We have spent a lot of time over the past month working on the beta version of FilterPoint. Our team of professional testers have been working hard to check for compatibility with all versions of SharePoint 2007 and 2010 and a wide range of browsers, as well as looking for bugs and challenging us on some aspects of the usability of the UI.

And we also owe a huge vote of thanks to our beta volunteers who have been testing out the product in the real world.  Our volunteers and not only uncovered some bugs, but also come up with suggestions for additional things that we could include in the first release.  Some of these we have already added and they include:

1. Date Picker- allows you to set filtering for a particular date using the familiar pop up calendar.
2. People Picker – allows you to use the familiar SharePoint people
3. Options for (All) and (Empty) Filters – allows you to control what you see when no filter is applied, and when there is no value in the field you are filtering on.
4. Default Values including [Today] and [Me] – very useful for getting quickly to your most relevant stuff.

We feel this has added useful new functionality to v1 and we have a long list of things we plan to put in v2.

We have now also set pricing for FilterPoint, which will be in line with our Planner and PivotPoint products:

$199 Starter Pack for up to 25 SharePoint users

$595 for a single server license

$1,395  for a 3 pack – ideal for farms, covering 3 web front end servers.

and Site Licenses from $2,975 – covering your for unlimited SharePoint users and servers in one geographical location.

FilterPoint will be available for purchase before Christmas – so register today for your 25% discount!

We’re pretty excited about this product as we think web part connections and dynamic filtering are a great ‘hidden’ feature in SharePoint so we want to build up a library of examples of how you can use this – do you have any use cases you would like to share with us?

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.

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?

Hi everyone.

We wanted to share this new SharePoint case study with you.  It shows how online security specialists Websense are using our PivotPoint webapart to slice and dice their marketing list data, and create some awesome, dynamic dashboards.

Websense were moving Excel spreadsheets into SharePoint lists.  In moving the data into SharePoint the marketing department didn’t want to lose the Pivot Table view that they had found so useful in Excel.

But nothing in SharePoint out of the box, or any of their existing 3rd party solutions could give them that Pivot Table in SharePoint.  The case study shows how PivotPoint delivers that functionality.

We were really pleased to get the case study because PivotPoint is perhaps the least understood of our products, but maybe one of the most useful.

Accountants and Statisticians have grown up with pivot tables and cross tabulations so they “get” the concept of a pivot view instantly.  But for the rest of us the concept can be a bit tricky to grasp in the abstract.

It’s only when you see it applied to your list data:  instantly presenting insights and summaries that might otherwise have taken you hours to uncover, that you really understand how it can help you.

So we hope you enjoy the Websense case study, and maybe it will give you some ideas about how you might use PivotPoint in your own SharePoint deployment.

Read the PivotPoint Case Study.

Just a quick note to let you all know that we have just released a new version of SharePoint Planner web part - v2.6.4.

The new version includes a couple of handy new features that might be useful for you.

The new Split Multiple Values option will be useful in resource planning in circumstances where you want to enter multiple category values into one list item, but still view each individual category’s activity as a separate line in your Planner view.  For example you might want to create a list item for a project meeting, with several people in attendance.  In a Gantt view of project tasks it would be appropriate to show this meeting as one item.

But in a category view of staff availability/commitments you would want the meeting to appear as a separate item for each staff member involved.

The split multiple values feature now gives you this option when working with a category view.

Another new feature allows you to word-wrap long labels. By default Planner truncates long labels, and this isn’t a problem when you are in front of your screen as you can see the full label of an item in the tooltip simply by hovering over it.

However, for those of you who like to print your planner views, the tooltip isn’t an option.  So we have provided the option to word-wrap long item labels, ensuring that you have all of your information to hand when looking at hard copy versions of your Planner charts.

We hope you find these small improvements useful.  We have spent quite a bit of time comparing the functionality of Planner with what’s available out of the box in SharePoint 2010 and although Planner is more than 5 years old now we have been pleased (and a little surprised!) to find that Planner still offers significant benefits for resource and simple project planning.  We will be sharing more of our insights into the good the bad and the ugly of resource planning in SP 2010 in a future post.

This is likely to the last minor upgrade of Planner before we move to version 3 early in 2011. Version 3 will include some of your most regular feature requests like grouping multiple categories, dynamic sizing and rich tooltips; and will also harness the power of Silverlight now available in SP 2010 to deliver a much richer display and improved printing capabilities – watch this space!

