A free calculated column for SharePoint 2007 and 2010 that allows you to display HTML: SharePoint HTML Calculated Column

Why did you make this?

I spent a long time working on SharePoint Highlighter, and then later unsuccessfully trying to make a [Today] Calculated Column. During both these projects we kept coming back to this glaring hole in SharePoint: You can’t use HTML in a calculated column.

After unsuccessfully looking for open source projects (or even commercial alternatives) for some time, the only solution I could find was Christophe’s JavaScript workaround using a normal calculated column and a Content Editor Web Part. A nice solution, but unfortunately not without its drawbacks.

So when it came to deciding what I wanted to do in my 10% time, the answer was clear.

Having listened to me rant, rave, swear, and finally give up and denounce all Custom Field Type development (at least once a week during Highlighter, and several times during the [Today] incident), Ryan’s reaction to my choice of project was a typically understated “I’m… surprised?”.

So during the TeamTime project I spent my Friday afternoons creating the first of hopefully many pet projects from us at Pentalogic: SharePoint HTML Calculated Column

How is this different to Christophe’s solution?

Using the SharePoint HTML Calculated Column avoids the need to add Content Editor Web Parts (containing JavaScript) to every page you want the HTML to be displayed on.

Adding the CEWPs can be a bit of a chore in some cases, and are vulnerable to being accidentally broken by end users editing the pages. They can also be lost on 2007 to 2010 upgrades.

However, HTMLCC requires that a System Administrator install it on the SharePoint server; which in many organisations is a real pain in the ears. Whereas Christophe’s solution can be implemented by most power users.

Isn’t this the same as Highlighter?

SharePoint Highlighter offers quite a lot more than this solution on it’s own. I won’t go into enormous detail, but here’s a sample of what Highlighter offers over the HTML Calculated Column:

• Row highlighting
• Countdowns
• Conditional formatting
• Built-in icon library

Most notably, all of this is offered through a polished and intuitive interface.

Finally

So, you get to plug the hole in SharePoint that’s bothered so many people over so much time, and we get to plug SharePoint Highlighter whenever we mention it. Everybody’s happy.

FilterPoint has had the ability to send Date Filters but a common request has been Date Ranges – like showing everything this month, last year or between two arbitrary dates.

The good news is that we’ve added this in to FilterPoint as of version 1.2

The bad news is that this will only work with our other SharePoint products – Planner and PivotPoint – it won’t work with SharePoints built in List View web part (LVWP).

That’s disappointing!

Yes it is – it’s just a limitation of SharePoints filtering I am afraid, but all is not lost!

This page shows how you can do things like Month filtering using calculated columns and this blog article shows how you can setup “Current Month/Previous Month” views using nothing more than Calculated Columns and View filters.

Upgrading

As always you can upgrade without losing any settings by downloading and running the latest trial version and selecting “Upgrade” when prompted (don’t forget you need the a recent version of Planner (v2.6.9+) and PivotPoint (2.2.0+) to accept date range filters.

Track and analyze your team’s time with our newest product: SharePoint TeamTime! A ready-to-use timesheet site template for SharePoint 2007 and 2010.

What’s so great about TeamTime you ask? Well let me tell you:

Log your time your way

Want to log your time as you work? Then simply punch in on your personal dashboard to begin the timer:

Want to write up your timesheets when it’s convenient for you? Your dashboard has this covered too:

Make those numbers work for you

Logging the time is all well and good, but what we really want is to see what all that data adds up to. Don’t waste time working for the numbers; make the numbers work for you.

Using the Analysis page you can drill down to the data you want, and view read-made summaries and graphs.

If you still want more from your numbers, pick the data you want from the Reporting page and export it straight to Excel.

Need more?

• Per-server licensing: No wasting time trying to license and set up every user; buy it once and forget licensing ever happened.
• Take the tour: Watch our TeamTime Demo; see if you can count how many times the word ‘time’ is used. It’s a lot, trust me.
• Free 30 day trial: Download and try it out!

Since SharePoint Highlighter’s release in May we’ve had some great suggestions and requests for features and improvements; one of the more surprising was the request for performance enhancements for those with 20 or more Highlighter columns in a view (and really big screens, no doubt).

Although we’ve added odds and ends during other projects, the Highlighter wishlist has steadily grown; fed by the suggestions from its growing user base and our own drive for continuous improvement.

