Remembering to check when contracts are up for renewal can be a chore. Instead of waiting for someone to nag you about it, beat them to it with your own monthly reminder e-mail.

Here’s how you’d set it up

Select your list and view:

Then choose when you’d like the e-mails sent. Here we’ve set them up for the first Monday of each month:

Next choose "Items due before next check" and the column with the renewal date in. This will send e-mails for renewals due this month:

Give the e-mails a subject and some explanation in the header. We’ve chosen to end the e-mails to HR and copy in the manager:

Give it a name, save it, and that’s it! Reminder 365 will start delivering e-mails like this every month:

If you’ve got a list of potential or current customers, it’s likely you’ll want to keep in regular contact with them (especially in the case of sales leads). So skip making checking the list every morning, and just get a summary e-mail of today’s contacts. That’s less time logging in or messing around trying to use SharePoint from a mobile phone, and more time making calls.

Here’s how you’d set it up

Select your list and view:

Then choose when you’d like the e-mails sent:

Next choose "Items due before next check" and the column with the next contact date in (this will send e-mails for contacts due today):

Then give the e-mails a subject, header, and a motivational footer like ours:

Above we’ve chosen to send e-mails to the assigned Agent, CC-ing the manager. Give it a name, save it, and that’s it! Reminder 365 will start delivering e-mails like this every morning:

Want to send reminders of all your meetings, without having to manually set them up in Outlook? Reminder 365 can send all attendees a summary of all of their meetings today first thing in the morning.

Here’s how you’d set it up

Select your calendar and the All Events view:

Then choose when you’d like the e-mails sent:

Next choose "Items due before next check" and the meeting start time:

Then give the e-mails a subject (and optional header/footer), and choose to send them to the attendees:

Just name your alert, save it, and that’s it! Everyone now gets meeting reminders like the below every day: It’s that easy.

Reminder 365 is now available! Sign up today for your free account!

What is it?

Our Reminder web part has been extremely popular for those using the on-premise version of SharePoint but its not been available for those of you on Office 365 / SharePoint Online. Now we have a version of Reminder especially for SharePoint Online customers.

Reminder 365 builds on SharePoint Online’s built-in alerts, so you can get more from Office 365:

Create alerts for due or overdue items
Customize alert e-mails
Send daily, weekly, or monthly summaries
Free to use: Upgrade if and when you want
No installation: Just sign up and go

What’s it for?

Here are some of the things our beta testers used Reminder 365 for:

• Sending contract renewal reminders
• Making it easier to get today’s follow-ups
• Reminding attendees about meetings

Why not see what it could do for you:

Well, I saw a charity ride raising money for the Alzheimer’s Society and thought "Hey, I cycle 4 miles to work, I could cycle 230 miles from London to Brussels. No problem." Then something very odd happened: My wife (destroyer of fads and disapprover of good ideas) said "Yes, you probably could." to the surprise and shock of all involved.

230 miles? That’s not too bad?

It works out at 75 miles each day, split over 3 days. But average folk like myself haven’t a chance in hell of getting up even the first big hill without training. 2000 miles of training, to be exact.

So every weekend I’ve been panting, sweating, and wheezing dozens of miles across the Gloucestershire countryside, in the hope that at some point I’ll miraculously turn into Bradley Wiggins.

My nice 4 mile commute into work is now a grinding 10 mile loop of hills and back roads, which will get longer and longer until the challenge itself in September, by which point I’ll be regularly doing a commute of 25 miles and a weekend ride of 70 miles!

But… Why?

I’ve asked myself that more than once, believe me. To be honest there are two main reasons: A selfless one and a selfish one.

1. With one in three people over 65 developing dementia, it’s likely we’ll all know someone effected by this awful condition. The Alzheimer’s Society help people with Alzheimer’s and dementia, while also funding research to prevent it in future.

2. It’s been one of my life’s aspirations to do such an event, so I thought I’d get off my bottom and do it.

Where do I donate?

The challenge’s minimum fundraising target is £1250, half of which is due in June. So any help towards that would be greatly appreciated by both me and the charity! Here is my page on Just Giving:

http://www.justgiving.com/Stuart-Pegg

If you live in the UK you can also donate by texting "STUU60 £2" to 70070

You can watch and/or laugh at my training progress on RunKeeper:

http://runkeeper.com/user/foriamstu/profile

Thanks for reading!

Perhaps you’ve got contracts that will expire at a certain time and need to be renewed. Perhaps you’ve got policies that need to be checked for accuracy at least once per year.

Reminder can help with this and many other scenarios requiring you to setup email alerts to be sent on certain dates – and it’s much easier than working with workflow.

Scenario 1 – Email to author asking for a document to be reviewed once per year.

In this simple example we’re just going to send out an email to an author if a document hasn’t been updated in a year.

Start with a standard SharePoint Document Library (or even a normal list with document attachments).

Create a new wiki page (or web part page if you’re using SharePoint 2007) somewhere in the same site. The location is not important as long as it’s in the same site.

