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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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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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. |
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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!
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"
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.
We are happy to be able to let you know that a German version of the Pentalogic Planner web part for SharePoint is now available.
Although Planner was already partially localized for German, so that German end users would have see Month and Day names in their own language, administration and set up screens were previously only available in English and French.
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.
 Clare Stone - Marketing Manager |
Since you may have noticed a new name on recent posts in this Blog now seems like a good time to introduce our new member of staff – Clare Stone.
Clare joins Pentalogic as Marketing Manager. She has a strong background in business and consumer marketing across a number of sectors including finance, professional services, education and the travel industry. Her roots however are in qualitative research – so she will be able to help us get some real insight into our customers, present and future: how they use our products and services, what they want from us and what they don’t. Clare does not come from a technical background, so she will also be able to help us keep our focus on producing software which provides neat solutions for the issues SharePoint end users face. So as always, if you have any comments, questions or suggestions then get in touch. |