So while TeamTime was being tested and prepared for beta, we stroked our collective beards (it is Movember after all) and decided to clear it down. Here are some highlights:

• Row highlighting columns hide themselves
• Highlighter displays on View Item form
• Lookup columns now supported

Hidden Row Highlighting Columns

If you have a Highlighter column which displays Row Highlighting you’ll no doubt have noticed that the empty Highlighter column has to be visible on the page on order for the highlighting to work:

In Highlighter v1.5 the column will automatically hide itself from the page if it is only used for Row Highlighting:

View Item Form Display

Previously Highlighter columns would not display on the View Item form (or customized versions of it):

Highlighter columns will now display on this form, with the exception of those used only for row highlighting (which will be hidden entirely):

Lookup Columns

You can now use Lookups as source columns, which act in much the same way as Choice columns:

Upgrading

Please see the manual for instructions on downloading and upgrading to the latest version of SharePoint Highlighter.

What’s on your wishlist?

The more suggestions we have the better we can make our products. Every feature request is reviewed and added to the product’s wishlist. Once a wishlist hits a certain size, the most popular (and/or the best ideas) are rounded up and herded into the next version.

Contact us at support@pentalogic.net and tell us what’s on your wishlist!

We have started beta testing our newest product SharePoint TeamTime and we expect it to be finished in the next couple of weeks!

Sign me up! Wait… what is it again?

TeamTime is a time tracking site template for SharePoint. Users track their time by entering it into a timesheet (a.k.a. timecard) or by punching in and out of tasks.

You can then get an overview of everyone’s time logged using our custom reporting tool and embedded versions of PivotPoint and FilterPoint that come preconfigured in the site.

Tell me more!

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s a glimpse of what’s inside:

‘My Dashboard’

‘Analysis by Week’

To look in more detail at how it works (or just to see more pictures), you can have a glance at our manual: SharePoint TeamTime manual.

If you want to be notified when its released then signup here.

Whats a Beta test and can I help?

Its the final stage in testing a software product before its released into the real world. All the major bugs should have been squashed but there may be some minor problems left. The idea is to get broad feedback from ‘real’ users that will help pick up problems, omissions or things that are just a little confusing that you wouldn’t find otherwise.

Beta testing isn’t for everyone – these are the things you should bear in mind :-

• You need to be reasonably proficient with SharePoint.
• You will need an in-house deployment of SharePoint 2010 or 2007 – its not suitable for BPOS/Office 365
• You should have a “non-production” environment to test in.
• You will need to have some time free to give it a good test and provide feedback.

If you would like to help us Beta test this then please e-mail us: support@pentalogic.net

Following on from Clare’s previous two posts on Native SharePoint Timesheets and Plug-in one, I’ll be running you through the options for creating SharePoint Timesheets for free.

During the early development of SharePoint TeamTime we looked at our potential competition, including the free alternatives. Of those we found, the following three were the most notable:

• Fab 40 – Timecard Management: One of the famous Fab 40 templates (2007 only)
• Built-in Timecard List: A little known built-in Timecard list (2010 only)
• Open Source Project: Paul Beck has kindly published an open source solution (2010 only)

Fab 40 – Timecard Management

The Timecard Management template was produced by Microsoft as a demonstration of the capabilities of WSS 3. In Microsoft’s own words:

The Timecard Management application template helps teams track hours spent working on various projects. The site enables team members to ‘punch in’ on a particular project and ‘punch out’ when they cease work. The system automatically generates the time worked by project, and can show managers who is working on a particular project…

This was one of the favorites out of all the templates we tried. In fact, the punching in and out functionality was a feature we emulated into TeamTime. I’d like to think of TeamTime as a spiritual successor to this template.

Built-in Timecard List

SharePoint 2010 has a built-in Timecard list, that is hidden from normal view for some reason. Although this is by no means a complete solution, it’s freely available to anyone able (or willing) to activate the feature and create it though SharePoint Designer 2010.

Laura Rogers has a very helpful walk-through for creating one of these lists: Out of the Box Timecard and Holiday Lists. Here is a description from her blog:

In SharePoint 2010, there’s a little-known built in feature.  There are list templates that can be used for time card tracking, with a holiday calendar that ties into the time card.

Open Source Project

Paul Beck has published a four part blog series on creating a Timesheet solution from scratch, entitled Timesheet solution for SharePoint 2010. He then went a step further and published his code to CodePlex for anyone to use. In his own words:

A common requirement on Intranets is to have a timesheet template on SharePoint.  There are solution for company timesheets.  I wanted to build a timesheet application that was scalable, reportable and friendly for SharePoint.

