One of the top questions you’ll ask if you’re looking at deploying a SharePoint solution for your organization is – how much is this going to cost us? While the exact answer depends on the size of your business and what you want from SharePoint, this post will look at the cost of entering the SharePoint sphere.

There are many options available and many variables that may come into play here – so the figures we are giving are not designed to cost a solution down to the last cent – rather to give you a “ball park” idea of what each level of the SharePoint solution is likely to cost, and perhaps more importantly the size of the steps between each level.

At each level there are a number of cost elements that you will need to take into account when working out your pricing:

1. Server Licenses: SharePoint is a server application and whatever level of SharePoint you are running you will need one or more server licenses before you can run the software.
2. SharePoint License: In addition to your server license you will need a SharePoint license.
3. CALS: Client Access Licenses: These allow users, or devices (desktops/laptops etc) access to your SharePoint server, and you will need one for every user/device you wish to grant access to.
4. External Connector License: want to use SharePoint for your public facing website?  After all, it’s free right?  Wrong?  Clearly you can’t use CAL’s to give access to users of an public facing website, so instead you will need a External Connector License.  Microsoft’s pricing guidelines on these helpfully state “Varies” – (thanks Bill!)  You should budget at least a couple of $k, and potentially much more, depending on the size of your installation. We have not factored the External Connector License into our price estimates here.

Finally, you will want to think about hardware costs.  Here we are simply discussing software costs and it may well be that in order to implement you desired SharePoint deployment you are going to need additional hardware as well.

Now, before we get on let’s have a little clarification on the 3 levels of SharePoint – because Microsoft does like to change the names fairly regularly.

SharePoint Versions 2007 and 2010

There is relatively little difference between 2007 and 2010 in terms of the pricing models, so in this article we have stuck with the 2010 terminology.

1. SharePoint Foundation

This is the “free” version of SharePoint that was known as Windows SharePoint Services (WSS) in 2007. It comes bundled with Windows Small Business Server (SBS) or can be downloaded free with Windows Server. It includes most of the powerful collaboration features, some basic search capabilities and limited content management features. Microsoft Windows Server costs from $1,088.00 and SBS costs from $1,428.00

SBS comes with five CALs as standard. This allows five users or devices access to the server and you’ll need to figure out if you might need more than this. Additional user or device CALs cost from $44.00.

There are two types of CAL – a user CAL is restricted to an individual while a device CAL is restricted to one device. Device CALs might make sense if you want to assign multiple users to one device, such as shift workers. User CALs are a good option if you have roaming employees who need access to the corporate network from mobile devices or employees who use multiple devices on your network.

Foundation is a comprehensive solution at an affordable price for small businesses but you miss out on sophisticated features like document workflow and content authoring. If there is one piece of ‘missing’ functionality that exists in the standard solution, you could look at enhancing Foundation with custom code or buying a third party tool rather than upgrading to Standard or Enterprise.

2. SharePoint Standard

If your organization has more than about 25 employees, you may need to look at buying SharePoint Standard, previously known as MOSS. SharePoint 2010 Server costs from $4,900 and a single license for the Standard edition is priced from $7,389. This option provides the core capabilities of SharePoint; sites, communities, content and limited search and composite features. You will need to buy additional standard CALs for MOSS and the Standard edition of the software. For this option, user CALs cost from $125 and device CALs cost from $142. Do bear in mind that this option is only for one server – you may need to invest in licenses for additional servers as your organization grows.

3. SharePoint Enterprise

This option will fulfil your demands if you have thousands of employees in your business and ball-park estimates for a server license range from $57,000. This option delivers the full range of features with additional search, composites and powerful data insights. Again, you’ll need to invest in user or device CALs and an additional FAST search server license from $22,000 if your organization demands it.

Bridging the Gap

So we can see that even with SharePoint there really is no such thing as a free lunch – even “free” Foundation will come at a cost for most of us.  And we can also see that the gaps in pricing between the different levels are pretty huge.

