibilities, but it could equally well present new problems for the way your own software works with the platform, or even make your application completely redundant.

So as you can imagine we were all over the public beta version of SP2010 as soon as it became available last November. We were very pleased to see that whilst there are lots of fantastic new features in SharePoint 2010 Microsoft haven’t introduced anything within the Out of the Box functionality that undermines our own products. For users of SharePoint 2010 our PivotPoint, Planner and Reminder will continue to add valuable planning, reporting and alert functionality to the Out of the Box offering, and we have also spotted some interesting new possibilities for product development.

Over the past few months we have carried out extensive in house and third party testing on all of our products in the beta version of SP 2010. There are some significant changes in this latest version of SharePoint and we have been busy making sure that our products function properly with these changes.

But we know from past experience that there can be significant differences between the beta version of any piece of software and the final release candidate – that’s what a beta is for after all.  so we know we wouldn’t be finished until we saw the final release candidate – and last week we got it and were able to run our final set of tests.

So we can now say, with confidence “Yes, we are SharePoint 2010 ready.” SharePoint 2010 versions of all of our products are available to download from the website for existing customers who are upgrading to 2010 or new customers who are running or trialling a SP2010 deployment.

Although there is a lot of excitement about SharePoint 2010 we know that many people won’t be upgrading overnight. We know 15% of our clients are still using SharePoint 2003. SharePoint 2010 only runs on 64 bit servers. This means that anyone currently running on 32 bit servers will need to upgrade their hardware before they can upgrade to SP2010. Though this would be normal practice for many large corporate, for smaller businesses on tighter budgets it introduces extra costs and could be a potential barrier to upgrades.

So whilst we are now fully SharePoint 2010 compatible, all of our products also remain compatible with all previous versions of SharePoint and we intend of continue to support all previous versions for the foreseeable future.

And now we are done with compatibility testing for the time being we can get on with some new product development – which should be much more fun!

SharePoint 2010 will be available on general release in May. There are 8 versions and as yet Microsoft have made no announcements regarding pricing.

Related posts:

1. New for 2010 – Premium Support We like to think that the standard support we...
2. SharePoint 2010: What’s Hot and What’s Not – #3 Social Networking This is the final part in our occasional series...
3. 2010: SharePoint New Year’s Resolutions A happy New Year to you – and 2010...

A site is the key place within SharePoint to bring together all the people, content and activities associated with a particular process, project or group.  And if the process or project is regularly repeated within your organization having a site template for it saves a lot of time and helps to ensure consistency and facilitate continuous improvement.

There are any number of scenarios where you might use a SharePoint site template, for this example we are using a recruitment process, but you could equally well set one up for any regularly repeated process or project you manage: training courses, audits, conferences and sales exhibitions, product testing, office moves, procurement, risk assessment, staff appraisals – the list goes on.

SharePoint comes with some Out of the Box Templates, there are other available on-line, free or to purchase.  But all of these are “off the peg” options: great if you are short on time, but they’re not going to be a perfect fit for your business processes.

To get a SharePoint template that fits your processes perfectly you are going to have to make your own – and thankfully it’s exceptionally easy to do – so here’s how.

First Create your Site

Before you even switch on your computer you need to sit down and think about the business process you are working with: the content, activities and people you will bring together in your site template.

So for our Recruitment Site Template we have:

• Recruitment Procedures: hiring policy, pay scales, interviewers guidelines, equal opportunities policy etc.
• Recruitment Forms: application form, equal ops monitoring form, interview score card, pro forma letters.
• Recruitment Interview Scheduling: calendar of scheduled 1^st and 2^nd interviews/assessment centres.
• Hiring Managers and HR: internal contacts involved in the hire
• Approved Staffing Agencies: with agreed terms and conditions and contact details
• Candidates and Applications: original application documents, status tracking and notes.

I am sure there is more, but you get the idea, you need to think about the content, people and processes you want to bring together in your site template.

So, now you can switch on your computer!

You need to be a “Site Owner” to create a site template. Your SharePoint administrator will be able to tell you whether you have the permissions you need – and if you don’t ask the administrator nicely and they might grant you some extra permissions.

You can’t actually create a site template from scratch in SharePoint – you first have to create a site and then save it as a template.

So, first create your site.

Decide where you want your site to appear  - for a recruitment site you might well want it to be a sub-site of a main HR site.  So from the “Site Actions” menu, in the site that you want as your parent site, choose “Create” from the drop down,

Then from the list of options choose “Sites and Workspaces” from the Web Pages list.