If you are an existing customer you can download the new version here.

Or if you don’t already use SharePoint Planner why not try it free for 30 days?

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.

This is Part 4 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

In parts 1 through 3 of this series we have laid the foundations for our tailor made Staff Vacation and absence planning system.  We have set up the basic SharePoint list, defined a number of list views, and set up dashboards using SharePoint Planner and PivotPoint webparts.

Now we are going to add the “moving parts” to the system and set up a simple approval email workflow using SharePoint Reminder webpart.

We are going to have 3 steps in our system :-

• One email to a staff member’s line manager when a new request for absence has been submitted.
• One email to the staff member and let them know whether their request has been approved or rejected.
• One email to the line manager the day before a staff member is due to be absent from work as a reminder.

SharePoint has “Alert Me” emails and  a workflow engine built in but the Alert Me is a little too limited and for workflows you need to fairly techie and modify them using SharePoint Designer or Visual Studio which can be overkill for these simple email alert. See part VI for more details.

If you don’t already have SharePoint Reminder Webpart you can download the free trial version and view the installation instructions.

Absence Request Email

To set up your first Reminder add the webpart to a convenient web part page in just the same way as you added the Planner web part.  Remember, with the Reminder, there will be no need for the team to actually see the web part, once it is set up all the work goes on behind the scenes.

Now go to “Modify Shared Web part” and set the web part up.

Watch List: Staff Absence Planner

For this Reminder you do not want to show all columns, or expand recurrences, so leave both these boxes unchecked.

Read Records that are: “Pending” we want to look at new requests that have not yet been approved or rejected.

You can find more information on Reminder’s “Watch List” settings here.

Email Reply To: this feature allows recipients of a Reminder email to reply to a specific person.  So in this case, you might want replies to go to the person specified in the “requested by” column, so that an authorizing manager can query a request directly with their team member, before choosing to approve or reject it.  If you don’t want to get that fancy at this stage, you can choose to leave this section blank.

Email To: “Authorized by” we want to email the line manager who will authorize the absence request.

You can then ignore the CC, BCC, all users in a group and “Don’t email Last Modifier” options.

For the Subject of your email choose something like “Absence Request Authorization Required”

Now to edit the email message.  Click on the “Edit Message” Button and a Text Editor box will appear, very much like a Microsoft Word window.  You can use Rich Text formatting such as bold, colors and different font sizes in your message.  You can also use the drop down at the bottom of the window to insert merge data from fields in your list, just as you would with a “Mail Merge” in word.

You can find more information on formatting the content of your Reminder email here.

For “Send When” choose “Always”.

Then for “Send Email” choose “once” – we are going to assume that our line managers are efficient and will respond to requests the first time round, without repeated nagging!

You will find more information on Reminder’s “Send When” options here.

In the “Check List” section, set Reminder to check the list once per hour, and you are done.

Request Approved/Rejected Reminder

The set up of the next two Reminders is very similar.  For our “Absence Request Approved/Rejected” Reminder the only things that you will change are:

Read Records that are: for this one choose “approved” and “rejected”.

Email To: choose “Requested By”

Choose a new email subject and edit the email text, you will want to include “approval status, and I have also included “Authorized By” to include the line managers name, and “Approver Comments” to include any explanatory notes that the line manager has made.

For “Send When” we are again choosing “Always” and “Once”. This will send one email for all approved and rejected items on the list.

“Staff off work tomorrow” Reminder

For the third Reminder, which warns the line manager of an imminent absence, the setup is again quite similar.

For this one we want to Read Records that are “Approved”, send the email to the person in the “Approved By” column.  Rather than sending an email “Always” in this case we want to send an email when “Start Time” is “Due Soon”.  I have set Due Soon to “Within 1 Day” but as you can see you can choose whatever timescale works for you.

So that’s the setup complete.

Final installment: take a look at the system working, and see how much of this we could have done with SharePoint out of the box.

This is Part 3 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

So having set up our basic SharePoint list with filtered views, and our “Wall Chart” dashboard, using SharePoint Planner webpart, we are now ready to get up our “Staff Absences to date” and “My Absences” dashboards.  This is the bit that allows managers to monitor the amount of absence each of their team members has had:

Or for individual staff members to monitor their own absences:

For this part of the process you are going to need SharePoint PivotPoint webpart.

If you don’t have PivotPoint already you can download the free trial version and view the installation instructions.