So what are your options if you find that the SharePoint level you are currently using is no longer giving you quite enough functionality?

Well you could dig deep into your corporate pockets and go for a full upgrade.  Or you might consider looking at 3rd party add-one that fill your particular functionality gaps at a fraction of the price.

For example, if you are happy with Foundation, but need more advanced filtering capabilities you could cough up $12,000+ for a full upgrade to MOSS, or you could simply buy a 3rd party SharePoint Filtering product for around $500.

3rd party add-ons exist to fill many of the gaps in SharePoint functionality and can represent a cost effective alternative to a full upgrade to the next level.

I hope this post helps your quest to figure out how much SharePoint will cost your organization and I’ve added some useful links for you to check out below.

How much has SharePoint cost you so far? Let us know if you’re feeling brave!

Useful links

Official SharePoint licensing details

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Licensing-Details.aspx

Compare the different editions of SharePoint at-a-glance

http://sharepoint.microsoft.com/en-us/buy/Pages/Editions-Comparison.aspx

Get more official estimates for volume licensing

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/mla/product.aspx

Some SharePoint pricing examples for different businesses

http://www.sharepointblues.com/2010/10/25/sharepoint-2010-pricing-examples/

SharePoint versions explained

http://blog.pentalogic.net/2010/06/sharepoint-versions-history/

CAL’s (Device/user) and External Connectors

http://www.microsoft.com/licensing/about-licensing/client-access-license.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Client_Access_License

So you’ve got your hands on SharePoint and you’re excited. Some might say we’re biased over here at the Pentalogic blog, but we definitely wouldn’t blame you for itching to deploy this user friendly and incredibly powerful server side software across your whole organization super quickly.

But wait a moment! Have you set out who will be in charge of migrating your shared drives to SharePoint, authorising new sites to be created and setting out an information lifecycle to manage your data? What about indexing information so it can be easily searched should you need an answer to be at your fingertips? If any or all of this sounds like a minefield to you, let me assure you that you’re definitely not alone.

Regulating SharePoint affects many users and most of us will look for guidance about managing our use of it at some point. With this in mind, we’ve put together a quick guide to explain why it’s vital to set out protocol for using SharePoint in your organisation sooner rather than later and have added some useful resources for you at the end.

Rocketing popularity

SharePoint governance is a hot topic and it’s pretty much here to stay. The storming success of the software product was firmly established with Microsoft’s announcement that sales passed the $1billion revenue mark a few years ago. Team this with the exciting new features in SharePoint 2010 and you’ll see why its popularity is set to rocket.

It’s hard to believe that there can be downsides to SharePoint’s many shining qualities. The fact that anyone can use it straight out of the box is a key selling point and this awesome usability is something that we really love. But it can mean that most end users won’t think to put an operations plan in place before they start to use it, which can cause no end of problems over time.

Fight or flight

You might think that making plans will spoil the fun of playing with your new toy (and up to a point I’d agree with you), but if they’re left to spawn organically without regulations, SharePoint sites will grow rapidly and the data in each one will become unmanageable, especially if you’re likely to be running thousands of them.

Ironically, without governance, you’ll make it harder to find, share and manage information across your sites if they are built inconsistently or in conflicting content types. Searching for information will become a chore and your users will switch off, never mind the fact that you may not be taking full advantage of SharePoint’s built-in auto-provisioning tools which are there to make your life a bit easier. D’oh!

It’s at this point that your stressed-out IT administrator may find themselves landed with the frustrating job of subsequently applying standards across your entire SharePoint environment, a labor intensive and time consuming task.

I really have to say though that regulation isn’t unique to SharePoint, its good practice to administer any new software that you’re going to introduce into your business. And if it’s backed up with a solid plan, ideally before or pretty soon after you begin using it, SharePoint really shouldn’t give you any management related headaches at all.

