HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint - a Product for the Future

HelpDesk OSP is the youngest product from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, created only two years ago. Since then a lot has happened to the product, and it has become the most popular among new customers. This feels very encouraging, and we will of course continue to improve HelpDesk OSP just like we do with all products.

Since the kalmstrom.com team is a geographically distributed group we use HelpDesk OSP ourselves for our support management, and even if it works well as it is we of course get ideas for enhancements and new features. We also get suggestions from users, and we are grateful for any input.

Yesterday we released a minor update of HelpDesk OSP, and today we have published a new Ideas page on the website. We will make such pages for all products, but this is the first. Welcome to have a look! And if you use HelpDesk OSP, or wish to start using it, please give us your comments.

New NameDays For Many Different Calendars

Yesterday kalmstrom.com took a first step to broaden the portfolio and not only offer add-ons for Microsoft products. For many years our free NameDays application has been an excellent way of marketing our brand. NameDays adds name days to the Outlook calendar, and since it has been very popular it has drawn a lot of traffic to our website.

Now we have released a new version of NameDays, a NameDays that is actually not an application at all. By adding the name days to ICS files, we can let users either import or subscribe to NameDays, and
the files may be used for more platforms than the Outlook calendar. Do you use iPhone, MacOSX and iCal, or the Google Calendar and an Android device? The new NameDays will work just fine! As the files for the different countries ‒ currently 15 ‒ are downloaded from our website separately, it is very easy for us to update them and to add name days from more countries to the list.

Welcome to use NameDays you also! On our website there are video demonstrations on how to import or subscribe to NameDays. The iPhone demo is still missing, but it will soon be finished. NameDays is a new and modern product that takes advantage of new technologies, so it works best on fairly new platforms and applications. For Outlook that means versions 2007 and 2010, but if you have Outlook 2003 you may still import the name days to your default calendar.

Surprise and delight friends and colleagues by always remembering their name days. And if you have international contacts, like so many of us have nowadays, you can use one calendar for each country!

Improved HTML Editor in Updated Public Folder HelpDesk

PF HelpDesk V11 has been updated again, this time with some enhancements and a couple of bug fixes. The most important improvement is the new HTML editor, which gives more possibilities than the old one. New buttons are added for font color and background color. A context menu is also added and will be shown when you right click on the editor. With the earlier editor font and color was sometimes changed  when a ticket was opened several times, but that will not happen with the new editor.

Please refer to the Revisions page for a description of all changes. We are grateful to Community Members who have pointed out to us how PF HelpDesk could be an even better application. All suggestions have not been implemented yet, but you can feel sure they are not forgotten! Welcome to upgrade PF HelpDesk, all Members!

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? If you are looking for an application that helps your workgroup cooperate on incident management inside Outlook, this is the perfect tool for you. It can be installed in a public folder or a shared  mailbox, and the full product may be tested for 30 days without any obligations.

TimeCard Single Integrated in the Outlook 2010 Ribbon

The Single version of TimeCard, is now updated for Outlook 2010. The ribbon integration is the same as for the Workgroup version, refer to the blog of 5 August. The image above shows the Start tab of the calendar with the TimeCard buttons in the ribbon.

The Single version is very popular among self employed people. One of them says: "I have configured TimeCard to assist me in keeping real time records of which client I was working on, the processes involved and the document type that I output. In this way I am able to provide clients with detailed analysis of the work I have done, the time involved and references to all documents associated with the time/processes." He even avoided a court process once thanks to his TimeCard records! Read the whole testimonial. It feels good to market a product that can help so many.

Calendar Browser and Outlook 2010

Normally I like to blog very much, but today I would have preferred to not have been forced to share the news about Calendar Browser and Office 2010. We saw from the beginning that there were big problems with Calendar Browser and the Outlook 2010 Calendar, but problems are for solving and that is what our developers do all the time. Therefore we assumed this issue would also be solved, even if it would take more time than for our other products.

However, if the software we build on is too much altered, the task gets impossible. Now Microsoft has changed the calendar to no longer fully support Outlook View Control, and because of that users of Outlook 2010 can only create meetings from the Calendar Browser button, and they cannot edit them at all from within Calendar Browser. Of course this is not acceptable, but even if our developers have spent much time trying to solve this problem they have not succeeded and we cannot offer a functioning Calendar Browser for Outlook 2010. We are very sorry for the inconvenience this will cause users of Calendar Browser who wish to upgrade to Office 2010.

Our only alternative is to totally rebuild Calendar Browser, and today we have no possibility to do that. We don't think it is the right way to go either. Maybe we will build a SharePoint based solution for resource booking in the future, but those plans are yet vague.

kalmstrom.com will continue to give support on Calendar Browser used with earlier versions of Outlook, and if we should find a solution to the problem later we will of course employ it.

TimeCard Embraces Contextual Tabs In Outlook 2010

The Workgroup version of TimeCard has been updated to take advantage of the Outlook 2010 Ribbon (32-bit). If you earlier have used Outlook 2007, the difference is not so big, but Outlook 2010 has something called Contextual Tabs. This means that you while still in an e-mail folder can select an appointment in the To-Do bar, and the Calendar Tools will be visible ‒ with the TimeCard dropdowns and the Expenses button.

The new release has also a new feature, the possibility to map e-mail domain or ID for TimeCard metadata which earlier was introduced in the Single version (refer to the blogs of June 22 and 28). Members, you are very welcome to upgrade your installations.

Have you not tried TimeCard yet? This application for time reporting from inside the Outlook Calendar is suitable for both big organizations and single users who work for themselves. It is one of our most popular products, so why not see how it can help you also?