So we need to set up 2 webparts, and you will need to give some thought to where you are going to put them.  “My Absences” is intended to be visible to anyone, so that could go on your main team page, or your HR home page.  “Absences to Date” however is only meant for managers, so you will need to place it in a location where only your managers have viewing permissions.

The webpart setup is very simple.  Let’s start with “Absences to Date” add the webpart to your chosen page in the same way as we did in part 2.

Now “edit shared webpart”.  What PivotPoint is going to do is add all the absences, of each type, that each of your staff members has had in the current year*, then pesent this information to you, in a table which will be automatically updated every time some has more time off approved.

In the webpart configuration tool tell PivotPoint to get its data from the Staff Absence Planner List and the Approved Absences view.

For the columns of our table we want the Reason field from our list, and for the Rows we want the Requested By field.  We will have Totals on both columns and rows.  Our values will come from the #Days Absence field and the Calculation we want to perform is a simple Sum.

For the set up of the “My Absences” webpart, everything is the same other than the view you want to watch, which is My Absences.  There is also little point having totals on the columns for this one.

So, now we are finished, apart from one little glitch, which is how to handle “this year”

*Clearly for this dashboard we only want to be displaying absences in the current absence year.  Now luckily, you don’t actually need to sort this out right now, you have until the end of your current year to think about how you handle it, but it’s going to need doing sooner or later so best to give it some thought now.

There are two methods you could use for ensuring these dashboards are only showing data from the current year.  The first is to set up a filter on the list, so that PivotPoint only looks at list events for the current year.

The second possible method is to set the system up as a site template, and create a new site for each year.

Either one may work for you, and you have a little while to decide which method suits you best.

Next installment – set up a simple Absence approval workflow with SharePoint Reminder webpart.

This is Part 2 of the SharePoint Staff Vacation Planner – DIY Guide

So having set up our Vacation and Absence list yesterday, we can now apply Planner webpart, to create a vacation and absence dashboard like this:

So staff and managers can easily see who is off when, and when it will be possible to request leave.

If you don’t already have our Planner webpart you can download the free trial version here.

You will find all the installation instructions you need here.

Now we are ready to set up the Planner web part.  Decide where you would like this to display, perhaps your HR home page, or your team home page, select Site Actions, Edit Page, Add a Web part then select Planner.

From the top right hand corner of the Planner web part which will have appeared on your page click edit and Modify shared webpart you will now see the Planner Configuration Panel on the right hand side of your screen.

So, we are going to set the Planner up like this:

Planner Style: By Category

Planner Source: is the view you just set up, so in our case: Staff Absences – Approved and Pending

Category: Requested by, so the names of the people requesting absence will appear down the left hand side of the Planner.

Label: Approval Status, so each absence will be labelled Approved or Pending.

You can leave Period set at auto Planner will display in the format most appropriate to the items you have entered into your list and you can easily scroll back and forth and zoom in and out.

The next section we are going to change is Set colour by column.  We are going to set this by the Reason column, and choose a different colour for each of the Reason choices we set up in our list.

This will allow us to see at a glance why a team member is absent.  In this section you should also choose where and how to display the color coding key, ours is underneath the Planner chart.

And that’s the Planner set-up done.

For more information on Planner set up and configuration click here.

Or take a look at this for more info on using color coding in Planner.

In the next section we will look at setting up our “Absences to Date” dashboard, using PivotPoint webpart.

SharePoint offers a great foundation for non-programming business people to build applications around our business processes, just the way we want them.  This guide will show you how to build your own SharePoint staff vacation and absence planning system.

Staff vacation and absence planning can cause trouble and strife in any organization.  The good old wall planner can work for staff who are all in the same physical locations . . .

. . . . until you approve an absence then forget to enter it on to the planner, and then allow someone else to book vacation at the same time, leaving your department under staffed.

. . . . .or until you forget that Sam has booked a week’s vacation and call him up furious on Monday morning asking why he isn’t in work.

. . . . . .or authorize Jenny’s week off in the Caribbean only to get a thorough ticking off from HR because you have allowed Jenny to exceed her annual leave entitlement.

I’ve been guilty of all these crimes in my time. So I was pleased to find that with SharePoint we can make things a little more organized, and using our PivotPoint, Reminder and Planner web parts together we can set up a slick little Vacation Planning system in just a few minutes.

So, what we are aiming for here is:

• A dashboard “Absence Planner” display, which will be accessible to all staff via SharePoint.
• A personal and managers “Absences to Date” dashboards.
• An automated Absence Request approval system
• An email reminder to line managers of imminent staff absence.