Taking off

Before I go into the nitty gritty of what to include in your governance plan, I think it’s a good idea to create a policy with flexibility. The last thing that you need is a long list of bureaucratic actions to extend and even undermine the whole process. Also, keep it collaborative! Why not discuss what should be in your governance plan by using a SharePoint wiki? Surely it makes sense for the key policy team members to use the software to discuss and create a plan?

Everyone’s plan will vary as we know you all have different needs and any general model should be adapted for the size of your organization. This advice should also be applied to the SharePoint governance guide and checklist at Microsoft’s own website(link).

A good SharePoint governance plan should focus on the following basic points to ensure its successful deployment in your enterprise:

• Roles – defining responsibilties in your organization
• Rules – a set of guidelines to state what is and isn’t allowed
• Routes – well-defined guides on how to handle different processes like taxonomies, sharing documents, adding sites etc.

Even though you will all have different requirements for your plans, it’s a good idea to monitor the creation, use and eventual deletion of sites to prevent countless ‘orphans’ in your environment. These are sites which have been abandoned but are still full of junk that is eating up your server space. Don’t forget to include backups of your system, sometimes overlooked elements such as branding or customization and any future migration strategy.

The sky is the limit

Think about why you are using SharePoint and what you want to gain from it. Your plan can then be a development strategy where goals can be ticked off as they are achieved. This should keep you referring to your document and making any adjustments to it. It’s best to see your policy as something that will need to be reviewed from time to time and not just as a static item. Ideally, it should grow and evolve with your business needs. The sky really is the limit!

Have you already formed your SharePoint governance plan? Tell us how it went.

There are countless posts on this topic, but here’s a list of some key ones that should help you further:

Getting started: resources at Microsoft

1. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff598584.aspx
2. http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/office/SharePointserver/bb507202.aspx

Further reading:

1. Veronique Palmer’s adaptations of the Microsoft governance plan:

http://veroniquepalmer.wordpress.com/2010/09/26/Sharepoint-business-governance-plans/

1. Shawn Shell on making SharePoint governance simple:

http://blog.consejoinc.com/2009/07/make-Sharepoint-governance-plain-and.html

1. Susan Hanley on why governance planning is more important than ever in SharePoint 2010:

http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/57959

1. Christian Buckley on how to kick start your governance plan:

http://buckleyplanet.typepad.com/samaritanweb/2010/04/how-to-jump-start-sharepoint-governance.html

1. Joel Oleson’s 10 steps to successful SharePoint deployment. See point 2 on governance planning:

http://SharePointmagazine.net/technical/administration/avoid-newbie-mistakes-10-steps-to-successful-sharepoint-deployments

Next time:  SharePoint Governance #2  – Roles, Rules and Routes.

Tooltips  – those little boxes that pop up when you hover over something – can be a blessing or a bit of a nightmare.  It drives me nuts when people enable those snapshot tooltips on every hyperlink on a page.  the resulting pop ups are huge, usually contain info I don’t want to see, and seem to hang around on the screen for ever.

But imagine a tooltip where you choose exactly what information is displayed?  How cool would that be?  Well that’s exactly what you get with tooltips in our PivotPoint web part  for SharePoint – which is why I think they rock.

So PivotPoint:  we take a SharePoint list – like this sales list, which has a record for each order Widget Wonderland have received over the past 4 years:

It’s a monster list, but hidden in the depths are some real gems of business information.  So let’s apply Pivot Point to it to see which are our best selling products year on year:

Wow, hundreds of lines of data summarized in seconds – neat eh?  We can see that in 2009 Agile App is a clear winner, but over the full 4 years Turbo Tool is our best performer.

But wait – see what happens when we hover:

Now I can not only see that we sold $125,365 worth of Turbo Tools in 2006, but also that we made 26 sales of that product, with an average sale value of $4,822, with Turbo Tool sales for 2006 accounting for 8% of our total sales to date.  And I can see this data for any cell – just by hovering.

How long would I have had to spend shuffling through Excel spreadsheets to extract all that?

