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Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part II

Helpdesk & Issue Tracking, Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint, Knowledge Base & Expert Systems No Responses »

Feb 012012

(This is the second part of the previously published blog ‘Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part I’. You can find the first part here)

I wonder how a support team can work together and collaborate on issues without some form of tracking and ticketing mechanism put in place in the organization. And lately, with SharePoint becoming as a preferred repository for sharing documents and enabling collaboration among staffs and workers from within or outside the organization’s network, I am seeing a trend for IT managers to make good use of the inbuilt Issue Tracking template in their SharePoint list, to meet their basic ticket recording and tracking requirements. Well, no doubt, Microsoft SharePoint is very powerful and popular. Just like a sculptor producing a piece of art-work from a raw wood, in the hand of a creative designer, SharePoint can be molded into doing anything they want it to do or, sort of. However, to be that something useful, it requires a good level of customization. And that’s where the problem and its potential pitfall lie. Because, without extensive experience and skills, there is no way one can build the logic of their helpdesk application and integrate their in-house workflows such as importing tickets from Outlook emails into SharePoint. In fact, SharePoint development is a huge business with hundreds of consultants or ‘third parties’ delivering web-parts, add-ons and other SharePoint customizations. And yes, it is certainly an expensive investment.

Well, a SharePoint based issue tracking system is useless if there is no easy way of sourcing and tracking ticket information from emails stored on your Outlook. Further, most trouble tickets cannot be resolved within a single e-mail and response. Feedback from the end-user and suggestions from other technicians or stakeholders often occur and lead to multiple request-response emails in Microsoft Outlook. Moreover, different members from the support teams may provide resolutions during the course of the request. So, in practical scenario, a trouble ticket might have various e-mail versions of the resolution steps, and the ticket should reflect the compete snapshot of these responses and resolutions. The question is, how will these emails from Outlook get updated to the ticket item in your SharePoint list? This is where our expertise and solutions comes into the picture to fill this glaring void! With our Outlook add-in (Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint), you can establish and maintain a live connection between your email clients (Microsoft Outlook) to your SharePoint lists, such that, you are able to simply press a button to raise and log a trouble ticket from the selected email to your Issue Tracking SharePoint list. The generated ticket item in SharePoint will inherit metadata information from the email or sender, such as name, email address, phone number, address, problem description, attachments, and any number of custom fields, your administrator might have deployed.

You may think, just clicking a button to raise a ticket from an email to a destination SharePoint list is a big leap in the efficiency of the helpdesk. However, in a typical service desk environment, where the email is the main medium of correspondence, there is a feel of a ‘disconnect’ between the technicians and the ticket tracking system. The reason being a technician has to manually create and log in new trouble ticket from email and this can be a major drawback if there is considerable emails traffic. Moreover, during off hours, weekends or holidays, support emails will remain unattended in your mailbox, increasing the anxiety and frustration of curious callers. It can increase response time affecting the overall performance of the help desk. So, an ideal issue tracker system should provide a way to automatically log a trouble ticket from an email and assign the appropriate technician who has the relevant skill to resolve it.

This is precisely why our Issue Tracker add-in is designed to operate in automation mode based on administrator defined ticketing workflow. When certain mailboxes or mail-enabled public folders are configured for automation, Issue Tracker will intercept incoming emails and automatically raise trouble tickets to the specified SharePoint list. Contact information is automatically extracted and populated from the emails along with the problem description into the tickets. The generated tickets will also inherit the default problem category, type, status or technician defined for that mailbox/folder in the workflow. As a consequence, automated emails of assignment will also be sent out to the technician. So, no longer you need to manually monitor your mailbox for support requests. Issue Tracker does that all for you in a blink, enabling you to focus and concentrate on resolving the ticket rather than spending on the technicalities of ticketing process. This helps to improve the efficiency, and response time of your helpdesk team.

You’ll be wrong to think that the functionality of an Issue Tracker system ends with the capture and logging of trouble tickets. In fact, the real purpose of an Issue tracker system is to enable tracking of a ticket over several communication loops and responses. But when you and other technicians start working on resolving to your assigned trouble tickets stored in SharePoint lists, unless you have managed to create some specialized web parts and workflows, most likely you would be unable to respond to the caller or other stakeholder from within SharePoint, or set SharePoint to send out notification alerts to the caller or the technician on the ticket progress and escalation. So, what do you do? Open up Outlook and get back to the caller, and when caller replies back, you again update that information into the ticket in SharePoint. Well, just imagine how laborious and manual procedure it is, switching back and forth between Outlook and SharePoint! And not to mention, the risk of making erroneous entry. Our Issue Tracker add-in in Microsoft Outlook overcomes this limitation, by monitoring and tracking incoming or outgoing emails associated with a trouble ticket and accordingly updates the corresponding ticket on the fly.

Talking about the Outlook and SharePoint integration, when the time arises to edit or re-assign to another technician, or add a comment to a ticket, normally, you would do that directly from the SharePoint site. Another way of doing this is from the comfort of your Outlook itself. You can simply select or open the email from which a ticket was raised previously, and press the ‘Edit Ticket’ button and that would allow you to easily edit or update the data into the ticket or add new comment without using your web browser and searching for the particular ticket list item amongst the lot. You can add comments, hours of work done, reschedule the due date and update the status, mark it resolved, in just a single click. If the ticket had been resolved already, and if the caller contacts the helpdesk to inform about the problem resurfacing again, you will have to reopen the ticket. In such a case, you can un-check the ‘Mark As Resolved’ option and update the ticket. Doing so, it will trigger a case reopening notification alert, which Issue Tracker add-in will send out to the assigned technician.

Would not it be nice, if you were to be able to see all the tickets that were assigned to you, from Outlook, and even work and update the ticket from within? From the ‘My Tickets’ panel, the tickets assigned to you are listed in tabular form with detail information on other columns. When you select a ticket from the list, based on the state of the ticket (ongoing or resolved), the actions and tasks that can be performed on the ticket are enabled. From within your Outlook, you can quickly reply to the caller, choose a relevant KB article to embed to the reply, forward to a third person or stakeholder, edit and comment to the ticket, mark as resolved or reopen or delete the ticket and more.

If you are the manager, and are assigning the ticket to a technician, Issue Tracker will automatically send out notification alert on the ticket assignment to the technician, and insert due date appointment to the technician’s default calendar as well. Optionally, Issue Tracker will also add or update the due date information of the ticket into an administrator specified dedicated SharePoint calendar.

