So we all like to know how we are doing – hitting our targets, meeting our KPI’s, staying within our budgets, running out of vacation days.

If you record things like this in SharePoint lists you would hope it would be easy enough to see how your actual performance compares to your targets, budgets or KPI’s.

Well for those of you who have Enterprise  and PerformancePoint it is possible – if not exactly a walk in the park –  but for the rest of us this can be a tricky task.   You need to find a way of bringing together 2 different sets of data:

• a Target or KPI - which is one item of data, which stays constant – no one likes a moving target do they?
• and an “Actual” figure which is the sum of a number of list items – sales, purchases, leave bookings, whatever, and which will clearly change as list items are added and changed.

So if we were looking to compare Target and Actual sales for July, as in the chart above, the date would loook like this.  A list of sales items, which will grow as the month progresses, producing a changing Actual total,  and one Target item, which will stay the same throughout the month.

These two data sets would generally live in separate lists.  The way many KPI columns work is by getting you to manually enter – and manually update – your changing Actual total into your Target list.  Not great, as you never get to see how the situation is changing until you have done your manual update.

In a workaround for one of our PivotPoint customers we have turned this on method on its head – entering the static “Target” into the ~Actuals list (in this example the sales list) to allow you to produce a chart or table with our PivotPoint web part, which will show actuals vs targets and is updated as your actual data changes, without the need for manual intervention.

So here’s how.

Add a new column to your list.  Make it a choice column with the choices as “Actual” and “Target”.  Have it default to actual, as this is what the vast majority of items are going to be.

Then we simply enter a “Target” item for each category we want to compare.  So in this example I want to see actual vs target sales for each of my products. So I have entered a Target Sales item for each of my products for July.

As the month goes on my team will enter actual sales for July, which will (hopefully) start to stack up nicely against my target.

So to see how things are shaping up set up a PivotPoint, get it to watch the sales list, and in this case a “This Month” view of the sales list.  Display a Pivot Chart, in this case a column chart.

To see the actual sales vs target sales set it up like this:

• Get your column data from the Actual/Target field.
• Your Row data from the product field.
• And your values from the Value field.

And you should end up with a nice column chart like the one above.

The best bit about this is that your chart will update as your list data changes.  So let’s say I get a really huge Planner order:

Woohoo – you can take that to the bank!

So, it’s not perfect, it’s a workaround, but some of you might find it useful.

Places you could use this would include:

• Sales vs Target
• Budget vs actual expenditure
• Annual Vacation Allocation vs Vacation taken to date.

If you have any other ideas on where this might be useful we would love to hear them.

Remember the good old days, before SharePoint 2010, when a dropdown on the top right of a List View Web Part (LVWP) allowed you to select different views, quicly and easily?

In SharePoint 2010 we have lost this handy feature.  On some pages, a substitute does exist in the Breadcrumb on the title bar (which is part of the Ribbon, at the top of the page). It took us a little while to actually realize was there – but once we found it, it was very welcome.

This bugged me so much that I decided to look into it further and ended up developing a little tool which  - well – rescues the view selector drop down.

If you just want the solution you can skip the rest of this post and download our free fix for this annoyance – ViewRescue

After many months of work we are delighted to announce that FilterPoint is now available to purchase.

Filtering is one of the things that any serious SharePoint user is going to need to do at some point. As you put more data into SharePoint lists become longer and you will need a quick and easy way to get to the items you are looking for.

When you create applications and dashboards, bringing together information from different data sources and displaying it in different ways with Web Parts adding filters will make your applications and dashboards dynamic – giving users the information they need, when they need it.

But when you start filtering you are going to quickly come across things that you wish you could do with SharePoint’s built in filters, but frustratingly just can’t.

So in the same way that we built Reminder to improve on the functionality of SharePoint Alerts, and Planner to improve on Gantt charts and calendars, we have built FilterPoint to give a little more power to your SharePoint filtering.

If you are working with SharePoint 2010 Foundation or WSS your filtering options are limited to static filtered views. Filtered views are great for getting at data sets that you want to see regularly – like “this month’s sales” for example. Set the view up once and it’s there whenever you need it.

But what if you have 100 clients and want to be able to look at “this client’s sales” for any of them? Setting up a filtered view for each client, and navigating to it is going to be quite a drag.

With FilterPoint your filter can be set up in seconds, allowing users to flip between the different data sets they need with just a couple of clicks.

With MOSS and 2010 Enterprise you get more filter power. But we still felt there were some things missing. So for example even with MOSS filters you can’t:

• Set up several Filters within one filter web part
• In 2007, send many filters to one filter consumer list or Web Part (e.g. filter on both customer and product).
• Use different styles of filter, like Free Text, drop down lists or Radio Buttons
• Clear filters with a single click.