And the best thing about this feature is that you choose exactly what you display in the tooltip:

In the web part configuration panel you can choose exactly what value you want to display in you tooltip, giving you access to several layers of data, all in the one view.

Now how cool is that?

Not a PivotPoint user yet?  Why not try it for free for 30 days?

Despite the infamous “fake today column trick” still appearing in new blog posts on a monthly basis you can’t use Today in calculated columns in SharePoint.

I’ve seen people assume (not unreasonably) that the same rule must apply with calculated default values used in columns that are not calculated columns as well – but strangely,  you actually can use Today in calculated default values, so I am going to explain why it works and how you might use this.

What is the difference between Calculated Column and Calculated Default value?

A calculated column, erm… calculates values from other columns in your list.

For example if you have an orders list with a Quantity and Price column you can calculate a Grand Total of Price * Quantity.

With a calculated default value you use a calculation to set the default value for a column that is not a calculated column – this is the value that is entered automatically when a new list item is created and may be over-written by the user.

So why may I want a calculation using Today as the default value?

Suppose we have a list containing customer complaints and we have a target to resolve everything in 3 days. Sometimes though for complex queries or if there are public holidays we may give more time. In that case we can set the default value as

= Today + 3

But the user can override that if necessary (public holiday etc).

So why can I use Today here but not in calculated columns?

With a calculated column the calculation is only reworked every time a record is updated. When it’s just viewed then it picks up the saved result from the last edit. This makes perfect sense for most calculated values, but not for values using Today or Me.

So for example if we tried to calculate the days left until a due date we might want to use

Days left = Due Date - Today

If we added the complaint on Monday then it would show that we have 3 days left to do it (Thursday). If we just look at the record on the Wednesday it would still show 3 days (as this was the calculation saved on Monday) when in fact we only have 1 day left to keep the customer happy.

That’s why SharePoint wont let you use Today in calculated columns.

However with a default calculated value the result is only worked out once when the record is being created – it’s understood that what is saved in this field is not updated automatically so there is no problem with using Today.

For a bonus point – you can’t reference other fields in calculations for default values (e.g. Start Date or Order Date) as before a record is being created the fields don’t yet contain values.

What else could I do with this?

The OP in this thread is using it to set default financial years. Suppose that your company’s financial year starts in April then you could use this formula to default to 2009/10 or 2010/11 on or after April.

=IF(MONTH(Today)>=4,"2010/11","2009/11")

or generating the year 20xx/xx notation automatically :-

=IF(MONTH(Today)>=4,YEAR(Today) & "/" & (YEAR(Today)+1),(Year(Today)-1) & "/" & YEAR(Today))

It’s also worth noting that you can use a similar formula in calculated columns – suppose you have an Order Date field and the financial year depends upon when the order was placed then simply replace Today with Order Date.

NB – This has been tested with SharePoint 2007/2010.

This is Part 5 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

See the System In Action

So, now let’s reap the rewards for all of our hard work and see the system in action.

I need to book a day off for a hospital appointment on Friday 9th of July.  I can see all the absence bookings for my department and the number of days I have had off this year on the absence dashboards above. I’ve only had 1 day off for Medical Appointments so far this year and I am allowed 3 so that’s fine – but 3 people are off on that day already, it’s going to be tough, but I really need to go to that appointment.

So, as you can see, I can add a new item to the planner straight from the link in the webpart, I don’t need to go to the list.

Ryan receives the absence request email and from looking at his dashboards he can see that although I am well within my Medical Appointments entitlement approving this absence is going to leave him really short staffed on Friday – but he can’t face the thought of listening to me moaning about my in-growing toenail for another 3 months, so he approves the request.

Once the request is approved I get an email notifying me, and the status of the absence changes from “pending” to “approved” on the absence planner.

And for the final step in the process, is the email to Ryan on Thursday, to remind him that I am off the next day, giving him chance to make sure all my work is covered.

So now we should have no excuse for messing up staff absence planning ever again!

