This is one of the most common questions posed in SharePoint forums.
SharePoint built in Alerts are one of the best used features of the system – but also one of the most problematic. There are just so many different ways they can go wrong! And when they do go wrong the internet advice available on how to put them right is very fragmented and often confusing. All manner of suggestions come up – many of then not appropriate to the particular problem the user is having.
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!
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.
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.
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.
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 :-
=[Priority] & " : " & [Title]
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"
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?…
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.
