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.

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It’s a relatively simple task to deploy an application like SharePoint within your organisation: the challenge comes in getting people to use it in a way that is consistent and productive.

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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.

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There are some scenarios where you could setup Reminder to generate emails alerts in a simple workflow scenario such as such as when a Task is completed,  a helpdesk ticket is closed, a company announcement is made, a vacation request or expenses claim is approved and so on.

When you first set up this kind of reminder, an email alert for any records already in this state (e.g. completed tasks) will also be sent and some of these could be quite old, so you could end up sending quite a lot of “old” reminder emails.

If you want to avoid sending emails for these old records you have 2 options:

• Use the Redirect Emails function to redirect the emails to yourself the first time its ran, delete these and then remove the redirect

This also gives you the opportunity to double check that everything is setup correctly.

• Use a view to filter out old records

For example you could filter to show only records with an ID > a recent ID.

Or you could add filter to show only records Created after a certain date.

Tip – All records in SharePoint have an ID and its sequential and automatically generated. To find the id you can show the ID column in your view or see the ID in the URL in your browser address bar.

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.

With Planner you can show multiple columns in the Category or on the Timeline of a Gantt chart by using a calculated column to merge fields together.

For example to merge Priority and Title columns together you would :-

• From your list click Settings > Create Column
• Set a name such as “Category”
• Choose Calculated for the type
• In formula enter (where [Title] etc is the name of the columns you want to merge)

      =[Priority] & " : " & [Title]

• Uncheck ‘Add to default view’ checkbox if you don’t want this appearing for the normal list view.
• In Planner you can now select this column.

You can merge multiple columns together, for example :-

   =[Priority] & " : " & [Title] & " - " & [Assigned To]

You can also use SharePoint standard functions and formula (many similar to excel) such as :-

   =Text([Start Time],"mmm-yyyy") " : " & [Title]

Which would prefix the Title with Month and year, like so  October-2009 : Your title here

To display the the duration in days you could use

   =DATEDIF([Start Time],[End Time],"d") & " Days"

See some more examples of common functions

Tristan asked in another post

“When a calendar event is being created, I want the end date/time to automatically populate to 1.5 hours after the start date/time.  Seems simple, but haven’t found a formula for this yet”

Sounds like a pretty reasonable suggestion and the Calendar lists NewForm.asx already sets the Start time to the current time – shouldn’t be too hard, right?…

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I am new to the world of software and I am noticing that you do things differently here.

Some of it is great – I don’t mind that I have had to put my entire wardrobe of business suits into storage and go out and buy a load of jeans and trainers, I’m not missing the endless, pointless meetings I used to sit in, and I’m getting used to the idea that no-one is going to ball me out if I turn up at 10 in the morning, so long as I put in a full day’s work.

But some things are proving more difficult to understand.  So for the next couple of weeks I thought I would share some of my “new girl” thoughts and perhaps pick up some insider knowledge from you along the way.

So first up – guarantees.

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Have you every tried to use any of the SharePoint Reminder or Alert web parts on the market – including ours – with Recurring Events in SharePoint Calendar lists?  They just don’t work do they? If you want to send out Alert/Reminder emails about a regular event you have to set up each and every instance of the event as an individual list item in your SharePoint calendar list. Annoying isn’t it?

That’s what our customers have been telling us – and with the latest version of SharePoint Reminder Webpart we have introduced functionality which will allow you to use Reminder with SharePoint’s handy recurring events feature.

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Update: CrossTab has been renamed PivotPoint

Our newest web part for SharePoint is a data analysis tool called “CrossTab”

We really like it: it works a bit like an Excel pivot table but has some extra functionality that helps you to unlock the data patterns and trends in SharePoint lists.

But nobody except us seems to get it.  So we have prepared a quick video demo to show you how it works.

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As of Tuesday this week we have achieved Microsoft Certified Partner Status – so we giving ourselves a bit of a pat on the back over here in Cheltenham.

Getting the certified status is something we have know we needed to do for quite a while now – but just haven’t got round to it.

To get the Certification we went for the Microsoft ISV/Software solutions competency – for which we had to demonstrate a successful record of developing and marketing packaged software based on Microsoft technologies.

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