So Can’t I do this with SharePoint out of the Box?

Well some of it. Clearly, your basic list and filtered views are all set up in SharePoint out of the box.

When it comes to your dashboard views there are some limitations.

This is how your Vacation Planner Wall Chart looks out of the box:

or as a Gantt view:

We have lost all of our color coding, it’s not possible to show the name of the person who is absent, unless you make this the title of the event, and we have no way of distinguishing between approved and pending items.

For the “Absences to Date” and “My Absences” dashboards we can achieve something similar, if a bit clunky, out of the box.  From the settings tab in your Staff Absence Planner list, choose edit current view.

Head down to Group By and choose Requested By and Reason.  Then expand the Totals section and choose # Days Absence and sum.

This will give you a view like this:

The information is all there, but I have to work to get at it.  For example Ryan can see that I have had 11 days off this year, covering 3 separate occasions, but he is going to have to drill into each individual event and get his calculator out to figure out how many of my days off have been annual leave, training or Medical.

Then on to the workflow emails. It is possible to generate email alerts for the absence request and the request approval, but the solution isn’t perfect.  For absence requests an administrator can set the list up to email all line managers within your company or department, every time a new request is added to the list.  This means that managers will get absence requests from their own staff, but also from all other staff as well.  The only way to avoid this would be to set up a separate absence request list for each line manager.

For the request approved/rejected email the requester will need to set up an alert on each request as they create it, asking to be alerted any time anything changes on that list item.

When the alert emails arrive, this is how they look:

There is no way to edit the email, and give the recipient clues on what they are supposed to do with it.

The final “John Smith is off work tomorrow” email, cannot be generated in SharePoint out of the box, as it doesn’t do date based alerts.

You could do this with Workflow and Event Receivers, but that means having some technical knowledge and breaking out SharePoint Designer and/or Visual Studio.

So – can you build a staff absence planning system with SharePoint out of the box?  I guess the answer is “kind of”. It is possible to build a basic system but it’s going to lack some useful functionality and may now be enormously user friendly.

We hope you’ve found this useful.

If you would like to try the Vacation planning system you can download a 30 day free trial version here.

And as always, if you have any questions or comments, we would love to hear them.

In SharePoint 2007 there is a well known trick for opening up a list’s forms (New/View/Edit) in design mode – append ?ToolpaneView=2 onto the url – this is often used to add instructions or javascript using a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) e.g.

• Showing a records ID on the View and Edit forms
• Setting a default duration for new SharePoint calendar events

However when I first tried to use my tried and tested shortcut in SharePoint 2010 I came a little unstuck as now the New/View/Edit forms appear in a fake popup window and modifying the URL doesn’t work.

There are two ways to do this in SharePoint 2010 – and once you know where to find them they should actually make life that little bit easier.

The first is to open up the form in a new window and then add ToolpaneView=2 onto the end of the URL, so

Right click on Add new Item or the lists Title field and select Open in New Tab or hold down CTRL while left clicking.

Alternatively you can do this using the new-fangled ribbon toolbar – select under List Tools the List tab, then on the right hand side of the ribbon you should see an icon for Form Web Parts which gives a menu of the different forms associated with the list that you can edit.

ID’s are a convenient, often short, way to uniquely refer to something. Unless you’re the Tax man who seems to believe he can’t get through his day without giving me, thats just one person, 7 unique id’s – presumably one for each extremity that we would like a piece off…

I digress… ID’s – SharePoint uses an ID for each item in a list and sometimes its handy to know them “Ere Bob – have you done task 1234 yet?”

You can easily add them to the list view (Modify this View then find the ID column, click display)

But what about if you want to see this on the View and Edit forms? (You can’t see it on the New form as it doesn’t get an ID assigned until you’ve created it)

You can’t do this in the UI. You can create a custom View/Edit form using SharePoint designer but its quite complex, is a pain when we add new fields and its fraught with potential problems.