So even though MOSS offers more filtering options, there are still some significant gaps and we believe that FilterPoint goes a long way towards filling these.

Of course FilterPoint isn’t the only 3^rd party filtering web part on the market and you can see how we match up to the competition by taking a look at our comparison chart here.

When we were looking at the competition one thing we noticed was that some of the most useful filter Web Parts – the ones offering the most functionality – were incredibly complex to set up. You would need the patience of a saint and a PhD in SharePoint (if such a thing existed!) So we have worked very hard to keep the setup of FilterPoint quick and simple. Take a look at our short on-line demo here, and let us know whether we have succeeded.

We’ve also tried to keep the prices competitive. Our Starter Pack license comes in at $199 and a Single Server License is $595.

And of course, like all of our products FilterPoint comes with a 30 day free trial and a no quibble money back guarantee.

And for existing customers we are offering a 25% discount for purchases made by 31st March 2011.  Email sales@pentalogic.net for your discount code.

So why not give it a try today?

As FilterPoint is our new baby we are very keen to know what you think of it – so please let us have your comments and feedback.

Our Reminder Web Part – which adds advanced email alerting features to SharePoint – has recently been updated.

The main new feature in version 1.7.9 is support for host-named site collections (aka host header based site collections).

A host header is the main part of a url – such as www.pentalogic.net or sharepoint.yourcompany.com

Normally SharePoint uses separate Web Applications for different host headers and whilst you can use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to map two different urls to the same site (e.g. sharepoint for internal access  and http://sharepoint.yourcompany.com for external access to the same site) you can’t have entirely different sites served by the same web application on different urls.

Why does this matter to you?

Well, for the vast majority of you it doesn’t! In fact you can’t create host header site collections using SharePoints Central admin tool – you’ve got to break out the command line STSADM or powershell.

For most installations you’re likely to have a scheme such as sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/HR and sharepoint.yourcomapny.com/sites/Finance etc  and you may perhaps use Alternate Access Mappings (AAM) to give alternate urls for the same content. e.g. a shortcut of sharepoint/sites/HR and sharepoint/sites/Finance.

However, you can’t use AAM to serve different content from different host headers using the web application. So if you want to have customer specific sites such as CustomerA.yourcompany.com and CustomerB.yourcomany.com (a very common requirement for hosting companies) then you have to create separate web applications for each host header.

The problem is that this doesn’t scale very well above approximately 20 web applications and instead you’re advised to use host header site collections.

• Host-named site collections – 2010, 2007
• Shared Hosting solutions on WSS 3.0 (Word)

In addition we’ve also included corrections to errors caused by mixing field names and formatting in the Rich Text Editor and separating multiple email addresses in rich text fields with new line characters were also included in this new version.

You can download the latest version and update without loosing any settings – upgrade instructions are included in the manual.

Well finally, after months of hard work we are delighted to be able to let you know that we have just released our new FilterPoint web part for SharePoint in beta.

FilterPoint has been a long time coming so we hope you are going to like it.  It’s a tool that we always knew we wanted to develop. Dynamic filtering  – the ability to flip between filter values at the click of a mouse – is one of the building blocks for the kinds of rich applications that our customers like to build for themselves.  It builds on the power of webpart connections (a much neglected area in SharePoint) and once you have the ability to apply a group of filters to a page with a selection of webparts and lists you have the potential for some really nice dashboards.

But, as I said FilterPoint has been a long time coming, because what started out looking like a straight forward project turned out to be anything but . . . .

It starts off looking ever so simple with plenty of online examples – but when you start delving into the details it quickly becomes the stereotypical ”Can of Worms” project.

There are basically two interfaces you can use – one old IFilterProvider interface , and the new ITransformableFilterValues interface. So far sounds easy but how about some wildcards….

With the new ITransformableFilterValues interface – you can’t create filters dynamically,  and you can’t have multiple connections on the consumer side in SP 2007.

On the other hand, with the old IFilterProvider interface you can’t send multiple filter values to List view web parts and you can’t connect more than one provider web part to a consumer web part. And that’s just scratching the surface.

To top it all off you have little control over what the filter consumer web part actually does with the info you give it – want to say “Equals” or “Not Equals” or “Greater Than” etc and thats out of the scope of what a filter provider can do (we’ve got some ideas on how to work around this in a future version of FilterPoint though).

My oh my, enough to make your head spin!

