It's always gratifying to hear how our products are helping customers meet their everyday goals in the workplace. We spend a great deal of time developing, testing, and fine-tuning our products, but we never want to lose sight of our end goal - enabling you to improve your business performance through SharePoint web parts.  With this in mind, we ask you "How do you Bamboo?" so that we may learn from your experience, and share how our products are having a real impact on real companies.

Name: Jeff Lundberg
Company: Runzheimer International is one of the most innovative companies in the world, providing a comprehensive range of employee mobility services relating to business vehicles, relocation, travel management, corporate aircraft, and virtual office programs. 
Web Part: List Rotator Web Part, Calendar Plus Web Part, World Clock and Weather Web Part (Free)

Bamboo: How are you using SharePoint in your organization?

Jeff:  We use SharePoint as a corporate intranet and as a means to collaborate between our various offices throughout the United States.

Bamboo: Why do you choose Bamboo?

Jeff:  We chose Bamboo because of the quality of the Web Parts you develop. They are well documented, flexible, very stable and user friendly. The products allow us to manage and complete tasks that are integral in our business process which would otherwise take a great deal of time for us to develop from the ground up. We also find that the tools greatly enhance the end-user experience throughout our corporate intranet.

Bamboo: What problem did our Web Parts solve? What do you like most about it?

Jeff:  Your Calendar Plus Web Part has done wonders for our ability to manage projects across departments, lines of business and between locations. The flexibility of the tool has allowed us to evaluate time and resource planning commitments graphically. We really enjoy how easy it is to configure and use the tool.

Have something you'd like to say, or want us to highlight your company? Contact us.

Learn how other companies are using our products in the Bamboo Client Spotlight.

* Emphasis from Bamboo

The US Army is all about being prepared.  At a moment's notice, the Army can execute a plan and deliver results.  Although this preparedness reaches across the world, it starts behind the scenes with strategy, forethought, anticipation and training.  This includes managing people and information that are critical to worldwide communication.  To securely manage information, administer sites and projects and to collaborate, the Army has deployed Microsoft SharePoint.  To extend and enhance SharePoint out-of-the-box, the Army has the essential Web Parts needed for SharePoint - the Bamboo Ultimate Suite.

The Bamboo Ultimate Suite is a compilation of about 50 Administrative, Project Management and Business Intelligence Web parts.  The benefit is the tools are ready to go as the Army deploys SharePoint; even better is as Bamboo releases new products, the Army receives them automatically as a Premium Support customer. 

With all of those tools to choose from, Information Architect Jason Lasby, stationed in Italy, has had a few products become instant favorites.  One is Bamboo Data-Viewer Web Part.  With Bamboo Data Viewer, Jason customizes all of the columns based off of filtering, allowing him to say 'ciao' to excel spreadsheets.  He has inline editing capabilities and a grid style view without using SharePoint Designer. 

"We have had positive reviews from users who are now able to share and edit lists driven by the Data View Web part that was formerly only possible to do in Excel with color coded columns or entire rows. In line editing is a major hit with our user base as they do not have to go through the pain of clicking through multiple pages to edit a single item. Over all the Data Viewer Web part has had rapid adaptation and more requests for this web part more than any other."

Another crowd pleaser from the Ultimate Suite is Calendar Plus.

Says Lasby “The Calendar Plus web part has helped our users consolidate 4 long range planning calendars formerly done in Outlook, Excel, and the 2003 SharePoint portal in to a single user friendly entity. Leveraging the power of Content types within the portal, we were able to create a base template and then build 12 different Content types, one for each of our user sections, to add an event to the calendar. The Gantt and Compact Gantt View has helped our teams find overlapping areas, thereby reducing the stresses of allocating resources to a mission that were already engaged in another event. Our users love creating views for everything and having color coding to highlight different levels of importance has really helped our IT staff deliver a winner.”

Bamboo Solutions has successfully harnessed the power of AJAX to enhance the user experience in many Web Parts. This in turn is converting users to SharePoint and making the Army’s mission to capture knowledge easier and easier. Every month the Army looks forward to the updates to the Web Parts as they continue to provide enhanced functionality and build the trust of their users.

Lighthouse Computer Services is a Microsoft Certified Partner that provides IT services to clients in the Northeast region.  They implement enterprise SharePoint portals for their clients, helping them convert isolated islands of data into a collaborative, interconnected community.  Their clients have quickly learned that SharePoint out of the box has its limitations, and they confidently recommend Bamboo Web Parts like Password Change Web Part to alleviate the change password task for the IT administrator.

Castle Pines Capital LLC (CPC) is a channel finance company specializing in the technology industry.  It provides innovative financing solutions to technology resellers and vendors worldwide.  CPC has chosen the Microsoft Office SharePoint Server as their web portal infrastructure and relies heavily on the Bamboo Web Part solutions to deliver high quality graphical data representations.

Castle Pines is a big advocate of Bamboo Chart Plus and other visually oriented Web Parts.  “A picture says 1,000 words,” says Armand Brunelle, Senior Vice President of Technology.  “Customers appreciate the ability to come to our portal and quickly see the status of their facility with us.   Bamboo Chart Plus helps us easily convert a large amount of data into useful charts for instant decision making by our customers.” 

CPC is also in the process of deploying the Bamboo SharePoint Knowledge Base Solution Accelerator to share knowledge within the various departments and across the company.  The Bamboo Project Management Suite with its Portfolio Dashboard allows the CPC Tech group to communicate the status of active projects via our CPCINTRANET as well.  “Bamboo Solutions has quickly become a very important partner of CPC.  Their products deliver tremendous value and functionality and I highly recommend them.”

Big Thought experiences the chronic challenge of most non-profits - restricted ability to invest in infrastructure but the need to function efficiently as would any business.

Karim Virani, Big Thought's Director of IT says, "This is why we have selected various Bamboo Solutions Web Parts such as the List Rollup Web Part and the Password Change. The List Rollup is valuable in integrating information across a mulitple web-based applications. This improves the visibility of critical information by allowing us to bring it together in one place. The Password Change Web Part supports our external partners using Active Directory accounts with the SharePoint platform. This eases the internal burden on our own IT staff. The cost of these tools paid for themselves within days."