Resource Management in Outlook for All Languages

The kalmstrom.com resource management application Calendar Browser has been updated to full support of Unicode. With Calendar Browser you can book resources and supplies just as easy as you make an appointment in the Outlook Calendar, and the administration is given smart tools for descriptions of the resources and for following up their use. In this release Calendar Browser has also been given an overall enhancement, as a number of smaller issues has been fixed. Refer to the Revisions page for a full list of the improvements.

Now you can describe your resources in a correct way whether your language is Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese etc. and of course also our special Nordic characters are supported. These resources might be anything that you need to share and book in advance within the organization - machines, rooms, cars and even people whose services may be booked. No wonder Calendar Browser has been so popular during its comparatively long life.

Peter first developed Calendar Browser for a Swedish town in the year 2000, when they could not find a suitable product for their room booking. After that the demand for this application grew, and he decided to market a standard solution. As you understand some of our users have been with us for many years now, and it feels really good to be able to offer them a continuously improved application.

Welcome to upgrade, Members and Support Customers, and welcome to try Calendar Browser if you have not yet tested it. You will be surprised that such an easy to use software can be so effective!

Use Any Character When You Report Time and Expenses With TimeCard

I am happy to announce that the kalmstrom.com developers now have added full Unicode support also for TimeCard, our application for reporting time and expenses from inside the Outlook calendar. The update of the workgroup version was released today, and we will soon publish a new single version also. At the same time they fixed some non critical bugs ‒ see the revisions page ‒ that our QA engineer found, or that were reported to us from customers. As usual we are grateful for all reports about issues with our products. They work in such complex environments that it is virtually impossible to test them all.

Community Members and Support Customers are welcome to upgrade their server installation. Once it is upgraded, the clients will be upgraded automatically if they are connected to the server. Have you not tried TimeCardyet? Please do. Reporting time and expenses directly from the Outlook Calendar is easy for the users, and the drop down selection of data minimizes the risk for errors. The integrated statistics application, OLAP Reporting Tool, is of course also updated for full support of Unicode.

A Prosperous 2010 to All Readers

The first day of 2010 is here, and Sweden still has very cold weather with as much snow as in the Christmas image below.

The image for this post was taken another cold year, in the spring, when you could use ice yachts on the Swedish lakes. I chose it as a symbol of the light and fun that I hope this new year will bring to all of you.


Sigge and I will return to Spain tomorrow and change snow for rain - but hopefully also some sunshine. During our stay in Sweden we have of course had meetings with Peter to discuss kalmstrom.com, beside the family gatherings. I have already told you about the Facebook page, one of the ideas that was born in these talks. More will follow ...

We look forward to the coming year and the challenges it will surely bring. I am now testing the Beta version of Office 2010, like the developers have done for quite a while, and making our products compatible is of course one of our most important tasks.

In the plans for the first quarter of this new year is the release of PF HelpDesk 11. It will have part of the ticket html-based, for easier customizations and to avoid the problems with Outlook forms. We also look forward to welcoming many new Community Members. During 2010 we will hopefully get at confirmation that the new Community and subscription system is such a good idea for both customers and company that we believe it is.  

The kalmstrom.com team and I wish all blog readers a prosperous 2010. We also want to say a warm thank you for the past year to our Community Members and Support Customers. We cannot make your year for you, but if we can make your work smoother, so that you get more time for the really important things in life, we feel happy about that!