Your end-users may send you emails on similar issues repeatedly. It is typical of any support team to frequently find themselves trying to solve the same issue time and again. And if you are already aware of the solution, typically, you will try to compose the solution or if you have vague recollection of it, you would try to navigate to your existing document libraries, past emails etc. Just imagine how much time and effort you had wasted in trying to find the right information at the moment of need, not to mention the delayed response to the support request. You wish you could share your knowledge on a centralized information system with other team members so that everyone has the same understanding and are communicating the same message when asked about specific issues! One of the important goals of implementing an issue tracking system in an organization is to minimize the occurrence of recurring issues from their end-users. Our Issue Tracker system includes an integrated Knowledge Base system that allows your helpdesk team to document best practices and solutions to common problems, in the form of KB articles stored on a dedicated SharePoint list. A Question and Answer format is used to intuitively display KB articles. Each article may have any number of file attachments associated, rich-text elements, and hyperlinks to other web pages. All articles are tagged with a related problem category and problem type, so it is easy to find a particular resolution at time of needs.

So, the question is how can technician make use these knowledge base articles in replying to emails? Well, individual technician even need not go back and forth between the email (Outlook) and the KB articles (SharePoint). In the Issue Tracker toolbar or ribbon in Outlook, there are KB buttons, which the technician can use to choose one of this relevant KB article directly for replying to tickets or emails.

A dialog window allows the technicians to browse through the existing knowledge base articles, and select the relevant article to be embedded either as attachment, inline or as URL into the email reply.

Selected KB article can be applied or inserted into the replied email in varied format. You can choose to insert as attachment in the form of a word document (*.doc), Adobe PDF (*.pdf), Microsoft XPS (*.xps) or as single file MHTML (*.mht). You can also embed the selected KB article directly into the body of the email reply. Any inline images and formatting are preserved in its original state in the reply also. Alternatively, if your SharePoint site is opened (i.e., accessible via the web), then you can also insert the hyperlink or URL of the selected KB article into the reply, so that the recipient can simply click the hyperlink to open the relevant article in their web browser.

As these knowledge base articles reside in your SharePoint server, you can allow your end-users access to the KB website so that end-users and customers experiencing technical challenges can self-service the answer to their problem by accessing this web-based knowledge base. Once on the Knowledge Base web interface, end-users may click through the tiered problem categories and type to find articles they are looking for. They can even make use of the SharePoint inbuilt search functionality to query KB articles by keywords. A knowledge base repository acts as an effective knowledge sharing medium, boosting support productivity by leveraging collective knowledge and providing invaluable KB Articles to support technicians in a snap! It also helps in improving the average “First Call Resolution” timing significantly, as technicians find resolution to problems quickly.

Another long term expectation or goal of implementing an issue tracking system in the organization is to be able to re-engineer business processes, reinforce resources and forecast problem areas and exploit all these factors for competitive advantage. Senior managers should be able to perform information mining to seek out trends and other hidden measures such as response and resolution durations. Analyzing these mathematical values for cues are critical to devise an effective strategy for helpdesk best practices. In a nutshell, an ideal issue tracking system should aid in extracting mission critical information and intelligence that will enable better decision- in the team and organization. In our Issue Tracking system, we have implemented two kind of reporting tools – Summary Reports generator and OLAP Statistics and Reporting.

With the Summary Report tool, managers can generate summarized reports on support tickets based on different time interval. It appraises on the current happenings on the helpdesk and enables tracking the progress of tickets. It provides an overview about when tickets are logged, due, worked and resolved over a period of time. Any fields can be selected for inclusion into the reports which can then be exported to Excel, Text, XML or HTML web page or printed for sharing and easy distribution.

The OLAP tool on the other hand, provides statistics on trouble tickets from the SharePoint lists. It supports displaying multidimensional data structures in grids, charts and graphs and support most common operations such as pivoting, drill down/slice and dice, filtering etc. This gives managers a unique opportunity to analyze their helpdesk data – slice and dice performance data to seek opportunity, drill down into trouble spots to reinforce and strengthen policies. It also provides various inbuilt reports specific to Issue Tracker tickets. Helpdesk managers can also easily create and save their user-defined reports for future references. Any report, chart, grid or graph can be saved to PDF, images, web pages or printed.

Therefore, in addition to providing a mechanism to resolve customer problems, our Issue Tracker system provides senior IT managers with statistical information and understanding that aid in the decision-making process concerning the whole of help desk, and the organization as a whole.

I know, I have gone a bit lengthy on writing this particular blog, but I believe it was necessary, as we have put considerable amount of time and efforts in the development of this application (Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint). The fact is, there are whole lots of other features which I have not covered in this blog, doing which would have turned this blog into a journal of some sort. Anyway, if you want to get first insights and learn more on our issue tracking system, watch out the video demonstrations.

Product Summary:
Title: Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Team Edition)
Website: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/
SharePoint: WSS 2.0, WSS 3.0, MOSS 2007, SharePoint 2010 (Foundation and Enterprise), Office 365 SharePoint Online and any other cloud based SharePoints
Outlook: Outlook 2003, Outlook 2007 and Outlook 2010 (32 bit Office 2010 only).

Part-I: Administrative Installation & Configuration

Part-II: Technician Installation & Raising tickets to SharePoint

Part-III: Editing and Searching tickets from Outlook

Part-IV: Configuring a KB SharePoint list, use KB articles to reply to emails and tickets

Part-V: Embedding ticket due date appointment to Outlook or SharePoint calendar

Part-VI: Generating Reports and Statistics from trouble tickets

It’s here! Office 365 support on our products!

Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint, Team Helpdesk for SharePoint and Outlook, Team TimeSheet for Outlook and SharePoint, TimeSheet Reporting No Responses »

Nov 192011

By now, most of you might be aware of latest Microsoft’s Cloud based Office collaboration and services – Office 365. The offering consists of Office Professional Plus, Exchange Online, SharePoint Online and Lync Online.

In the last few months, Office 365 has grown tremendously and widely adopted by small and medium businesses. Add to that, many of our existing customers keep nagging me when the support for Office 365 is planned. Reluctantly, it was decided that the time has come to finally do it. But wait, there is no blueprints or easier way to achieved it. One aspect of Office 365 is the claimed-based authentication which is quite different from the usual NTLM or form authentication, that are quite common in in-housed Microsoft software environment such as SharePoint 2010. So, spent 2 days learning about the new claim-based authentication implementation in Office 365 and another day for finally coming out with a working prototype. The journey was painful, but the end it was worth it, because now, I can proudly display ‘works on Office 365‘ for our products. Moreover, I would be scanning less emails on Office 365 support from now onwards – a relief actually!

The following products are now updated to support Office 365, especially the SharePoint Online service.

1. Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Team Edition)
2. Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint (Personal Edition)
3. Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint
4. Data Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint
5. Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint
6. Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint

The update does not add any new UI or options to go along, only the logic that drives connection to the Office 365 SharePoint Online site is piggyback into existing module. So, there is no new steps to get accustom to and you can keep on using the product the way you had been doing before. What is new is now, you can specify your Office 365 SharePoint site to interface and work with our product, by simply keying in the office 365 team site URL and you will be prompted to provide the credential to log on to the site.

For example, below, the Office 365 team site URL is http://amt100.sharepoint.com/TeamSite

And in the credential dialog prompt, you will enter your Microsoft Online Services ID, as the user name. In this context, it is john@AMT100.onmicrosoft.com and the password characters.

Note that, Microsoft Online Service ID is the same that you use when signing in to Office 365 site in your web browser.

If the credential provided is correct, it should load up all the lists and sub-sites as shown below.

Edited (30th November 2011): Please note that you need the following requirements to be able to integrate Office 365 SharePoint Online with our products:

Operating System – Vista SP2 or above. Windows XP and 2003 won’t work with Office 365 SharePoints.
.NET Framework – 3.5 or above
Windows Identity Foundation – This component is required to be installed on the system so that our product can work with Office 365 SharePoint lists.

You can download and install this component from below:

For Vista 32 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x86.msu)
For Vista 64 bit (Windows6.0-KB974405-x64.msu)
For WIndows 7 32 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x86.msu)
For Windows 7 64 bit (Windows6.1-KB974405-x64.msu)

Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part I

Helpdesk & Issue Tracking No Responses »

Oct 172011

For any product or project life-cycle, issues from end-users and workers are inevitable. Any business processes that require the organization or team to track a high volume of issues or tickets, such as customer help-desk, sales leads or project activities, needs a defined and structured methodology of issues collection, assignment, deployment and resolution. This is where an issue tracking system can prove indispensable and blessing to support staffs. An organization or team can benefit a lot if these issues are identified and recorded, in a way that allows qualitative analysis for improving the product or service, in the long run.

Using SharePoint for Issue Tracking
For organizations that already have invested in Microsoft SharePoint platforms for collaboration and sharing, support team can easily implement a simple issue tracking list and exploit the SharePoint inbuilt tracking and workflow capabilities to track issues and risks throughout the product life cycle. Such SharePoint based issue tracking list is good enough for teams that receive phone calls about product and service issues. A technician can simply log a new ticket within the SharePoint list, and key in the information as per the phone conversation. Using the SharePoint workflows, automated notification can also be sent out to the assigned technician.

Limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking
But for organizations that rely on emails partially or wholly, it is a lot of inconvenience and hard work. Because, there is no direct and easy way to source the ticket information from your emails, except to resort to copy-paste trick, which is time consuming and laborious, and not to mention, the precious human resources needed for data gathering. Moreover, the inbuilt issue tracking list template in SharePoint is only good for basic tracking requirement and lacks the automation and sophistication, to function as an effective help-desk system.

Besides, Microsoft Outlook integration of SharePoint is limited, and does not provide the capabilities to connect and export to a SharePoint list at the item level. One of the important goals for a help-desk is staying on top on the growing amount of support request emails from end-users. But without an organized and structured link between Outlook and SharePoint, caller and problem information from Outlook mails cannot be added or updated to SharePoint tickets in a timely manner. This can lead to delay in response time and even support requests falling through the crack. These limitations prevent many help-desk teams from implementing an effective SharePoint based issue tracking system.

Connecting Outlook to SharePoint based Issue Tracking
To exploit the sharing and collaboration features of SharePoint for Issue tracking purpose, we need an easy way to source the problem, callers metadata information and attachments from emails stored in client application such as Microsoft Outlook, and feed to the trouble tickets in the SharePoint list. Keeping this requirement in mind, I have invested considerable time to design a generic solution that can be used by every team and organizations. The outcome is an Outlook add-in that enables to create and maintain a link between Outlook and your Issue Tracking SharePoint lists, such that you and other technicians can easily raise trouble tickets from emails from within your Microsoft Outlook, in a single click, or even better, automatically (if you have set Issue Tracker to watch and process incoming emails, that is)

‘Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint‘ runs within Outlook.exe process and extend the functionalities of Outlook, by allowing custom actions to be triggered and additional feature sets and capabilities to be implemented on top of the host application (Outlook). It is currently in ‘release candidate’ 3 and was developed as an offshoot from my other application ‘Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint‘ (i.e, help-desk and issue tracking functionalities built upon Team Publisher application).

So How Does It Work?
The team edition of ‘Issue Tracker for Outlook and SharePoint’ is designed as a groupware solution i.e., multiple technicians working on the same set of tickets in the administrator chosen SharePoint lists. So, we have an administrative installation and configuration, only needed to be performed by the help-desk manager. And a client installation, that is required to be installed by every technician on their system.

Being a groupware, the help-desk settings and configurations data need to be stored on a central repository. Because your help-desk staffs can be scattered in different geographical locations, and might not have access to the company’s local network remotely, using a network database or shared folder won’t be feasible. Instead, in Issue Tracker system, the help-desk configuration and settings data are stored in a special SharePoint list (having the name ‘TeamIssueTrackerSettings’) which is accessible to all help-desk staffs, on the local network, VPN, HTTP, WAN.

From within Outlook, using the administrative add-in for Issue Tracker, help-desk manager can choose the destination SharePoint lists where trouble ticket raised by other technicians would be stored. The fields of the email and each of the chosen SharePoint list are then mapped, so that you have control over what and which data goes to the ticket. These chosen SharePoint lists are the deployed to all the technicians in their Outlook.

To allow technicians to add extra meaningful information to trouble tickets, apart from the ones extracted from the email, help-desk manager can maintain and deploy a list of problem categories and types, statuses and any number of custom fields drop down values. These help-desk specific fields would be then available in the Outlook application of each technician.

To raise a trouble ticket, simply select one or more mail items, and Choose and click the particular SharePoint list under which the ticket item will be generated. When you do this, relevant metadata such as caller and problem details, attachments etc. will be extracted from the email to the ticket item. You can add further details to the ticket to be generated such as, the technician that will be responsible for solving the ticket, due date, by which the issue should be resolved, and problem category, type and status and any number of custom metadata.

Once a trouble ticket is generated successfully in the chosen SharePoint list, information regarding the ticket, such as the ticket ID, data/time and the URL to the SharePoint ticket are tagged and embedded into the email item in Outlook. This not only provides an easy way to go to the ticket item in the SharePoint site directly, but also prevents other technicians from generating a duplicate ticket, from the same email (a possible scenario on shared mailboxes and mail-enabled public folders).