If you want to skip the source code, his third article in the series (Part 3 – Installation) has a link to the pre-built package.

This solution is slightly different from the others, as it stores its data in a separate SQL Server database; which may not be an option for everyone.

Lastly

I hope you’ve found our  SharePoint Timesheet series useful. If you know of any better alternatives, please let us know. We’re not afraid of a bit of competition.

This is the second part in our series covering the options available for anyone looking to implement a timesheet or time tracking system within SharePoint.

Those of you who are regular readers of this blog will know that we have been doing some work with SharePoint Timesheets recently. As a part of that we have spent quite a bit of time looking at what’s currently available. In the spirit of social sharing we thought we would give you a rundown of what we have found.

I want to stress here that we haven’t tested all of these timesheet applications. We’re not aiming to offer any kind of recommendations here, simply a handy run down of what’s available: A brief summary of each product in the publishers own words, and an idea of pricing where possible.

In part 1 we looked at native commercial SharePoint Timesheet applications.  Today we are looking at Plug-in Commercial SharePoint Timesheet software. In other words Timesheet applications which, whilst not built in SharePoint, can be accessed via your SharePoint site. These applications may offer functionality which is not available within the confines of SharePoint. A potential issue to consider if purchasing in this category would be that of data integration.

TeamTimesheet (AssistMyTeam)

Product Homepage

This is an interesting one.  Time is input in Outlook, and then reported in SharePoint:

Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint is an enterprise time reporting and billing management solution for team to work, plan and execute project related activities and prepare timesheets in Microsoft Outlook and publish to the company’s SharePoint site.

Pricing starts from $600 for a 10 user license.

TimeControl (HMS Software)

Product Homepage

TimeControl is designed with its own powerful web-based interface. However, for organizations which have adopted the Microsoft SharePoint environment as their Intranet or Corporate Portal software TimeControl can be deployed right inside the SharePoint interface. This allows end users to use TimeControl without ever leaving SharePoint.

Pricing: Although HMS give extensive advice on how to buy the product, they don’t actually provide any indication of the price on their website.

SharePoint Timesheet (Tenrox)

Product Homepage

SharePoint Timesheet is a Web-based timesheet solution offered by Tenrox. This Employee Timesheet and Scheduling Management application leverages SharePoint technology for collaboration, dashboards and reporting. Tenrox Timesheet is an on-demand solution that works with your SharePoint instance on-premise or on-demand thereby enabling collaboration with team members and customers in various locations.

Pricing: Once again we are in Enterprise land, and the website gives no indication of pricing.

That would seem to be about it for commercial plug-ins.  Again, if we have missed any then please do let me know.

In our third and final instalment we will be looking at creating SharePoint Timesheets for free.

Regular readers of this blog will know that over the past few months we have been doing some work on SharePoint Timesheets.

As a part of this we have spent quite a bit of time looking at what the available options are for people wanting manage timesheets in SharePoint, and in the spirit of social sharing we thought we would give you a run down on what we have found.

I want to stress here that we haven’t tested all of these timesheet applications. We’re not aiming to offer any kind of recommendations here, simply a handy run down of what’s available: A brief summary of each product in the publishers own words, and an idea of pricing where possible.

We are going to look at the options in 3 categories:

• Native Commercial SharePoint Timesheets: Timesheet applications fully built and deployed within SharePoint (commercially produced and supported).
• Plug-In Commercial SharePoint Timesheets: External applications that ‘plug in’ to SharePoint, rather than being fully integrated; making them accessible through your SharePoint Portal (commercially produced and supported).
• Free SharePoint Timesheets: Free to use, but lacking a commercial standard of support.

Native Commercial SharePoint Timesheets

Today we are starting with Commercial Native SharePoint Timesheets, with the other 2 categories in separate posts over the coming few days. When we finish there will also be a PDF covering all the options, which you will be able to download for reference.

In this category we are looking at applications which are built in SharePoint and available commercially (i.e. you are going to have to pay for them).

If SharePoint is key to your IT infrastructure then the advantages of having a “native” SharePoint Timesheet application are easy to see.  You are leveraging your existing IT investment, allowing people to record time in the familiar SharePoint interface and storing your data in the central SharePoint data repository.

SPTimesheet (1st Thinking)

Product Homepage

SPTimesheet is the first 100% SharePoint based time tracking management solution. With SPTimesheet you are able to fully leverage your existing investment in SharePoint while benefiting from a feature rich powerful time tracking solution.

Pricing is per user and starts at $1000 for 20 users.