Add a new web part to the page (Insert > Web Part > Miscellaneous > Reminder)

Edit the web part and in the toolpane (the settings on the right) configure it like this :-

Set the watch list to Documents (or whatever your document library or list is called) Set the Email To : Created By Tip – you don’t have to use the Created By column (who is the first person to upload the document) you could use Use the Modified By column (the last person to edit the document) Add a “Owner” field as a Person or Group field into the document library and set Reminder to send to that Hard code a person or distribution address into Reminder such as “doc-reviewers@yourcorp.com”
Setup a subject and message – remember you can include details from the document library such as [Name] and [Modified By] and any other metadata fields from the list. The email will also contain a link to the document record.
Under Send When set the Reminder email to be sent when the Modified field is Overdue by 12 months – this will trigger an email when a document’s last modified date is a year old. (If someone edits a document half way through a year the alert email will be ‘moved back’ to be a full 12 months since the last modification)
In the Send Email section set this list to be checked at 7am every weekday (or whatever makes sense to your organisation).

And that’s it! In a years’ time the person who created the document will get emails like this – notice the ‘mail merge’ of information from the document library / list being put into the subject and message

Scenario 2 – Email to an Account Manager to ensure a contract is renewed.

Building up on the previous example we’re going to

• Add an Owner field into the document library as who initially uploads a document may not be the person who is later responsible for it.
• Add a Review Date field – just sending an email in a year’s time isn’t precise enough for our well organised office!

So add these fields using Library > Create Column

• Owner is a Person or Group Field
• Expiration Date is a Date and Time field and defaults to a Calculated Value of [Today]+365 so by default documents are due for review 1 year after they were created, but this can be changed

(Note – you can use [Today] in default values and filters, just not calculated columns!)

It will look something like this :-

Email To : Owner Subject : The document [Name] is due for review on [Review Date] Send When : Review Date is Due Soon within 5 days.

And you’re done! 5 days before the Review Date comes around an email will be sent to the Document Owner.

Further ideas

• You can have multiple Reminders for different time periods, e.g.
  • The first email 6 months after it was created, the second 24 months after or
  • One email 2 weeks before a review date saying “Due Soon” and another email once the Review Date has passed by a month saying “Overdue – get on with it!” – let the  computer be the team nag!
• Email CC – perhaps the ‘due soon’ email can go to just the document owner but the “overdue” email can be cc’d to the team leader
• Dynamic Review Dates – perhaps HR documents need to be reviewed every year, but health and safety documents very 2 years. You can set different rules and emails by setting up Views to filter different types of documents and setup different Reminder web parts for different views.

Download the free 30 day trial and get started today!

If upgrading from SharePoint 2010 to SharePoint 2013 simply perform the upgrade then install the latest version – your old settings and license key will be picked up. Full instructions for upgrading Reminder to SharePoint 2013 are in the online manual.

Reminder is the last of our commercial web parts to be made SharePoint 2013 compatible.

Reminder 365 is now in beta! Sign up now to try it for free:

Customisable and data-based alerts for Office 365 / SharePoint Online

What is Reminder 365?

Our new hosted product for Office 365 (aka SharePoint Online) that allows you to send alerts for:

• Items that are due soon: Send a daily nag e-mail to task assignees
• Overdue items: Let managers know what’s gone overdue this week
• All items on a view: Get summaries every month of new documents

There’s no installation: Just sign up on the site and you’re good to go.

How much does it cost?

Reminder 365 is free during beta. Final pricing has not yet been decided.

How long will the beta last?

We intend to run the beta for between 3-6 weeks. So the sooner you start, the better!

Are there any perks to being a beta tester?

You get a chance to shape the product before it’s released to the general public. We’re not ruling out discounts for active beta testers, but since we haven’t finalised the pricing we don’t yet know what we’d be discounting!

I’ve got an idea, request, or bug I need to tell you about!

Please do! You can contact us at: support@pentalogic.net

Join the Reminder 365 beta!

SharePoint is the platform millions of organizations use to manage various facets of their businesses.  However, in many cases, SharePoint’s built-in functions do not provide the ease of use and advanced functions that users need to work efficiently and effectively.

Some SharePoint consulting firms will recommend custom-built web parts to provide the necessary functionality required.  Before going this route, companies would be wise to evaluate pre-built applications and web parts to save significant time and money!  Evaluating and sourcing the right products however can be an overwhelming task – and falling prey to vendor hype a common outcome.  This is particularly true with CRM technology (Business/Customer Relationship Management).

Benefits of a 100% SharePoint- based CRM application:

A system that is designed to be highly configurable and evolve with the business’s ability to embrace change is the key to a successful implementation and a higher than average level of user acceptance.

• Single point of user login where all business related information is stored
• Maintenance of  sensitive customer data inside a controlled environment
• Leverages existing technology investment

Designed exclusively for SharePoint, SharePoint CRM by LookOut Software revs SharePoint up with dynamic, flexible and powerful features out of the box – yet is easy to personalize, scale, and upgrade as needed.

Rather than reinvent the wheel, LookOut Software partnered with one of the top Web Part developers in the industry to provide powerful, yet optional, enhanced functionality for its CRM application.

Pentalogic’s Filter Point, Pivot Point, Highlighter and Reminder  web parts enhance and further empower SharePoint CRM with easy to use, flexible and comprehensive interactive Charts, Graphs, Filters, Alerts and more.

Some examples:

SharePoint CRM and Pentalogic’s simple- to-use and effective add-on web parts combine to create the ultimate Flexible CRM Solution for SharePoint.

(Collaboris produce some interesting Policy Management software for SharePoint – for companies that need to distribute paperwork and policies and ensure they have been read and acknowledged)

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