In the subject of the email from which a ticket was raised, a tracking code containing the prefix code of the SharePoint list and the ticket ID is embedded. For example, [CMA-4]. This is done so for tracking purpose on subsequent email conversations that might happen. As long as this phrase is intact when sending out response to caller, or when caller replies back to the help-desk, Issue Tracker System will automatically track and associate it with the correct SharePoint list and ticket item. This means, the ticket item and description field will be updated live automatically, as and when the email is sent out or received. This greatly enhances the productivity of the help-desk because, no technicians are required anymore to monitor the mailbox for new replies from caller, nor there is need to add and update the new information to the relevant ticket manually. Issue Tracker system does that for you automatically, to provide a commentary on exactly what happened and the series of actions taken to achieve resolution.

If you have a dedicated mailbox only used for support purposes, you can automate the whole process of ticketing experience from incoming emails. You can set Issue Tracker to monitor your mailbox and automatically raise trouble tickets from incoming emails, without requiring your intervention.

Since its first beta release on August 15th 2011, there has been more than 300 downloads. And our site statistics indicates that the product page gets listed within the top 5 rankings of the Google search of common keywords such as ‘issue tracking outlook SharePoint’, ‘trouble tickets SharePoint’, ‘incident management SharePoint’ etc. So naturally, I am very excited for the general applicability of this application, because it overcomes the limitation of email integration, or the lack of it, in SharePoint based issue tracking system, by linking Outlook to SharePoint. In being able to raise tickets from their emails in the comfort of Outlook, Issue Tracker system empowers help-desk staffs to focus their valuable time and efforts into resolving the issues rather than spending on the technical processes of gathering tickets and doing manual tasks.

Here are two high definition videos I have composed, to demonstrate the capabilities and feature sets of Issue Tracker.

Part-I: Administrative Installation & Configuration

Part-II: Technician Installation & Raising tickets to SharePoint

Product Summary:
Title: Issue Tracker for Outlook & SharePoint
Product page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/
Download page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/Download.asp
Video page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/IssueTrackerSP/TutorialClips.asp
Current Status: Release Candidate 3 (as of 15th Oct 2011). Available for free.

PDF Document Exporter add-in: A must have companion for business and power users of Microsoft Outlook

Document Conversion, Document Export, Document Exporter for Outlook, General Category, Inbox Management No Responses »

Oct 092011

With presence on about 500 million computer systems, Microsoft Outlook is by far the most widely used email application in the world. It is more so entrenched in the business community, where it is not only used for email exchange, but also as a personal organizer able to handle just about everything from your email to your calendar and easily transfer tasks, contacts, and more. In a nutshell, Microsoft Outlook enjoys an enormous popularity.

However, being the most popular email application does not necessarily mean it is perfect. In fact, is far from it. One of the glaring omissions is the feature to extract and export emails from Outlook data store to document formats such as Adobe PDF, even Microsoft own proprietary XPS and Word document formats.

PDF or Portable Document Format is an industry standard for document exchange and archiving. In other term, it is an electronic replacement for paper. Converting emails to PDF can serve many purposes. First, PDF format preserves the source file information such as layout, styles and format of the email. Second, PDF exists in compressed form that reduces the size of the file significantly, making it simple to distribute by e-mail or post on a website. This also makes it an ideal to archive and backup emails so that you have a record of your information in a format that can be easily opened in the future. Additionally, because of archiving, mailbox size can be maintained at reduced level. Third, it is very easy to share with other users because of its size and portability. Fourth, PDF files are viewable and printable on virtually any platform, including Windows, Mac OS, UNIX, Linux and mobile platforms such as iPhone, iPad, Android etc.

Because of the popularity of PDF, Microsoft started supporting it in Office 2007 via a special ‘Save as PDF and XPS’ add-in, available as a separate download. With SP2, PDF and XPS support is natively inbuilt into the Office suite. So, now you can easily save your Word, Excel or PowerPoint documents to PDF natively. Unfortunately, Microsoft chooses to leave support for PDF/XPS out of its Outlook application. Whether that was deliberate or limitation in PDF licensing term, we don’t know for sure. But what we do know is the devoid of PDF and XPS export feature in Outlook is a big limitation. So, as usual, most of us has to either rely on Adobe Acrobat Outlook plug-in (which means, you will have to buy it and yes, it costs a lot too, $299 for a personal license for the standard edition!) or, make use of a PDF printer driver, to generate PDF document that is not searchable and contents that is not easy to recover or exported to another format. Some even resort to copy-paste of the content of the web page to Microsoft Word and convert to PDF/XPS document, albeit in a crude fashion.

For these reasons, a year back, in an attempt to bridge the gap, I wrote a VBA, that puts a button in the mail inspector window in Outlook, clicking which would feed the HTML version of the email item to Microsoft Word application through command line execution, and convert it into a PDF document. What started as a simple script to meet my own requirement for document generation from emails, has now evolved into a full-fledged commercial add-in application for Microsoft Outlook. It really is a lot nicer. It has a lot of conveniences that make it easy to use, encapsulating all the complex and dirty processes within the familiar Outlook toolbar and ribbon user interface. But in the end it still does that same core function that got it started – it generates PDF, XPS, word documents and web archived pages from any items in Outlook (be it emails, appointments or tasks), with a single click or on its own through automation. These are all achieved, by leveraging your existing investment in Microsoft Office 2007 or 2010 suite. There is no requirement to install a PDF printer driver or a third party library or Adobe Acrobat application.

In its new avatar, Document Exporter is a lot more than just being a PDF converter. Once you convert an email to PDF or other document format, generated PDF files of the email and attachments can be named with the metadata information contained in the email item itself, such as date, sender, receiver, subject, etc. This way you don’t even need to input and key in the name of the document.

Document Exporter can also convert the underlying attachments of the email to PDF. You have the choice to output each individual attachment to a separate PDF file, or merge all attachments into a single PDF file where each attachment is joined to one another, or merge the email along with the attachments to a single PDF file such that, each attachment is joined and appended to the email PDF. However, the support for converting attachment to PDF depends on the file format of the attachment. Most of the Word, Excel, PowerPoint, Web or simply plain text file formats are supported. Here is a list of different file formats supported for converting to PDF: docx, docm, doc, dot, dotx, dot, htm, html, mht, mhtl, rtf, txt, odt, wpd, wps, xl, xlsx, xlsm, xlsb, xlam, xltx, xltm, xls, xlt, xla, xlm, xlw, odc, uxdc, ods, csv, prn, pptx, ppt, pptm, ppsx, pps, ppsm, potx, pot, potm, odp, bmp, gif, png, jpg, jpeg, tif, tiff, pcx, psd

One unique feature of Document Exporter that sets it apart from other PDF converter tool for Outlook is in its support to export emails to other popular document formats such as Microsoft own, XPS (*.xps) and Word Documents (*.docx, *.doc), Rich Text (*.rtf), Open Document (*.odt) and Web archive (*.mht). There are five ways of generating PDF and other document formats from Outlook items:

Convert individual Outlook item
Batch convert multiple Outlook items
Append Outlook items to an existing PDF file
Merge multiple Outlook items into one file
Automatically convert new incoming emails

One recent feature addition is the real-time generation of PDF or other document formats from incoming emails. This works by setting Document Exporter add-in to monitor an Outlook folder or mailbox, for new emails. So, when a new incoming email hits the folder or mailbox, Document Exporter automatically processes it to generate PDF or other documents, without any intervention from the user. Now, you can easily maintain a parallel copy or backup of your current Outlook items.