So instead we’re going to look into every ones favourite SharePoint UI hacking tools – the Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) and javascript/jQuery.

Not so fast though young Jedi – before embarking on any of these hacks you should understand the pros and cons and this excellent article is a good place to start – jQuery : The SharePoint band aid.

Right now you’re back (you did read it right?) and understand what you’re getting into.

Open up the View page for any of your list items and add ToolPaneView=2 onto the end of the URL to open up the page in edit mode.

Note – if you already have a query string (&ID=xzx…) on the end of the url then you need to use &ToolPaneView=2 and if you don’t its ?ToolPaneView=2 e.g.

http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ID=1

=> http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ID=1&ToolPaneView=2

http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx

=> http://yoursite/Lists/Tasks/DispForm.aspx?ToolPaneView=2

Next add a Content Editor Web Part (CEWP) to the page and put the following code into it using the Edit Source button.

Content Editor Web Part (CEWP)

Add the javascript at the bottom of this article and after you click OK you will see that ID has been added at the top of the form. Do the same on the Edit form.

<script type="text/javascript"
   src="http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.3.2/jquery.min.js">
</script>
<script type="text/javascript">

$(function() {
  // Get the ID from the query string
  var id = getQueryString()["ID"];

  // Find the form's main table
  var table = $('table.ms-formtable');

  // Add a row with the ID in
  table.prepend("<tr><td class='ms-formlabel'><h3 class='ms-standardheader'>ID</h3></td>" +
	            "<td class='ms-formbody'>" + id + "&nbsp;</td></tr>");
})

function getQueryString() {
  var assoc = new Array();
  var queryString = unescape(location.search.substring(1));
  var keyValues = queryString.split('&');
  for (var i in keyValues) {
    var key = keyValues[i].split('=');
    assoc[key[0]] = key[1];
    }
  return assoc;
}
</script>

Notes

• This has been tested in WSS3 (SharePoint 2007) and SharePoint 2010 Foundation – I would expect it to also work in MOSS/SharePoint 2010 Server.
• The method  for adding a CEWP to the page in SharePoint 2010 is slightly different.
• When looking for references I found that Christophe beat me to it by about, ohh a year and a half and his version can be found here.

He doesn’t use jQuery so there is a little more code to write. If you’re just doing this or can’t use jQuery on your site (e.g. no network access) then you may be better off with his version. If you want to do other thigns on the form you may be better with the jQuery version above.

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

How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

Wrong!

What we want to do is “not send alerts to me, for items assigned to me, when I have created or amended an item myself”

So, lets have a look at a Task List first:

OK, so that’s fine, just select “Alert Me “  from the “List Actions” drop down and then from “Send me an alert when”  we need to select the “Someone else changes an item assigned to me” option.  Nice and easy.

So now lets look at a Project Tasks list:

Oh dear, the option we need “Send Alert when Someone else changes an item assigned to me” simply doesn’t exist.  Even though there is an “assigned to” column in the list.

It’s the same story with any other list – there is no simply one click mechanism to turn off alerts to yourself.

So how do we do this then?

Well you need to set up a filtered view.

Call it something like; “My Items, Modified by others”.

Set up the filter so the Assigned to” column is equal to [Me] and the “Modified by” column is not equal to [Me].  Like this:

Then, when you go to set up your Alert you get this option:

So, it’s do-able, but its a bit of a hassle.  In order to simply switch off alerts to yourself, for items assigned to you that you have just created or amended you need to create a filtered view which you wouldn’t really need for any other reason. And the alert will have to be set up individually for each user of the list who needs this functionality.

This annoying little glitch doesn’t just apply to SharePoint out of the box alerts, as far as we are aware you will also have the same problem in all the 3rd party alert enhancement tools on the market.

So for our Reminder we decided to eliminate the problem:

Ticking the “Don’t email the last modifier” box will solve the problem in one click, for everyone on the list.  We hope it makes you working day just a little bit easier.

This feature comes with newly released Reminder v1.7.6.

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.