I am very excited to write this post, to announce the official release of NetAdvantage for SharePoint, our newest product.  You might be thinking that SharePoint is really about ‘end-users’ or ‘business-users’, and that’s true – in most cases.  One of our top requests (from developers) over the last few years was to wrap our controls into web parts for SharePoint.  This makes sense, seeing that 3 of 4 enterprises have adopted SharePoint, the backlog is growing for IT development staffs to deliver a better SharePoint experience for users.  We figured the best way to do this was to build an amazing design time experience on top for the web parts, so literally anyone can build better pages in SharePoint.  With NetAdvantage for SharePoint, your business users are empowered to visualize their data quickly and easily with a simple point and click design experience. This is all about end user ease of use, being able to quickly bind data to visualize it, simple and easy.

So let’s take a look at what’s in the product.

Web Parts for SharePoint

In this first version, we’ve included 5 Web Parts which cover a wide variety of business scenarios:

• Version Timeline
• Content Rotator
• Radial Gauge, Linear Gauge
• Data Chart
• Geospatial / Geographical Map

Let’s go over the details of each one.

Version Timeline

The Version Timeline is more of an add-in to a list or library than anything else.  It replaces the boring list which shows the history of an artifact, and displays it along a Timeline view.

For example, if you want to view the history of an artifact, and the Version Timeline Web Part is installed, you will see this on the context menu:

 

If you select Version Timeline, you will get the following visual, more true-to-life timeline view:

Some of the key features on the Version Timeline include:

• Views and Features
• Zoom bar
• Versioning control
• Minor and major versioning preview
• Delete all versions / Restore a version
• Filter by user
• Ability to compare item versions

 

Content Rotator

With the Content Rotator, you can promote everything from company activities, announcements, news, and products launches. The gist of the Content Rotator is that you point the control to a library of images or a list with rich content, and you set the interval of rotation, and it just works.

Here is the design time window for setting up the data source:

And to set properties like Theme, Size and Transitions:

Some of the key features for the Version Timeline include:

• Different content types
• Preview (rich text content)
• Playback controls / End-user navigation
• Animation

 

Linear / Radial Gauge

Gauges are great for dashboards and KPI’s.  With the Gauge Web Part, you can create both Linear and Radial gauges, both come with custom themes, the ability to auto-aggregate your data, and multiple scales for data display.

Here is the Gauge design time showing multiple scales, and configuring the Scale Layout:

Your users can choose to use the default theme of the SharePoint Gauge control, or choose from one of the pre-built themes we are shipping:

This is the Linear Gauge design time experience:

Data Chart

Built using our market-leading, award-winning xamDataChart, the Chart Web Part can connect to SharePoint List data, BCS / BDC data, or Excel Services data.  We’ve included 10 chart types in this release:

• Area Series
• Column Series
• Line Series
• Spline Area Series
• Spline Series
• Step Area Series
• Step Line Series
• Waterfall Series
• Range Area Series
• Range Column Series

The Chart Web Part supports multiple series (like a Line chart over a Bar chart) as well, so your users can take data from multiple sources and accurately graph it.  Each series can also be auto-aggregated by the control, so functions like Sum, Min, Max, etc are available to users so they don’t have to worry about the math that usually goes in to charting.

Here’s the Chart Web Part Axis design time:

This is the simple data design time, users can simply drag column names to the CategoryX and CategoryY labels and the chart is created for them:

You can add Chart Series in a simple dropdown, where you can select the chart type, or add additional chart series to an existing chart.

With the SharePoint Chart Web Part, we’ve taken an operation that is usually fairly complex and made it pretty simple with the great design time experience.

Map

The Map Web Part supports multiple tile sources , including Microsoft® Bing®, Open Street and Cloud Made. We’ll have ESRI Shape File (SHP format) support in the first service release next month.  With the Map Web Part, you can apply multiple data source layers and pins to effectively represent your geographic data.  This is great showing and hiding data based on the zoom level of the map, so there is a complete interactivity in data analysis with this control.

Here is the Map Web Part designer linked to a Cloud Made map source:

This shows a SharePoint List data source bound to a layer of the Map Web Part:

Some of the Map Web Part key features include:

• Map Layers
• Map Tile Source
• Elements (points / pins) layer
• Path layer
• Navigational panes
• Color Swatch panes
• Color map elements and paths
• Scale panes

You can even add pins or markers on to your map to define locations and add a legend or captions to complete your design experience.

Pricing and Licensing

Since SharePoint is a server product, this product is licensed a little different than the NetAdvantage developer tools.

We decided on a simple, friction-free license / pricing model.

On-Premise Server License:

• $4,995 per server, $7,495 per server with Priority Support
• This includes a perpetual license, with 2 releases per year, no source code

Office 365 Cloud pricing:

• $4,995 per 1,000 named users, $7,495 per 1,000 named users with Priority Support
• License is sold in blocks of 1,000 uses
• This includes a perpetual license, with 2 releases per year, no source code

No Charge for:

• Developer, Staging, Test Server license – this license is included in NetAdvantage Ultimate and as a separate “Trial” download
• When Web Parts are deployed to a Production SharePoint Server or an Office 365 Server, a paid license is required per server

Call to Action!

Check out the samples today at http://sharepoint.infragistics.com, and download the developer license today at http://www.infragistics.com/dotnet/netadvantage/sharepoint.aspx#Downloads.

If you’d like a demo for you or your team, shoot sales an email at sales@infragistics.com or call us up at  +1 (800) 231-8588.

If you are looking for other types of Web Parts, or want to send me some feedback, please shoot me an email at jasonb@infragistics.com or just comment on this post. 

Thanks for checking out our new SharePoint Product!  We excited to finally get this in your hands!