You can also opt to maintain a single PDF file for an Outlook folder or mailbox, such that every new Outlook item received or added to the folder or mailbox will be automatically appended over this single PDF file, containing iteration of pages just like an e-book. This entire process will appear seamless to the user, and you will have a PDF file that has the latest update of your Outlook folder or mailbox.

Finally, you have complete control over the PDF document generation through the Output settings panel. You can customize the default file naming scheme by choosing your own metadata fields, specify the attachments output behavior, choose single or multiple PDF merge options and modify the page setup and layout etc.

The latest release of Document Exporter add-in is version 6 and works with Outlook 2007 and 2010 (32 bit). I have also composed a 15 minutes video demonstration on its capabilities on Outlook 2010, which is now available on the product website. If you have any opinions, feedback or questions on this product, I’d love to hear from you. You can contact me at bahrur dot ipham at assistmyteam dot net.

Product Summary:
Name: Document Exporter for Outlook
Website: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/
Download: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/Download.asp
Video Demonstration: http://www.assistmyteam.net/DocumentExporter/Videos/

Helpdesk Service Hours and Limited license for up to 5 Technicians

Helpdesk & Issue Tracking, Team Helpdesk for Outlook No Responses »

Jul 132011

One of the much anticipated feature which was frequently requested, is now finally implemented in Team Helpdesk for Outlook. Helpdesk Service days and hours feature enables manager and administrator to specify the service days and hours optionally, their helpdesk operates. With this mechanism, any automatic assignment of due date to support cases, including those triggered by an enforced Service Level Agreement (SLA), would be dynamically adjusted to fall within the service days and hours (if specified). By default, service day start from Monday and ends at Saturday. You can choose the service starting and ending days as per your helpdesk requirement.

Once a service days and hours are specified, due date assignment will take note of the helpdesk unavailability accordingly. When specifying a SLA to a support case, the response time would be added to the current date/time, plus any helpdesk off-hours such that, the due date is always set within the service hours band. So, no longer you or other technicians would be sent due date lapsed or SLA breach automated notifications and alerts in off hours of the helpdesk.

Another new addition to version 6.5 is the licensing mode for up to 5 technician seats. Often, I had been approached by many users looking out for a helpdesk solution based on Outlook, if there was any special version of Team Helpdesk, for fewer teams, such 3 or 5. The cost of the enterprise license for unlimited seats is beyond their reach. After looking out for such user base, I am happy to announce the availability of a limited license version for Team Helpdesk for Outlook. This license can used to deploy Team Helpdesk up to 5 technicians. The cost of this license is fixed at 750 USD, one time payment, life validity. This includes a year support and maintenance support subscription. As I write, this license is now available on our web store. Related to licensing is the bumping of 1 year Support and Maintenance contract for the Enterprise license to 3 years, without any increment to the cost. Of course, this offer is available for a limited time. For more on this limited license option and the 3 years Support Contract offer, refer to the purchase page at http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdesk/Purchase.asp

Enabling Microsoft Outlook as Content Provider for SharePoint

Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint No Responses »

Jul 062011

With the growing amount of emails and enforced limits on mailbox sizes, today’s organization needs an environment to effectively manage these information assets and apply the appropriate retention policies for emails containing company records. SharePoint is the ideal platform to facilitate this requirement, and no wonder, many organizations are adopting it to manage and share documents from a central location.

On the users’ side, publishing documents to SharePoint from the latest version of Microsoft Office applications had never been easier. However, SharePoint integration in Microsoft Outlook still leaves a lot to be desired, as it makes it very hard and inconvenient for users to publish contents from their personal mailbox to SharePoint. For instance, it is nearly impossible to upload and publish emails selectively to a SharePoint list, from Outlook. Even if you do manage to succeed, you will certainly find that most of the required metadata information did not make it to SharePoint. If the Outlook items have custom fields, they would certainly be skipped or ignored in SharePoint. What good is SharePoint integration in Outlook, when you can’t figure out an easier way to push emails and other data from Outlook to SharePoint conveniently! The process of capturing and publishing of business contents from personal mailboxes and public folders has become a core issue for most organizations, as they come to rely on SharePoint for storage, retrieval, search and collaboration on documents enterprise wide.

To cut the discussion short, we have a solution that addresses the shortcoming of SharePoint integration in Outlook with our latest release – Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint. This exists as an add-in process in Microsoft Outlook and is designed to provide enterprise users a means to bring contents from their Outlook to SharePoint, without needing you to be a techie or programmer. In other words, Data Publisher extends your Microsoft Outlook to effectively act as a content provider for your enterprise SharePoint repository.

Workflow chart for Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint

All you need to do, is associate one or more SharePoint lists to each Outlook folder, or to a particular Outlook item type such as mail, appointment, task or contact. If you choose the former, the configured SharePoint lists will be visible to that folder exclusively and items from the particular folder can only be published to one of the associated lists. For the latter, the configured SharePoint lists will be available in the common pool, which means, any mail items in Outlook from any folder or stores can be published to one of this common SharePoint list. Associating SharePoint lists at the folder level exposes Data Publisher to custom fields that you might have defined in a customized Outlook form, on that particular folder. This means, data from both inbuilt fields and custom fields will be available in SharePoint list items, when published. So, if you need to include information from custom fields to be made available in SharePoint, you will choose the folder level association with SharePoint lists.

Mapping fields between Outlook and SharePoint

Before you can publish any items from Outlook to SharePoint, you will also need to decide or choose the SharePoint fields that will store the value extracted from the Outlook fields. This is easily done in Data Publisher with the mapping tool. With this, you can map the fields between Outlook and SharePoint, enabling minute control on what data is being published to SharePoint. Besides the standard inbuilt fields of the Outlook item type, you can also include any number of user defined fields. This mapping feature also allows you to dynamically create new field of the relevant data type in the SharePoint list, so that you can associate it with an Outlook field. These are the least settings required to be able to start publishing.

