Posts Tagged ‘WebPart’

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5 Things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Alerts

Date:July 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas, SharePoint Reminder Comments:1 ;

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.

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SharePoint Archive Round-up

Date:June 17th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

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.

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available

Date:June 14th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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”.

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The Truth about Tech Support

Date:May 24th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: ,
Category: General Comments:2 ;

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.

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SharePoint 2010 Ready – PHEW!

Date:May 4th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:1 ;

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.

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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.

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And the Winner Is . . . !

Date:March 10th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , ,
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;
red carpet

No, it’s not more about the Oscars, it’s our Case Study Competition – just as important to us, but maybe Jeff Bridges wouldn’t share our view.

Random aside: Did you know that this is (allegedly) the first year in over 20 years that award presenters at the Oscar’s have used the phrase “and the winner is”?  “And the winner is” was banned at the 60th Oscars, for fear of offending the “non-winners” (didn’t they used to be called losers??).  Presenters have been saying “and the Oscar goes to . . .” ever since; until this year, when, presumably due to popular demand, the traditional phrase is back in place.

Anyway, enough of all this.  Our winner is Adam Venn of Bridges Engineering in Bath, England.  Adam wins something far more useful than a little gold-plate statue.  He gets a swanky new Flip video camera, which he tells us will come in very handy for filming the first baby that he and his wife and expecting any time now.

So thank you to Adam. Bridges have been using Reminder since 2007 and Adam has sent some really interesting information on how they use it.  As we expected they are doing things over there that we never even thought of.  We will be publishing a full case study in a couple of weeks.

Thanks also to everyone else who sent in case studies. We will be publishing them all over the next few months.  If you have a case study that you would like to share with us it’s not too late, just email me clare.stone@pentalogic.net with brief details and I will get in touch to get the full story from you.  There are no prizes in it now – but we would still love to hear from you.

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2010: SharePoint New Year’s Resolutions

Date:January 18th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , , , ,
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

A happy New Year to you – and 2010 looks like being an exciting one in the wonderful world of SharePoint

Here at Pentalogic we have a good crop of SharePoint New Years Resolutions.  We thought we would share them with you now – so that you can hold us to them if our resolve waivers down the line.

So here they are:

  1. Join a gym.
  2. Give up chocolate.
  3. Read “War and Peace”.

OK, so we’re never going to stick to those, lets focus on something realistic.

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What’s In a Name?

Date:January 7th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , ,
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Some of you may have noticed that with the introduction or our new website we also seen to have lost a product – CrossTab.

Don’t Panic!  It’s still there, we just changed the name.

And why have we done that?  Well with the exception of us here at Pentalogic, and a few hard core number crunchers out there no one seemed to understand the old name.

Not that many people seemed to know what a Cross Tab is. And if you Google it this is what you get:

“A Cross Tabulation – often abbreviated to “crosstab” is a statistical technique that establishes an interdependent relationship between two tables of values, but does not identify a causal relationship between the values.”


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pivot-point

Phew, sounds like hard work!

Actually it’s pretty simple – it’s just what an Excel Pivot Table does – which is why we have changed the name to “PivotPoint” – which we hope will make sense to a lot more people.

Like a Pivot Table, Pivot Point is one of the handiest little data analysis tools you could wish for.  Use it to get a quick a quick and easy to interpret summary of the numerical data in your SharePoint lists.

Since we were somewhat lacking in inspiration when it came to finding a new name we picked the brains of lots of SharePoint users and experts.  The suggestions for PivotPoint came from Kirill Kirg in the MOSS group on LinkedIn.  So many thanks to Kirill!

And as always, if you have any comments or suggestions please do get in touch.

New for 2010 – Premium Support

Date:January 6th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: ,
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

We like to think that the standard support we offer as a part of our licensing is pretty good.  We are after all one of the very few companies in this market place offering all customers free telephone and email support. All backed up by our full 90 day money back guarantee for anyone who is not fully satisfied.

However some customers have requested a higher level of support and for this reason we have now introduced optional Premium support, for an annual fee.

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New Pricing

Date:January 4th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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.
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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.

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