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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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. |
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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:
OK, so we’re never going to stick to those, lets focus on something realistic.
Customers tell us that because of the flexibility of Reminder, and the huge number of different ways in which a SharePoint installation can be set up: getting Reminder correctly set up and configured for the first time can be a bit of a challenge.
To help with this, in Reminder v1.7 we have added a Setup Diagnostic Wizard that will check for many of the common set up and configuration problems for you and suggest possible configuration changes to fix them.
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!
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.
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:
This also gives you the opportunity to double check that everything is setup correctly.
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.
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.
It’s always great to hear from our customers: positive feedback gives us a nice warm glow, and the less positive gives us the chance to work on our weaker points!
This just in from Alicia is definitely of the warm glow variety:
“Thank you so much for all your help. Your responsiveness and professional assistance epitomize ‘customer service.’ We are still working on perfecting our Sharepoint task list, and we literally would not be as far along as we are today without your Reminder web part. It is exactly what we needed!”
Thank you Alicia!
Alicia also put in a request for a new feature for Reminder, which we are incorporating into the next release – watch this space!
So if you have any feedback for us – good or otherwise – or suggestions for product features or enhancements that you would be interested in, please get in touch.
Did you know that you can customize SharePoint alerts with Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder webpart by merging data from fields in your lists into the subject and message of each email alert?
This is one of the most powerful features of Reminder and in this way you can personalise each Reminder email so that you will often be able to include enough data to enable the recipient to complete a task without having to check the task list.
It works just like a Microsoft Word Mail Merge. Include the Merge data by inserting the name of the field containing the data you want to merge into your email message or subject line in square brackets: [FIELDNAME].
So, for example you may have a list of equipment requiring testing, with its location and the date when the next test is due. Have Reminder send your service engineers emails telling them exactly what they need to test, where and when.
So you message would look something like this:
“This message is sent to remind you that the [EQUIPMENT NAME] at [EQUIPMENT LOCATION] is due to be tested on [NEXT TEST DUE DATE]”
Which would appear to your engineer as:
“This message is sent to remind you that the Potterton 2000 Gas Boiler at 37 Gloucester St, Bristol is due to be tested on Monday 1st September 2009.”
Your engineer now has all the information needed to get on with the job, without having to check details on the task list.
For more details and examples have a look at the Pentalogic Reminder online manual.