Choose to which SharePoint list the selected Outlook items will be published to

You publish items from Outlook to SharePoint by simply clicking the ‘Quick Publish’, in which case, it will be published to the default SharePoint list that is set in the settings panel. If you have multiple SharePoint lists configured, simply choose one of the lists from the ‘Publish To’ drop down menu. With this arrangement, you can easily file and publish emails, attachments, appointments, tasks or contacts to SharePoint, without worrying for loss of metadata.

This is how the Outlook item looks like after successful publishing to SharePoint

This is how the published item in SharePoint will look like

What if you want Outlook to perform the publishing of items to SharePoint automatically, without requiring any input from your side? Yes, Data Publisher will let you do this automation in Outlook. How? Data Publisher can monitor any number of Outlook folders real-time, to automatically publish incoming mails or newly added appointments, tasks or contact items to a SharePoint list of your choosing. Such automation comes very handy and useful, in maintaining a parallel copy or backup of your current Outlook items in SharePoint. This spares you from having to do that laborious work of copying and pasting the data from Outlook to SharePoint manually.

Automatically publish Outlook items to SharePoint

One of the core designs in Data Publisher add-in for Outlook, is the user experience – making it very easy and effortless to publish your mails, appointments, tasks or contacts from Outlook to SharePoint manually or on the fly. And because SharePoint is ideal for sharing documents and collaboration, Data Publisher can be adapted and used for variety of content management purposes in SharePoint:

For filing trouble tickets to an issue tracking SharePoint list from Outlook emails, so that tickets can be collaborated and assigned to relevant technicians in SharePoint accessible by all members of your support team.
For submitting personal time sheets from Outlook calendar on work done, to a SharePoint calendar list.
For submitting meetings and schedules from Outlook calendar to a SharePoint Calendar list
For publishing attachments and emails (as .msg) on document libraries
For email retention and archival purpose in SharePoint

Data Publisher is currently available for free. If you want to learn more, you can refer to the product home page – http://www.assistmyteam.net/DataPublisherSP/. A team edition is also under development.

You can also watch this 20 minutes video demonstration on ‘Data Publisher for Outlook and SharePoint’ in action.

Free licenses for Educational Institutions and Universities!

Uncategorized No Responses »

Apr 142011

In an effort to help professors, scientists, researchers and staffs to take advantage of their organization’s investment in Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint, AssistMyteam SMB Solutions has launched the Acadamic Programme for educational institutions and universities. The Programme allows the Institution the right to use an unlimited number of my products for educational purposes, free of charge, with surprisingly little bureaucracy! This includes the enterprise groupware products such as Team Helpdesk, Team TimeSheet and Team Publisher. The programme can cover any disciplines and departments, engineering, science or arts course. It will come in force starting 1st May 2011. More instructions would be posted on this blog soon.

The following products will be offered for FREE licenses:

Document Exporter for Outlook
Document Exporter for Internet Explorer
Attachment Manager for Outlook
Database Exporter for Outlook
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for Outlook
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for SharePoint
OLAP Statistics & Reporting for Access
Team KB for Outlook
Team Helpdesk for Outlook
Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint
Team TimeSheet for Outlook
Team TimeSheet for Outlook & SharePoint
Team Publisher for Outlook & SharePoint

Having been in this ISV business for a year, there is a thing or two to celebrate – because with the financial year end, our premium clients with enterprise licenses have now crossed 100 (102 to be precises as of today). Total licenses sold during the financial year stands at 368, of which 102 are enterprise license, and rest personal licenses. Of the 102 enterprise licenses acquired, 9 comes under the Non-Profit License scheme, and were granted to educational institutions, universities and other non-profit organizations around the world.

Premium clients list with enterprise licenses now updated on the website:

Danfoss India Pvt. Ltd

University of Cambridge

Hunter Water Australia

SOS-Kinderdorf International

Tometich Engineering, Inc

KTH Sales, Inc.

Commonwealth of Kentucky

Daily Legal News, Cleveland

Diserio Martin O’Connor & Castiglioni LLP

Library of Congress

Res Consortium Ltd

Ingersoll-Rand plc, Dublin, Ireland

JTM Clinical Services, LLC, Hilliard

City of Thornton

Weeks Marine, Inc., Cranford

iiNet Australia

Creative State, Tulsa

Jenson Pharmaceutical Services Ltd

Amtac Professional Services, Australia

The Codemasters Software Company Limited

Vanderbilt University, Tennessee

Nooter Corporation

National Motor Freight Traffic Association (NMFTA)

New Mexico State University, Las Cruces

CenturyTel, Inc

DCI Cheese Company

Sonic.net, Inc., Santa Rosa

CSC Holdings, LLC.

Correctional Healthcare Companies

Lifespan, Providence

Arcor Germany

Medisse BV, Netherlands

Danfoss Australia Pty Ltd

INITSOL, Germany

Elkonor, Norway

Kicking Horse Mountain Resort, Canada

Blycolin, Netherlands

Hestia Housing & Support, UK

Professional Computer Systems

GBSYS, S.A.

Notore Chemical Industries

Dynamix Consulting Corp.

Thybar – Roof Curb Products

Bridge Betriebsdaten AG

Mental Health Centre Penetanguishene

Peachtree Special Risk Brokers

Polycor Inc.

Austrian Development Cooperation

WEAVEonline

Turf Care Products Canada Limited

Tidsam AB

Wells Fargo

Orange

Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE)

James Madison University

INSEAD The Business School for the World

The Financial Services School, Queensland

AGIL Freight Logistics Group

Bryan, Pendleton, Swats & McAllister, LLC

Virgin Media, UK

eircom Limited, Dublin

Vestil Manufacturing

CFP Solutions Limited, UK

CenturyTel, Inc

Aerial Cartographics of America, Inc

LogIn, Inc

Columbia University, City of New York

Merial Ltd

Buck Consultants, LLC

Widerøe Internet AS

Marcuard Family Office Ltd

Bell Canada

Shaw Communications

Lucasfilm Entertainment Company Ltd

ProSys, Inc

FUJITSU United States

Metropolitan Transit Authority of Harris County, Houston, Texas

IMPACT INDUSTRIAL SERVICES, Indianapolis

Justified Type

The INSEAD

Florida Tourism Industry Marketing Corporation

GMX International

Mailing Services of Pittsburgh (MSP)

Hindustan Engineering

Sibcy Cline Realtors®

Swan Analytische Instrumente AG

The Kroger Co.

Austrian Development Cooperation (ADC)

Valassis Communications, Inc

Fire Creek Resources Ltd.

MASS Precision, Inc

Glenwood, Inc

Camber Corporation

SOS Children’s Villages International

North Star, Minnesota State Government Online

Community Care Access Centre (CCAC)

Curtis & Green LLP

Watervliet City Council

Australia and New Zealand Banking Group Limited (ANZ)

Berman Printing Company

CDW

Road Runner HoldCo LLC

Issue tracking system integrated with Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint!

