SharePoint | Pentalogic Technology

Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint’

SharePoint Feature Receivers – the hidden details

Date:June 15th, 2010 Author:Ryan Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint Development
Category: General, SharePoint Development Comments:2 ;

Warning – this post is somewhat techie so if you’re not a developer you may want to go find something more interesting to do!

I’ve been doing some work with SharePoint Feature Receivers recently and found the official documentation to be somewhat … lacking.

SharePoint Feature Receivers allow you to run code when a Feature such as a web part or template is installed, activated, deactivated and removed. They are often used for installation/setup tasks that can’t be done using XML incantations in Manifest.xml, Elements.xml and Feature.xml.

I am not going to give a step-by-step guide to Feature Receivers (see the excellent How to add a Feature Receiver to a Feature from SharePoint dev wiki) but plan to detail information that I was struggling to find anywhere else.

(more…)

SharePoint Reminder Webpart – version 1.7.8 now available

Date:June 14th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: filters, Reminder, SharePoint, WebPart
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”.

(more…)

The Truth about Tech Support

Date:May 24th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, WebPart
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.

(more…)

SharePoint Calculated columns – Adding hours onto a date field

Date:May 18th, 2010 Author:Ryan Tags: Calculated Columns, Formula, SharePoint, Tip
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:10 ;

A customer recently contacted me with an interesting question.

They were using a SharePoint task list to help schedule jobs for field engineers but rather than have a Start Date and End Date field they wanted to have a Start Date and Duration field and automatically work out the End Date.

So End Date = Start Date + Duration

They were then planning to display this using Planner in the By Category view which is idea for resource booking as it makes it easy to see when a resource is booked or free (SharePoints built in gantt chart can’t do this swimlane style of view and doesn’t support using calculated columns).

Now this is easy to do if the Duration is specified in days – in fact you just use the equation above – but what if Duration is in hours or minutes?

First port of call is this page from Microsoft showing examples of common date time formula you can use in SharePoint calculated columns hmmm, adding days OK… adding months Check… adding years OK too….but nothing about hours. Back to the drawing board.

(more…)

SharePoint 2010 Ready – PHEW!

Date:May 4th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Beta, SharePoint, SharePoint 2010, WebPart
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.

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.

(more…)

SharePoint Site Templates: KISS guide to creating, saving and using

Date:April 27th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, Training
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas, Training Comments:2 ;

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.

(more…)

Use SharePoint Filtered Views to Stop Sending Alerts to Yourself

Date:April 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Filter, filters, SharePoint, SharePoint alerts, Tip
Category: Filter, General, SharePoint Alert, SharePoint Ideas Comments:0 ;

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?

(more…)

New SharePoint Partnership – Pentalogic and LookOut Software

Date:April 9th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Partners, PivotPoint, Planner, Reminder, SharePoint
Category: General, Partners Comments:0 ;

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.

(more…)

SharePoint Partner Perspective: Veronique Palmer

Date:April 1st, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Partners, SharePoint, Training
Category: General, Partners, Training Comments:1 ;

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.

(more…)

SharePoint 2010: What’s Hot and What’s Not – #3 Social Networking

Date:March 22nd, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:2 ;

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?