Anyway- we’ve worked really hard to make this web part as simple to use as possible whilst still being compatible with any web parts that can accept the standard web part connections.  We have managed to come up with a tool which allows you to apply multiple filters to multiple webparts and lists, and (at least when working with our Planner and PivotPoint) you can have some control over the operator – using “not equal”, “greater than” and “less than” as well as the standard “equals”.  We hope to extend this aspect of the functionality in v2.

So, why might you want to use this thing then?

Well, you might want to use simply it to guide your users to the most relevant data in one list or webpart – giving them the ability to “filter on the fly”, selecting new data sets, and then clearing filters in one click.

Or, at the other extreme, you might want to bring together a collection of lists and web parts on one page, and use FilterPoint to create a truly dynamic dashboard for your users.

In fact, once you start to use filters and webpart connections there are any number of different ways to enhance the functionality of your SharePoint site with a tool like FilterPoint – we already have it set up on our Sales Pipeline and Client lists here, and are finding more possible uses every day.

We are planning to have FilterPoint ready for full public release by the end of the month.  In the meantime, if you pre-register for your free trial, you will qualify for a 25% discount on the product purchase price.

We hope you like it, and as always, we are keen to hear your thoughts and feedback.

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

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

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

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

You will then see a window like this:

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

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

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

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

We are pleased to be able to let you know that we are introducing new free licenses for charities, community groups and philanthropic not for profit organizations on all of our products.

We have always offered a limited free Community license of our Reminder product, but a review of all of our licensing has allowed us to extend all our offering to charities and philanthropic non profit organizations.  We will now have a monthly quota of free licenses of all of our products available for non-profit organizations.

We will be making fully featured versions of all of our software available to charities and non-profits.  Any organizations interested should take a look at the relevant page of our website, to check that they qualify, then contact us at sales@pentalogic.net to obtain a license key.

Existing users of the free Community license for our Reminder web part are welcome to continue using the software and it will continue to be supported, however the Community license will not be available in future versions of the software (after v1.6.3).

If you are a Community license holder and want to upgrade to new versions of Reminder you will need to either obtain a new free license key from us if you are a qualifying non profit organization, or if you are a commercial organization purchase one of our commercial licenses which will shortly include a $199 “starter pack” for small business.

We know there will be a few businesses who will lose out under the new system, but we hope that if you are one of the “losers” you will understand our reasons for making the change. As always, if you do have any questions or comments please do contact us.

Victor from New York asked

Is there a way to configure a Reminder webpart to send an email when task item status in the task list is set to “completed”?

Sure there is!

In this case the trick is to use a SharePoint Views to filter out the tasks you are interested in.

In the “Tasks due and Overdue” example we show now to use the built in Active Tasks view to send email alerts only for overdue tasks that are not complete.

For this requirement we are going to setup a new View to just show the Completed tasks

• Create a new View using a filter of “Status = Completed” – call it something imaginative like Completed Tasks.

• If you are not familiar with SharePoint views then this link should help

• Then you would setup a Reminder web part to watch the Complete Tasks view

• Set Send When to Always – because you want an email alert to be sent as soon as a Task is complete, regardless of any Due dates

• Set-up a recipient, subject and message  (remember that you can customize the contents of the email alert)

• Leave everything else as default (send email once and check list every 1 hour) and then you should be good to go – one email for each completed record will be sent within an average of 30 minutes (1 hour / 2) of its status being changed to completed.

This will send out emails for any completed tasks that are already in your list and some may be quite old – so you might want to look at this tip on how to stop emails being sent for old items.

Reminder is pretty flexible but this also means that its not always obvious how to set something up. The Common Scenario examples may give you the answer you need but you can always contact us, describe what you are trying to do and we can give some pointers.

Did you know that you can customize SharePoint alerts with Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder webpart by merging data from fields in your lists into the subject and message of each email alert?

This is one of the most powerful features of Reminder  and in this way you can personalise each Reminder email so that you will often be able to include enough data to enable the recipient to complete a task without having to check the task list.

It works just like a Microsoft Word Mail Merge.  Include the Merge data by inserting the name of the field containing the data you want to merge into your email message or subject line in square brackets: [FIELDNAME].

So, for example you may have a list of equipment requiring testing, with its location and the date when the next test is due.  Have Reminder send your service engineers emails telling them exactly what they need to test, where and when.

So you message would look something like this:

“This message is sent to remind you that the [EQUIPMENT NAME] at [EQUIPMENT LOCATION] is due to be tested on [NEXT TEST DUE DATE]“

Which would appear to your engineer as:

“This message is sent to remind you that the Potterton 2000 Gas Boiler at 37 Gloucester St, Bristol is due to be tested on Monday 1st September 2009.”

Your engineer now has all the information needed to get on with the job, without having to check details on the task list.

For more details and examples have a look at the Pentalogic Reminder online manual.