Helpdesk & Issue Tracking, Team Helpdesk for SharePoint and Outlook No Responses »

Apr 112011

The last blog I had written was on my issue tracking and ticketing system (i.e., Team Helpdesk for Outlook), based on Microsoft Outlook and Exchange Server. When implemented on an enterprise network (as groupware), this add-in solution aids in providing timely response and resolution to end-users queries, something which is very critical to the success of the business, in long run.

My latest release is a variant of the issue tracking system (known as Team Helpdesk for Outlook & SharePoint), that is based and integrated on three commonly used environments in most IT workhouses – Microsoft Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint. Designed to be deployed on an enterprise level, this add-in can drastically reduce the workload of the typical help desk technicians or agents, through automation, accurate logging and tracking of tickets. In this help desk system, the support tickets are stored in both Exchange (either a public folder or a shared mailbox) and in SharePoint (in a list). The idea is to provide technicians and support staffs access to their assigned tickets through the comfort of Microsoft Outlook or SharePoint site. The SharePoint integration is seamless to the users, as is in Microsoft Outlook, facilitating remote technicians and other stakeholders to view, track and work on support request in a web browser, thus realizing the benefits of the help desk company-wide.

As this is based on Exchange & SharePoint, it is highly scalable, and requires less or no special maintenance efforts. The advantages are high rate of user adoption, (because of their familiarity with Microsoft Outlook and SharePoint) and little or no special skill sets requirement.

The flowchart below, pretty much sums up the processes involved:

The Outlook connection:

And the equivalent SharePoint case item:

Product page - http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdeskSP/

To get you a quick start and walk-through, I have also prepared 2 hours long video demonstrations, on how to get the most out of your help desk support team.
http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdeskSP/TutorialClips.asp

Prevent support requests falling through the crack with helpdesk system

Helpdesk & Issue Tracking, Inbox Management, Knowledge Base & Expert Systems, Team Helpdesk for Outlook, Team Helpdesk for SharePoint and Outlook No Responses »

Feb 212011

You have a business that you aim one day to grow and be profitable. If you are one person support team and have fewer customers, sure, you can provide resolution to their grievances by writing or speaking to them, without logging the details of the customer and nor documenting the nature of the problem. However, what happens if you have a large customer base? Of course, there will be multiple support staffs attending to high number of support requests. How would each one of them remember who sent what and who needs what? How would John know that Monica has already resolved this particular customer’s issue? How would you prevent them from working on the same issue concurrently to avert duplicate effort? What if Monica solved an issue virtually identical to a separate issue John is currently working on? How would John know this issue has been already resolved, so he could use this information to reply to the customer’s issue ? For strategic decisions and intelligence, senior managers would certainly like to know how many times has this particular problem come up for this particular product? How long has this problem been an issue for them?

It is said that success of a business is measured against the level of customer satisfaction on sales and services. In fact, the higher the customer satisfaction is, the repeated business it creates. This is one of the key reason why successful enterprises have a dedicated help-desk team or call centers to caters to the queries and grievances of their customer base. But what makes a help-desk team productive and successful? Well for sure, choosing the right helpdesk system is the first step that can make all the difference.

But how do you arrive to the decision of choosing a particular helpdesk system? Do you need a helpdesk database system that works standalone within your local network? Or do you need a web based helpdesk to enable your scattered support personnel to work on troubled tickets? Or do you require a helpdesk that make uses of your existing email infrastructure such as Microsoft Outlook and Exchange?

Typically, an ideal helpdesk system should support the organizations’ internal logic and workflows, integrates easily and leverage existing infrastructures, caters to the support technicians on the move, enables automation and processing based on customizable rules and most importantly, should be easy to use with little or no training requirement. This is where a helpdesk system based on email client such as Microsoft Outlook scores over other type of support systems. This is because in most businesses, most support staffs use Outlook extensively – all day, every day for email communications, appointments, contacts, tasks etc. As they have relied that heavily on Outlook, it is only natural for them to turn Outlook to a sort of a ticketing system to support requests and calls from customers. Moreover, as Outlook provides quick access to company’s contacts, address books, mailboxes and public folders stored on a central Exchange server, it makes it much easier for support personals to track, collaborate and log support requests in Outlook.

So Microsoft Outlook is a great productivity office application, something more of an indispensable companion for many businesses. However, Outlook itself is highly optimized for personal email exchange often falling short when it comes to providing a complete history of an event over time. When an email has been forwarded on to another helpdesk team member, the original owner loses insight into the progress. This has a serious implication, that is, in its original state, Outlook simply lacks the automation, reporting, reminders, and workflow to manage a support ticket request, which is critical for growing helpdesks looking to optimize and uniformly improve support staff/customer interactions.

This is where ‘Team Helpdesk for Outlook’, a plug-in application that I developed two years back, completes the picture. Team Helpdesk overcomes the limitations mentioned above by extending your Outlook as an ideal platform to collect, track and resolve trouble tickets while sharing this information with your entire team. It does this by bringing help desk functionality and automation, and integrating seamlessly with the easy workflow of Outlook. This allows support team to work in the same way they do with emails, something which they are already familiar with. It also adds integration with fixed phones, Skype or SMS gateways to facilitate relaying helpdesk response over these phone or SMS.

Designed as a groupware, Team Helpdesk, when used with a public folder or shared mailbox (with Microsoft Exchange, that is), provides a way for multiple support team to work in collaboration on a number of issues. Monica resolves an issue, marks it closed, and John can search though all of the resolved issues to see if the problem he’s working on has already been resolved. John can also find out how the problem was fixed and use this solution to solve his issue.

By enabling assignment of a particular support agent to work on an issue, Team Helpdesk helps you to ensure your helpdesk staffs are not unnecessarily duplicating effort – John and Monica are not both separately working on Mr. Francas ‘s printing issue at the same time without knowing the other is working on it.

The Ongoing Cases subfolder in Team Helpdesk System in Outlook

The support case form used for logging new support request assistance from customer in Outlook

Another major obstacle many support staffs face is the lack of clarity and overall picture of the reported issue. Most support requests cannot be closed within a single e-mail and response. Feedback from the caller and suggestions from the respective support staffs often occur over multiple request-response emails. Moreover, different members from the support teams may provide resolutions during the course of the request. So, in practical scenario, a support case might have various e-mail versions of the resolution steps, making it cumbersome to get a complete picture of responses and resolution. With the conversation threading feature, Team Helpdesk captures the complete course of the conversation chronologically, from all email communications received or sent (including those automated notifications sent to caller and technicians in due course). The end result is a consolidated view where all the responses to a support request are collated together. Redundant and repeated conversations are filtered out to present only the relevant communications.

