If you have visited our website recently you may have noticed that we have changed our pricing.  Just a quick note here to explain what we have done and why. Firstly we wanted to simplify the pricing of Reminder.  People often commented on how confusing the licensing structure was with a combination of server licenses and web part license packs.  So we have simplified this and also reduced the price, so that the price of Reminder now falls more in line with the pricing of other Alert enhancement web parts on the market.

Across all of our products we have also introduced 2 new pricing options, which we hope will help to make our software more affordable for a lot of customers. Firstly, we have introduced “Starter Packs” for each of the products, priced at $199. With these we hope to make our software an affordable option for smaller businesses and small SharePoint installations.  The starter pack license can be used for SharePoint installations using a single Web Front End (your database server can still be separate) and up to 25 users. We thought it was important to introduce this level of pricing not only because SharePoint is becoming so widely used by smaller businesses, but also because of the way SharePoint most typically gets deployed within the Enterprise. The research for our free white paper so SharePoint End User adoption showed that very often SharePoint is initially utilised by one team or workgroup within an organisation, before gaining more widespread organisational use.  Our new $199 Starter Pack Pricing means that our products will now fall within budget for a small team or workgroup deployment. We have also introduced a new “3-pack” license, which is a mid way option between the single server license and the “unlimited use” site license.  Research amongst our existing customers showed that very many farms use 3 Web Front End servers and separate indexing and database servers, so our 3-pack license offers an ideal and affordable solution for many farm deployments. Adding these options to our Free Non-Profit licenses and 25% educational discounts means that we now have a pricing structure that we hope offers an affordable solution for everyone. We hope you agree, and if you do have any comments or suggestions please get in touch.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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This web part gives a CrossTab view of a SharePoint® list helping you to summarize and analyze data.

(CrossTabs are more commonly known from Microsoft Excel® as a Pivot Tables – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pivot_table)

There are almost limitless ways to use a CrossTab – here is one quick example

CrossTab - Sales example

We take a Sales list and first generate a CrossTab showing sales by product over time. We can see a big increase in sales from £11,000 in October to £70,000 in November and most of that increase is due to sales of the “Can-o-matic” product.

The next CrossTab shows the same data by Product/Sales Team expressed as a percentage of total sales. We can immediately see that the Regional sales team and the “Can-o-matic” are a winning combination generating 65.4% of revenue.

Previously you would have to export this data to Excel or use MOSS Enterprise Excel Services to perform the same sort of analysis. Now using the CrossTab web part you can summarize and cross tabulate your data for easy analysis in all versions of SharePoint.

This is one of several new products in the pipeline that we are very excited about – if you would like to help with Beta testing then please get in touch

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