Time Management (EPM Live)

Product Homepage

Understand the full effort associated with the execution of any work item. Reduce organization costs by re-aligning employees to improve deliverables and improve employee productivity and performance. Understand historical data to create precise future estimates and quotations.

This is part of the EPM ‘Work Engine’ which “expands the capabilities of SharePoint with a whole raft of common business applications for you to pick and choose from”.

Pricing – is not clear from the website, however this is firmly positioned as an Enterprise solution, which may give some clue as to where pricing is likely to fall.

Timetracking for SharePoint 2010 (NowShare)

Product Homepage

Our application “TimeTracking for SharePoint 2010” offers you a professional time tracking tool. It simplifies the time registration on different tasks or projects, also with your iPhone while travelling. The instantaneous commenting simplifies the documentation of the accomplished tasks.

Pricing starts from $1600 for a 10 user license.

SharePoint TeamTime (Pentalogic Technology)

Product Homepage

This is of course our own offering:

A simple SharePoint time tracking application.  Time is entered through a punch card or a traditional grid. The Team Dashboard shows what everyone is working on now, a breakdown of work this week and timesheets awaiting approval. Powerful reporting and analysis with Export to Excel gives an overview of the big picture. All in a ready-to-use SharePoint site.

Pricing – $995 per server.

That rounds off the commercial SharePoint timesheet applications.  If you know of one we’ve missed, please share!

In our next post we will be looking at Plug-In commercial TimeSheet solutions.

SharePoint is an enormous heaving behemoth of machinery; full of spinning cogs, churning engines, and peculiar dials. We’ve all worked with parts of it, but not even those that created it understand all of its inner workings.

So where do we go when the wheel that goes ‘whir’ is going ‘squeakity’? Or when we’re having trouble bolting on some shiny new levers? What we need is an expert in that area.

Two likely candidates for finding yourself an expert are:

• The MSDN SharePoint forums (MSDN): A SharePoint specific branch of the MSDN forums; a staple of the Microsoft Support offering for the past 7 years
• SharePoint Stack Exchange (SPSE): A community-created sister site to Stack Overflow, whose rebirth into the new Stack Exchange engine (which I’ve blogged about previously) culminated in a re-launch on its 2 year anniversary last month

All about Questions and Answers

So where does everyone else go to post their questions? A quick glance at the number of questions on each in the last 24 hours* is quite revealing:

The MSDN forums have had over 10 times the amount of questions in the same times period, across its various forums. SPSE is clearly the underdog in terms of its volume of questions, and certainly in terms of traffic.

This is largely unsurprising, as most people will automatically go to Microsoft with their questions, and the MSDN forums are a long-standing staple of the Microsoft support process.

What’s more surprising, is the percentage of questions that are actually answered**:

That’s a 64% answer rate on MSDN and a notably higher rate of 91% on SPSE. So why is there such a big difference? This boils down to two factors:

• The quality of the questions
• The quality of the answers

Question quality

Part of the difference in answer rate (and question quantity) is the different motivations behind the sites. MSDN’s goal is to help an individual person with their problem, whereas SPSE is built on Stack Exchange’s ethos of building a definitive FAQ on the subject; making it more likely you’ll find an answer to your question without even asking it.

When it comes to asking a question there’s unfortunately very few ways to improve how someone goes about it (short of Internet-based mind control rays). So the question quality is largely determined by how it is handled after it has been posted. This brings us to Moderation:

The mysterious fade effect isn’t entirely because I just found the ‘Gradient fill’ button; the MSDN SharePoint forums are moderated by the mysterious and unquantifiable force of Microsoft Support, and an unknown number of community moderators with their own pockets of influence.

In contrast, SPSE is moderated by three recognised members of the community. Much like MSDN’s Forum Issues forum, SPSE has Meta for contacting them, but it also has a chat room that can be used for asking questions about questions.

The final and most important effect on question quality is us (the community). Here are the ways we get involved in this process:

This additional community contribution on SPSE has a noticeable effect on the quality of questions. Unfortunately this can lead to a much higher maintenance role for Moderators, which may not translate well to MSDN’s moderation processes.

Answer quality

The biggest factor in answer quality is of course the answerer: The quantity of experts on a site that may know about the problematic area, and the amount of everyday people who may have suffered the same problems in the past.

In terms of quantity, both sites have roughly the same number of responses (~3.5 per question***). Approximately 1.6 of these being proposed answers on SPSE; unfortunately the MSDN proposed answer rate isn’t available (except through checking each one of the 163K questions manually).

