Posts Tagged ‘WebPart’

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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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.

SharePoint PivotPoint Free Trial Download

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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New Website – at Last!

Date:December 22nd, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: ,
Category: General Comments:0 ;

Finally our new website is up and running – and we are sooo pleased with ourselves!

As I am sure those of you who are regular visitors to the site will agree, an overhaul was very much needed. The old site has served us well for nearly 5 years now, but it was never going to win any beauty contests.

We wanted to improve the look and usability of the site but we also wanted to improve some of the “behind the scenes” functionality.  We have upgraded our content management system – which will mean that it is easier for us to keep the content of the site up to date.  We have also worked on our image management – so that even though the site now has a lot more going on visually, it should still be fast-loading for users, whatever part of the world you happen to be in.


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New SharePoint Reminder v1.7 now with Rich Text Editor

Date:November 18th, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: , , ,
Category: SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:1 ;

With the huge volume of messages landing in your users in-boxes every day how do you make your important SharePoint Alerts and Reminders stand out?

Easy with the new Rich Text Editor in v1.7 of SharePoint Reminder Webpart.

The Editor uses the SharePoint’s intuitive WYSIWYG interface, which will be easy for any user of Microsoft products to pick up.

It allows you to add Rich Text formatting including font sizing, text effects, color and tables to Reminder alert emails – helping you to get the message across!

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