A site is the key place within SharePoint to bring together all the people, content and activities associated with a particular process, project or group.  And if the process or project is regularly repeated within your organization having a site template for it saves a lot of time and helps to ensure consistency and facilitate continuous improvement.

There are any number of scenarios where you might use a SharePoint site template, for this example we are using a recruitment process, but you could equally well set one up for any regularly repeated process or project you manage: training courses, audits, conferences and sales exhibitions, product testing, office moves, procurement, risk assessment, staff appraisals – the list goes on.

SharePoint comes with some Out of the Box Templates, there are other available on-line, free or to purchase.  But all of these are “off the peg” options: great if you are short on time, but they’re not going to be a perfect fit for your business processes.

To get a SharePoint template that fits your processes perfectly you are going to have to make your own – and thankfully it’s exceptionally easy to do – so here’s how.

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How annoying is it when you have just created or amended an item in SharePoint, and you immediately get an Alert email about it?

You know the kind of situation: you might be working in a team list, you have the list set up to alert you when an item assigned to you is added or amended, so as soon as you add or amend an item yourself an alert email pings through to your inbox. Completely unnecessary inbox clutter.

So, lets switch off those annoying “alerts to myself” – has to be an easy one click operation, right?

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We are really pleased to let you know about our latest Strategic Partnership with a SharePoint relationship management development company, LookOut Software of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

LookOut has been in the CRM software business since 1994.  In 2007 they were introduced to SharePoint and made the decision to change development platforms and haven’t looked back since.

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This is the first in a series of interviews with our partners  – giving insights into what’s happening in their part of the world and in their part of the world of SharePoint. And our first interviewee is Veronique Palmer. We first met Veronique in discussions on the SharePoint Experts Group on LinkedIn, which she co-manages and moderates.  Veronique is based in Johannesburg, South Africa and is owner and founder of Lets Collaborate.

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This is the final part in our occasional series on what’s hot and what’s not for the end user in SP 2010. A couple of weeks ago we focused on our favorite new feature for end users: FAST Search, which we think is going to make a huge impact on how people store and search for content in SharePoint 2010.  Last week we took at pop at Business Connectivity Services – which we feel could cause more problems than it solves. Today we are throwing stones at SharePoint 2010 Social Networking – which gets our vote for joint top turkey in terms of new features that have been heavily hyped, but in our opinion are not likely to deliver much real value for the end user. The thing with SharePoint 2010 Social Networking is that we just don’t understand why its there.  This is enterprise software – it’s not supposed to be fun, it’s supposed to help you get the job done.  Have Microsoft added these features just because “social” is so darned sexy at the moment?

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So here we are with the second installment in our occasional series on SharePoint 2010 features for the end user. In part 1 we looked at the new features in SharePoint 2010 that we thought would be most welcomed by end users.  Our vote went to FAST Search, because it’s going to make search within SharePoint much more like search in Google – which has to be a good thing. This provoked a lot of debate and whilst some of you agreed with us, others had different candidates for the top spot. A lot of people liked the improved UI and the introduction of the Office Ribbon, others loved the new Metadata features, tagging and voting, and others thought Records Management was going to be a winner.

But enough of all this positivity: (we are British after all: skepticism is our default setting!) this week we are looking at our pick for the #1 “turkey” feature SharePoint 2010, the feature that has been really hyped but that we believe could easily sink without a trace.

And our vote goes to . . . . well, we have a tie for top spot actually:

• Business Connectivity Services
• Social Networking

So, today we are going to talk about Business Connectivity Services, and on Monday we’ll come back to Social Networking- we wouldn’t want to bore you by gong on for hours!

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So here we are on track with at least one of our SharePoint 2010 New Year’s Resolutions – and its only March!

We wanted to get some more insight into how people use our products out there in the real world, and so we asked you to send in case studies.  In fact we launched a little competition to encourage you – winner to be announced in the next blog post.

We have been delighted with the response, and here is the first in what we hope will be a long running series.

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Along with many others in our part of the technology industry, we’ve spent the past few months with our heads firmly buried in SharePoint 2010, getting our products compatible, and along the way getting really familiar with the wealth of new features on offer.

So as we’re now at the “been there, done that” stage with SP 2010 we thought it might be useful to share our thoughts on what the killer features are, and where to watch out for the white elephants!

This week — killer features.

There’s a lot to get the developers excited: Just do a quick Google search and you’ll come across bags of blog posts on all the great new developer features. But here we want to take a slightly different tack and focus on the features that we think will make the most difference to the end user.

Our vote goes to FAST search.

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One of our New Years Resolutions for 2010 was to: “find out how people really use our stuff”. We really want to understand how people use our Planner, Reminder and Pivot Point in the real world.  We know we have clients from a huge range of industry sectors, so it will be great to see how our software helps with the special challenges of your area. And we know that some of you use 2 or 3 of our products together: we would love to know what you are doing there. So this year we want to find out how you use our products in your SharePoint environment. If we know how you use them it will help us to improve them! Just send us a quick email telling us a bit about your business and how you use our products and we will enter you into our free prize draw for the chance to win a funky Flip video camera. We would really appreciate your help on this one, so if you have a minute free please send us a quick email.

Terms and Conditions

1. You must be a user of Pentalogic Technology Software in order to enter (free trial users are welcome to enter.)
2. Entries must be sent to [email protected] with the subject line “Case Study”
3. The draw will take place at 12 noon GMT on Monday 1st March, you entry must be submitted by 12 noon GMT Sunday 28th February to qualify.
4. All entrants agree to take a 30 minute phone call from Pentalogic Technology, to clarify details of your case study.
5. All entrants agree to their case study being published by Pentalogic Technology, on line or in print.