The Conversation Threading view of all email communications that had taken place on a particular case

This eases the task of the helpdesk and minimizes repeating what has already been done, while keeping support team members to stay on the track. Another advantage is it allows the technician to quickly glimpse through the thread and get a complete overview on the responses in chronological order and resolution applied to the particular support request, something which is hard to extract from viewing multiple email responses.

Another useful information that senior managements can tract and extract from Team Helpdesk is trend analysis. Let’s say you get a lot of support requests on how to rectify papers getting jammed inside printer. By running statistics or searching through the resolved cases, you can articulate how often this particular topic needs assistance. If you find support requests received on this particular issue rampant in the past, you may decide to create a knowledge base article on the problem and publish this KB on your support website. This would, in turn, serves as a first level support service to customers. Therefore, without a helpdesk system to track these types of questions, you would never be able to figure out which knowledge base articles or frequently asked questions need to be published.

Team Helpdesk works great when automated. You can put your customer service online 24/7, even after office hours or holidays. You can install the managerial tool of Team Helpdesk in your windows server (as it runs 24/7 non-stop) or you can simply designate a particular workstation that is pretty much 24/7. With this arrangement, Team Helpdesk can continue to monitor your support mailbox, without any human intervention and generate tickets out of incoming emails automatically, assign technicians and notify callers and technicians with ticket number allotment with emails or as a SMS message to their mobile devices.

Support request received via emails seldom contain basic details on the nature of the issue. And often, there is a back-and-forth communications that goes between the helpdesk and the customer, in just try get hold of these information, long before the technician can start resolving it. With the Team Helpdesk Customer Web Service website, you can guide a customer in the way they report their problem to the helpdesk. By having required fields such as the model number of the printer, brand and driver version, etc. you not only cut down the communication loops, but also put in place a structured format of logging new support cases in the helpdesk system automatically.

As you can see, there is no excuse really not to have some kind of helpdesk functionality for any kind of business that involves an end-user. Even if you have a small business and are managing the support requests yourself, you will find some kind of helpdesk ticketing advantageous to use. For enterprise business, you will find helpdesk system an absolute necessity in order to save time, money, and effort tracking your support request issues, as well as to enable collaboration, eliminate duplication of effort and documenting problem resolutions for reuse.

The publication of this blog incidentally, falls in the same period as the release of version 6 of Team Helpdesk for Outlook. Version 6 added three main features which are described in this 6 minutes video tour

If you are interested in learning more, or even evaluating it for a free 60 days trial, you are welcome. Just visit the product home page at http://www.assistmyteam.net/TeamHelpdesk/

desperately seeking ‘Business Intelligence’

OLAP & Business Intelligence, OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint No Responses »

Jan 192011

I have been working on Business Intelligence and OLAP technologies for more than 3 years, extensively. Initially the very sound of it, gives jitter or boredom, and it was a less favorite subject during my academic year. When I enter the workforce after my masters’, never did I expect to work on OLAP extensively as part of my new job. But with time, I soon find myself digging more into OLAP technologies and eventually, became a love affair, and till today resonates in my entrepreneurial pursuit. In fact, every enterprise products that I have developed on Microsoft Office, Exchange and SharePoint platforms integrate an inbuilt OLAP solution to analyze business data and generate reports, that fits every level of management and accounting requirements.

Okay, now to the purpose of this blog, the new release of ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting tool for SharePoint list‘. For those of you, who are not aware of my products portfolio, I also have two other OLAP tools – one for Microsoft Outlook and the other for Microsoft Access. Each of this OLAP tool is designed to serve a purpose, which is to extract business intelligence out of the Outlook or Access data.

Before digging down more on the new OLAP tool for SharePoint, let me put forward the reasons on why these specific OLAP tools were developed in the first place.

For Outlook, there is hardly any specific OLAP tool that one can use to analyze Outlook data. To some extent, one can use Outlook views of presenting information in a more obvious way in folder, but it does not give you the summarized data that one needs often, to see broader trends based on aggregation, and to see these trends broken down by any number of variables. This leads to the development of what is now known as ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for Outlook‘.

For Access database, there is no inbuilt OLAP tool in Access that one can use to analyze aggregated and summarized data. Traditional query (Or OLTP) is slow in aggregation task, provides limited interactivity, and reporting is well suited to handle textual information mostly. Moreover, complex calculation are oftem difficult to implement. In short, there are major drawbacks with regards to answering, analysis and reporting with Access database. One can use Microsoft Excel to create an OLAP cube, and analyze it. But the process is cumbersome, and present a learning curve, for average workers and managers. The absence of a simple, and yet productive OLAP tool for Microsoft Access database leads to the development of what is now known as ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for Access‘.

OK, now coming to the new OLAP tool for SharePoint list. SharePoint can store business data in lists, such as meetings, time-sheets, contacts, tasks, announcements, sales transactions etc. The main purpose of storing it on SharePoint list is to enable sharing among team members in organizations, which is its selling point. However, one of its weak point is the absence of any inbuilt OLAP tool to analyze data in the list. Due to this limitation, often managers find themselves spending a lot of time and resource in exporting data to spreadsheet, and performing manual computation and parsing. Some even use specialized data professionals, web parts and a dozen different software packages, just to produce simple reports. Worst, if the report doesn’t have the required information, you will have to start over, wasting precious time.

As there is a time and expense involved in getting answers from SharePoint lists, a lot of business intelligence information often goes unused, due to the fact that, SharePoint is designed to store data, and not to help you analyze it. This leads to the development of ‘OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint‘, to let you configure OLAP cube from your SharePoint lists, and then analyze and create reports straightaway, out of the box.

Summary:
Product Title: OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint
Home Page: http://www.assistmyteam.net/OLAPStatisticsSP/
Requirements: OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint works with WSS 2.0, 3.0, MOSS 2007 and the latest SharePoint 2010 Foundation and SharePoint 2010 Server. And yes, you need to have .NET framework 2.0 installed on the system to be able to play with my OLAP tool.

I have also put up a 9 minutes video demonstration to give you a brief walk-through on how to use OLAP Statistics and Reporting for SharePoint.

Older Entries

bahrurBlog

Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part II

It’s here! Office 365 support on our products!

Overcoming the limitation of SharePoint based Issue Tracking system – Part I

PDF Document Exporter add-in: A must have companion for business and power users of Microsoft Outlook

Helpdesk Service Hours and Limited license for up to 5 Technicians

Enabling Microsoft Outlook as Content Provider for SharePoint

Free licenses for Educational Institutions and Universities!

Issue tracking system integrated with Outlook, Exchange and SharePoint!

Prevent support requests falling through the crack with helpdesk system

desperately seeking ‘Business Intelligence’

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