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Posts Tagged ‘SharePoint’

SharePoint 2010 What’s Hot and What’s Not? #2 NOT!

Date:March 19th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, SharePoint 2010
Category: General, SharePoint Ideas Comments:3 ;

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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And the Winner Is . . . !

Date:March 10th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Reminder, SharePoint, WebPart
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

No, it’s not more about the Oscars, it’s our Case Study Competition – just as important to us, but maybe Jeff Bridges wouldn’t share our view.

Random aside: Did you know that this is (allegedly) the first year in over 20 years that award presenters at the Oscar’s have used the phrase “and the winner is”? “And the winner is” was banned at the 60^th Oscars, for fear of offending the “non-winners” (didn’t they used to be called losers??). Presenters have been saying “and the Oscar goes to . . .” ever since; until this year, when, presumably due to popular demand, the traditional phrase is back in place.

Anyway, enough of all this. Our winner is Adam Venn of Bridges Engineering in Bath, England. Adam wins something far more useful than a little gold-plate statue. He gets a swanky new Flip video camera, which he tells us will come in very handy for filming the first baby that he and his wife and expecting any time now.

So thank you to Adam. Bridges have been using Reminder since 2007 and Adam has sent some really interesting information on how they use it. As we expected they are doing things over there that we never even thought of. We will be publishing a full case study in a couple of weeks.

Thanks also to everyone else who sent in case studies. We will be publishing them all over the next few months. If you have a case study that you would like to share with us it’s not too late, just email me [email protected] with brief details and I will get in touch to get the full story from you. There are no prizes in it now – but we would still love to hear from you.

Case Study – “ACME” Choose Pentalogic SharePoint Reminder for Job Tracking System

Date:March 8th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: Reminder, SharePoint
Category: General, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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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Tell Us Your SharePont Story and Win a Flip Video

Date:February 16th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: CrossTab, Planner, Reminder, SharePoint
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint Reminder, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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

You must be a user of Pentalogic Technology Software in order to enter (free trial users are welcome to enter.)
Entries must be sent to [email protected] with the subject line “Case Study”
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.
All entrants agree to take a 30 minute phone call from Pentalogic Technology, to clarify details of your case study.
All entrants agree to their case study being published by Pentalogic Technology, on line or in print.

5 things you never knew you couldn’t do with SharePoint Gantt Charts

Date:February 3rd, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: gantt, Planner, SharePoint
Category: General, SharePoint Planner, SharePoint webparts Comments:6 ;

Sometimes it’s all too easy to forget what it was like to be a new SharePoint user. Sometimes you need a wakeup call to remind you of the “WOW” moments of delighted surprise when you discovered an amazing new feature, and the “AAAGGGGGHHHH!” moments of frustration, when you hit upon something SharePoint obviously should do, but for some inexplicable reason just doesn’t.

We got our wakeup call this week when we were putting together a product features chart for our Planner web part – which is an easy to use planning tool, with a Gantt chart view. We like to do this with all our products, to see how we stack up against the competition, and against SharePoint out of the box.

When we looked at SharePoint out of the box, some of the basic things that you would expect from a Gantt chart just weren’t there. Here are our top 5 “missing in action” feature in SharePoint Gantt charts:

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2010: SharePoint New Year’s Resolutions

Date:January 18th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: CrossTab, New Version, Planner, Reminder, SharePoint, WebPart
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

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:

Join a gym.
Give up chocolate.
Read “War and Peace”.

OK, so we’re never going to stick to those, lets focus on something realistic.

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What’s In a Name?

Date:January 7th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: CrossTab, SharePoint, WebPart
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

Some of you may have noticed that with the introduction or our new website we also seen to have lost a product – CrossTab.

Don’t Panic! It’s still there, we just changed the name.

And why have we done that? Well with the exception of us here at Pentalogic, and a few hard core number crunchers out there no one seemed to understand the old name.

Not that many people seemed to know what a Cross Tab is. And if you Google it this is what you get:

“A Cross Tabulation – often abbreviated to “crosstab” is a statistical technique that establishes an interdependent relationship between two tables of values, but does not identify a causal relationship between the values.”

Phew, sounds like hard work!

Actually it’s pretty simple – it’s just what an Excel Pivot Table does – which is why we have changed the name to “PivotPoint” – which we hope will make sense to a lot more people.

Like a Pivot Table, Pivot Point is one of the handiest little data analysis tools you could wish for. Use it to get a quick a quick and easy to interpret summary of the numerical data in your SharePoint lists.

Since we were somewhat lacking in inspiration when it came to finding a new name we picked the brains of lots of SharePoint users and experts. The suggestions for PivotPoint came from Kirill Kirg in the MOSS group on LinkedIn. So many thanks to Kirill!

And as always, if you have any comments or suggestions please do get in touch.

New for 2010 – Premium Support

Date:January 6th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, WebPart
Category: General, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

We like to think that the standard support we offer as a part of our licensing is pretty good. We are after all one of the very few companies in this market place offering all customers free telephone and email support. All backed up by our full 90 day money back guarantee for anyone who is not fully satisfied.

However some customers have requested a higher level of support and for this reason we have now introduced optional Premium support, for an annual fee.

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New Pricing

Date:January 4th, 2010 Author:Clare Tags: PivotPoint, SharePoint, Web Part, WebPart
Category: General, PivotPoint Web Part, SharePoint webparts Comments:0 ;

If you have visited our website recently you may have noticed that we have changed our pricing. Just a quick note here to explain what we have done and why.

Firstly we wanted to simplify the pricing of Reminder. People often commented on how confusing the licensing structure was with a combination of server licenses and web part license packs. So we have simplified this and also reduced the price, so that the price of Reminder now falls more in line with the pricing of other Alert enhancement web parts on the market.

Across all of our products we have also introduced 2 new pricing options, which we hope will help to make our software more affordable for a lot of customers.

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New Website – at Last!

Date:December 22nd, 2009 Author:Clare Tags: SharePoint, WebPart
Category: General Comments:0 ;

Finally our new website is up and running – and we are sooo pleased with ourselves!

As I am sure those of you who are regular visitors to the site will agree, an overhaul was very much needed. The old site has served us well for nearly 5 years now, but it was never going to win any beauty contests.

We wanted to improve the look and usability of the site but we also wanted to improve some of the “behind the scenes” functionality. We have upgraded our content management system – which will mean that it is easier for us to keep the content of the site up to date. We have also worked on our image management – so that even though the site now has a lot more going on visually, it should still be fast-loading for users, whatever part of the world you happen to be in.