Support for Forms Authentication in new release of HelpDesk OSP

Forms authentication is a common mechanism for authenticating users in online applications. The kalmstrom.com issue tracking software for Outlook and SharePoint, HelpDesk OSP, has not handled this log in method before, but now it does! Today we released version 2.1, which of course will attract new users to HelpDesk OSP. Community Members and HelpDesk OSP support customers who want to use forms authentication are very welcome to upgrade their installations.

The SharePoint login info tab now has a dropdown where the user can select the Authentication alternative. Windows authentication is the default alternative, but no longer the only one.

Have you not tried HelpDesk OSP yet? Welcome to download and evaluate the application!  SharePoint is a great platform for cooperation within a team, and with HelpDesk OSP you can connect your Outlook or OWA to it.

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 with better ticket form

This month the kalmstrom.com team has tried to prioritize work with the new version of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk. The most important improvement in version 11 ‒ and a big one! ‒ is that the ticket form is changed. Because of some bugs in the Outlook forms we have chosen to not use them in most of our solutions, but for PF HelpDesk we earlier judged the benefits greater than the disadvantages. However now our skillful developers have found a way to keep the benefits and get rid of the problems!

The new form has two parts, an upper part built in HTML and a lower built in Visual Basic 6. The HTML part contains the fields that are most interesting for users to customize, and since we use well known HTML code here it will be easier than before to adapt the ticket to the needs of the organization. Another advantage with the new ticket form is that it loads faster than the old one.

Even if the ticket form will be easier to customize we want to give you a good default ticket. Right now we discuss the layout within the team. Many suggestions have been sent back and forth, but now I know that it will be something like in the image above, even if details might change before release. Our QA engineer, Dina Romanova, has started testing version 11, and we all hope that she does not find too many bugs, so that we soon can publish the new version of PF HelpDesk. We know many are waiting for it out there!

Minor Update of Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook

In his latest newsletter Peter hoped that there would be no more releases of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk, before version 11, but today we had to make a minor update since several users had problems converting e-mails containing attachments. If you get an error report that talks about attachment, I recommend you to upgrade ‒ if you have a support contract, of course, but nowadays most of our users have that.

The work with PF HelpDesk V11 continues, and we plan to have a prototype ready for testing by the end of this week. I look forward to see what our developers have managed this time, and I promise to keep you informed!