An important step is luring and identifying the experts, while also rewarding the everyday contributor:

Although very similar in other respects, the two sites use very different incentive methods. The prestigious MVP award and more commonplace MCC award are highly sought-after by experts (especially aspiring ones), and draw many people to the MSDN forums in search of widely-acknowledged recognition.

The incentives on SPSE take a slightly more understated route: As your reputation increases you become more trusted by the community, and hence the site. This increase in trust gives high-reputation users comparable abilities to moderators, purposefully blurring the boundaries.

Another important step is to make it easy for experts to find questions about their area of expertise. MSDN has 21 forums, each dedicated to a category of SharePoint. Between these forums there is fair bit of overlap, and moving misplaced posts is a continuous battle.

In SPSE the questions are all bundled together on a single page. While this would seem chaotic, the tag system thankfully mitigates most confusion, while allowing more flexibility. However, tags are even more open to misunderstanding and misuse than MSDN’s separate forums, leading to the addition of the ability for medium-reputation users to retag questions.

Which site is best?

As a person with a question, the above pie charts would seem to make it clear that SPSE is the best choice. However, it’s worth mentioning that the comparison is not as straightforward as it seems. Both sites have slightly different means of showing questions as answered, and SPSE has a built-in reputation incentive for marking your question as answered (possibly skewing the results).

As an expert, MSDN is like seeking your fortune in the Big City; you might see your name up in lights, maybe just make an honest living, or you might quietly disappear into anonymity. SPSE is more like staying in your home town; the rewards aren’t as dazzling, but they are more certain and (depending on your community-mindedness) possibly more satisfying.

So what’s the conclusion? Post on both of course! There’s no law against cross-posting questions on both sites, and experts are welcome wherever they go. In time you may find you prefer one or the other (which is likely to be a personal choice) but at least now you know what to expect from each.

*SPSE numbers from Area51 (only overall total available), MSDN posts were manually counted for the 24 hour period prior to 11:00 13/10/11.

**SPSE numbers from Area51, MSDN answered rate based on sum of forum totals on the front page as of 11:00 13/10/11.

***SPSE numbers are from the Data Explorer (sum of comments and answers), MSDN response rate based on sum of forum totals on the front page as of 11:00 13/10/11.

So here’s a new one for you.

SharePoint TeamTime: a nice and easy, ready to use timesheet and time tracking application for SharePoint.

We have been busy working on TeamTime all summer and now it’s very nearly ready to go.

TeamTime is a native SharePoint application pre-built for you to simply add to your SharePoint site and start using with your team.

It offers you two methods of time entry:

• either a punch card, to let your record time as its happening by stopping and starting a timer,
• or a traditional grid or timesheet if you prefer to enter all of your time at the end of the day or week.

The team dashboard lets you see who is working on what right now, and to approve time already logged.

Then powerful and customizable reports and analysis give you an overview of work over time to help you answer questions like:

• What exactly has Bob been doing this month?
• Who has been working on Project X?
• How much time are we wasting on meetings?

TeamTime is a bit of a departure for us.  Up until now we have concentrated creating SharePoint components: tools that you can use to help you get more out of SharePoint when building your own sites, applications and dashboards.

One of the great things about SharePoint is the ability it give end users and power users to build their own applications.  It can be great fun to see just what you can achieve with SharePoint and create something that is exactly tailored to your needs and your processes.

But equally sometimes you just need to quickly get your hands on something that just works and instantly solves your business problem, with no time or effort required from you.

Our research into SharePoint End User Adoption showed us that getting a visible “quick win” with SharePoint: using SharePoint to rapidly and visibly address a business pain point can be one of the best ways of jump-starting user adoption of SharePoint.

Our experience with SharePoint Vacation Planner taught us that sometimes you prefer to have someone else map SharePoint functionality on to business processes for you, rather than having to make that journey yourself.

All this made us think that you might welcome a ready to go SharePoint application that addresses one of the most common issues in any business: time tracking.

TeamTime has been built using a combination of out of the box SharePoint functionality and customized versions of our own web parts: PivotPoint and FilterPoint.  The development has provided us with some new challenges, particularly in the area of user interface design where we have had far more scope to express our creativity that we normally get when building components.  Could be dangerous!

Working our own components in to TeamTime has also given us a fresh perspective on them and some improvements have resulted – watch this space for a new version of FilterPoint.

We are now in the final stages of development and testing with TeamTime and the final version will be released very soon.

If you’d like to give it a whirl with our 30 day free trial then sign up here.