On the “New SharePoint Site” page there isn’t much you need to do.  Give the site a name, in this case “Recruitment” seemed to make sense, give it a URL – best done by just adding the name of your site, and from the “Select a Template” box choose either Blank or Team Site – either will do just as well.

Click “Create” and you’ve finished.

Add Some Stuff in Your Site

Now go back to your list of the people, content and activities that make up your process and think about how best to handle them within SharePoint.  Remember that the cardinal rule of content managment within SharePoint is that we only want to have one version of any one item of content, so you need to spend some time thinking about what content needs to exist within the sites that you will be creating from your template, and what content already exists elsewhere, so that you can simple provide links to it.

In our example we have we have set up:

• Document Libraries for applications and proforma recruitment documents (so things like blank Job Descriptions and Invitations to interview, where we will want to keep completed versions of the documents for our records) configured with metadata.
• a Forms Library for our equal opportunities monitoring forms,
• a Wiki for recruitment notes,
• a Calendar List for organizing our interviews
• a Tasks List
• Content Editor Web Part – to display links to relevant information located within the main HR site, like Recruitment Procedures.
  
• and some List View Web Parts on the main page, to let us see what happening easily.

You can save to your template pretty much anything you see from the “Create” page within your site:  any kind of list or library, communication, tracking, sub-site or page.

You can configure these as you want them.  You can also add and save content as part of the template if you wish.  So in our example the “Applications” document library is empty, but the “Pro Forma documents” library is populated with recruitment documents which, within the sites created from our template, will all be populated with data unique to each individual recruitment.   You need to decide where you need content, and where you just need to set up a structure, or add a link to content which exists elsewhere.  For example in this site we are providing a link within our Content Editor Webpart to the “Recruitment Procedures” manual, which is located in the main HR site.  By using a link we ensure that everyone using sites created from our template is accessing the most up to date version of the manual.

You can also save all your site settings, including look and feel, to the template.

What can’t you save to your Template?

You can’t save alert settings.

Save Your Custom Site Template

Having set up your site and filled it with all the stuff you need, you can now save it as a template, a very simple process again.

From the “Site Actions” tab, choose “Site Settings”, then under “Look and Feel” choose “Save site as Template”

As we discussed earlier, you will very probably want to “Save Content” and you’re done.

Create a Site from Your Custom Template

Right, so now we have our site template, lets create a new site from it.  In our example we are going to hire a SharePoint Trainer, so from our Recruitment site “Site Actions” tab we are going to choose “Create” and then under the Web Pages heading, choose “Sites and Workspaces”.

We are going to go through exactly the same process here as we did to create our Recruitment site. Name the site “SharePoint Trainer”, create a URL, but this time when we get to “Select a Site Template” we are going to choose the “Custom” tab and choose “Recruitment” from the drop down list.  Then click “Create”

So now we have our site for recruit our SharePoint trainer, ready to populate with documents, events and list items specific to this particular recruitment

and here it is once we have put some data into it:

A site template that’s tailor made for your own business processes with just a couple of hours work aren’t you the clever one!

Need to Update Your Template?

So let’s say your recruitment policy changes and you need to update your template – how do we do that?

You can’t just “save changes to a template”.  You will need to create a whole new template.  It’s not as bad as it sounds.

Just go to your “Recruitment” site, make the changes you needed, then save as a template called “Recruitment v2” or some other name different from the name of your first template.  However once you’ve done this you will be left with 2 versions of your Recruitment Template for people to choose from, and you know what’s going to happen.

So we would recommend that you delete the original template to avoid confusion.

Go to the very top level of your site and from the “Site Actions” tab select “Site Settings”.

From the “Galleries” list select “Site Templates”, click on “edit” next to the template you want to get rid of, click “delete” and you’re done.

So, that’s our brief run down on Site Templates and how to use them.  We hope you found it useful – and if you have any other tips on the subject we would love to hear them.

Further Reading

Microsoft’s free “fab 40″ SharePoint templates:

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/windowsserver/sharepoint/bb407286.aspx

Microsoft free role based templates for My Sites:

http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointserver/ha102147321033.aspx

For a different take on how to create templates:

Related posts:

1. SharePoint Terminology – Farms, Web Front Ends, Web Application and Sites Find out what SharePoint terms like Farm, WFE, NLB, Web...
2. SharePoint Partner Perspective: Veronique Palmer This is the first in a series of interviews...