To be clear: this is not a ready made “Vacation Planning” template or application, its a guide showing how you could build your own system, using some of SharePoints built in features and then add a little pizazz with our web parts. Its going to take a little work to set this up for your organisation but then it should be a better fit than a packaged solution.

Setting up the Vacation Planner should take you about an hour if you have our webparts already, a little more if you need to download them.  So we have broken this guide up into 4 parts, which we will be publishing over the next 5 days:

Today – set up your Staff Vacation and Absences list and filtered views

Part 2 – set up a Staff Vacation Planner dashboard with SharePoint Planner webpart

Part 3 – Set up Absences to date dashboard with SharePoint PivotPoint Webpart

Part 4 – Set up a absence request and approvals workflow with SharePoint Reminder Webpart

Part 5 – see the system in action, and see how much of this you could achieve with SharePoint out of the box.

For those of you who can’t wait that long, you can download the full PDF guide and a 30 day free trial of the webparts here.

First set up your List

We are going to use a Calendar List, add some extra columns, and switch on Approvals.

So, from which ever section of your site you want choose select Site Actions from the top right of the page, then from the dropdown, select Create then from the Tracking tab, select Tasks.

Call your list whatever you want – Staff Absence Planner works for me, decide whether you want it to display in the quick launch menu  – probably no need as few people will need to access the list that way once we have our system set up.  Then select no in the Alerts option.  Click OK and you list is set up.

Now go to the Settings tab in your list and first of all choose Create Column. We are going to add a few extra columns to the list. Add the columns Requested By and Authorized By, the column type for both of these is “Person or Group” and you want them both to display in the default view. Make these mandatory fields by clicking Yes for Require that this column contains information. Now we are going to add a column to show the reason for the absence – annual leave, maternity leave, training, sabbatical, whatever.  The column type for this column is going to be Choice and again we are going to made completion of this field mandatory, and show the field in the default view. Finally a column for the number of days of each absence, we want this to be a number column, I have set the minimum value to 0.5 days and the maximum to 30 days, and again we want it to be a mandatory field.

Next let’s switch on Approvals.  Back in the Settings tab of your list choose List Settings and from the General tab choose Versioning Settings. In Content Approval click Yes and we are done with the list set up.

Set up Filtered Views

Now for the filters.  If you haven’t made much use of filters before it may be worth having a look at these resources:

SharePoint filter techniques articles

Filters can really enhance the power of SharePoint lists, and we are going to use 3 here in our vacation planner.

#1 – Approved and Pending Absences for Planner

We want our Planner to provide a dashboard display for all staff, showing absences requested and approved.  So that staff can see when it will be possible to book an absence and managers can decide whether they wish to approve a staff absence request.

Our list actually contains 3 approval status’s “Pending”, “Approved” and “Rejected” we don’t need to display absence requests that have been rejected on our Planner, so we are going to set up a list view to show just “Pending” and “Approved” requests.

Go back to Site Settings and choose Create View.  From the menu here choose Standard View. N.B.  This choice is very important – Planner only works on Standard views. In the Create View Page add a name for your view, we have used Staff Absences – Approved and Pending. In the Audience section be sure you have checked Create Public View this again is an essential for Planner to work.  In the column section choose the columns that you wish to display to people who are creating or entering a list item.  This will not impact of the Planner display.

We are then going to skip over the “Sort” section and from the Filter section choose Show Items only when the following is true.

Column Approval Status is equal to Pending OR column Approval Status is equal to Approved.  Click OK and we are done with the filter.

#2 – Approved absences for managers “Absences to Date” Dashboard

Set up of this is exactly the same as the last one, except we are going to call it “Absences to Date” and just show items where column approval status is equal to approved.

#3  – The Magical [Me] Filter, for “My Absences” Dashboard.

If you haven’t used this filter before you are going to love it!  It shows whoever is logged in just the list items relating to them, so its ideal for our “My Absences” dashboard view, but also has a whole host of other uses.

We need a Standard, public view again – yes even though it’s “My Absences” it’s still a public view or other people won’t be able to use it.  Call it My Absences then head down to the filter section and choose to show items where column Requested By, is equal to [Me].

So, now we have laid the foundations for our system by setting up the basic list and filters.

In Part 2 we will create a “wall chart” dashboard, using SharePoint Planner webpart.