kalmstrom.com Wishes A Peaceful and Prosperous New Year!

The year is coming to its end, and I look back to what I wrote when 2010 was new. I talked about the release of PF HelpDesk V11, about our big hopes for kalmstrom.com Community and about Outlook 2010, which I then tested in a Beta version. It feels so long ago!

PF HelpDesk V11 is now in common use and we even have version 11.1. It works well - which does not mean that we don't have a lot of plans for enhancements! The most important one is the addition of the SQL Azure database alternative, which will come in the beginning of 2011.

Many old and new customers have shown us the confidence of joining kalmstrom.com Community, and that has given not only the Members but also the team a new security. It means that we can take kalmstrom.com to a higher level, a work which has already begun and which inspired me when I chose the image for this blog post.

Update to support of Office 2010 went smoothly for all products but our resource booking tool Calendar Browser. We had hoped for a release of version 7 in December, but unfortunately we did not manage that. It will come after the holidays in the beginning of January instead, and for many of you maybe that does not make a big difference.

During 2011 we hope to engage more employees and also extend our partner cooperation, all to improve the current products and to develop new ones. For the new applications we will especially plan for use with iPhone and other smart phones.

The kalmstrom.com team thank all Community Members for a good relationship during 2010. We are grateful that you help us meet the coming year with confidence and high expectations. Let us hope for a peaceful development in the world and for the same good spirit among it's leaders as we have in the kalmstrom.com team and Community.

Goodbye Calendar Browser V6

It is no longer possible to download Calendar Browser V6.1 from the kalmstrom.com website. As version 7 of our resource booking application requiered an extensive rebuilt, the documentation has to be renewed and the website info changed. We will do that during the quiet days after the Christmas celebrations, and then we hope to release Calendar Browser V7 during the first weeks of January.

I am sorry if this causes you any inconvenience. Please contact me at sales@kalmstrom.com if are a Community Member and need a setup of Calendar Browser V6.1. If you want to evaluate Calendar Browser, please be patient and come back in January to try the latest version instead!

Merry Christmas!

Maybe you remember that Peter came home from warm India to a Swedish snowstorm? It has continued, even if there have been beautiful days like in the photo in between.

This year the snow begun falling early in Sweden, and today the whole country is covered by a white, soft quilt. This is not something we are used to in the southern part of the country, and it is also colder than normal in December ‒ between 10 and 20 degrees centigrade below zero.

Sigge and I have left Spain to spend Christmas with Peter and the family. Here most people celebrate on Christmas Eve, when we gather in the afternoon to eat traditional food and give Christmas presents. This means that when many of you celebrate Christmas Day, we usually spend that day resting or taking long walks to get rid of the calories we consumed yesterday!

The kalmstrom.com support will work as usual tomorrow morning, but in the afternoon Sigge will be away. Jayant and Alena can take care of urgent matters via the online chat for a bit longer, though. We have had many calls and visitors to the website this week, just as usual, but I guess Christmas Eve will be a bit quiter.

The kalmstrom.com team wishes you all a great Christmas holiday ‒ or weekend, if you don't celebrate Christmas!

Watch The First Calendar Browser V7 Demo!

Now it is only a matter of days before version 7 of our resource booking application for Outlook is released. The Calendar Browser documentation is being updated while the testing continues, and as you see from the video demonstration above we now have a functioning product. Just some smaller adjustments have to be made before we can give Calendar Browser V7 to all Members who need a booking system that works with Office 2010.

Welcome to have a look at the demo! I think you can see just from this short video that it will be a joy to book resources with the new Calendar Browser.

kalmstrom.com Gives Support To Evaluators

"We would like to use your product, but I have a problem with the configuration. Can you help me?"

In spite of our efforts to make the kalmstrom.com applications easy to set up, this question from an evaluator is not unusual. The answer is YES. The kalmstrom.com team gives support not only to sbuscribers but also to evaluators.

For the kalmstrom.com team it has always been a natural thing to give support also to evaluators. If people take the time and effort to try our products, we should to our best to assist them. From the surprised and grateful reactions we get, we have understood that it is not always so.

Extensive documentation
The kalmstrom.com products are abundantly documented. This is essential for giving evaluators and users a good understanding on how our product works and for helping them to get the most out of it.

However, when you are new to an application and its documentation it might be difficult to find exactly the kind of info you need in FAQ, manual or video demonstrations. In those cases you are very welcome to contact the support! We can help you find the info or solve your issue.

Support e-mail
Our support e-mail is support@kalmstrom.com, and we can often answer within hours. We use HelpDesk OSP to convert the e-mails to tickets in SharePoint, so using e-mail has the advantage that your case can easily be discussed and commented by the whole team.

Online chat
The online chat is popular and gives you immediate contact with a technician. (Or with me if you select the Sales department.) It is also used when a remote session is needed to solve the problem. We get transcripts of all chats, and they can be shared among team members if needed.

Praise for the kalmstrom.com support
The kalmstrom.com Support has been highly praised. As one evaluator expressed it: "You have the answers I need when I need them and deliver them professionally and with a smile that comes across in your chat! :)" We will always do our best to live up to these words.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Calendar Browser V7 Released Soon

We hear that users of our resource booking tool for Outlook are waiting eagerly for the new version, and I can now tell you that development of Calendar Browser V7 has entered the testing phase. The icons in the Outlook ribbon have been updated too, and you can see the result here above. The buttons are nice and well integrated, aren't they? I think it looks as if Microsoft put the Calendar Browser buttons there from the beginning!

The icon update has of course not been allowed to delay the release. Other issues have taken care of that quite well! Limitations in Outlook 2010 have been a challenge for our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza. As the ingenious developer he is he has found ways around them, so that Calendar Browser still can work as intended and be possible to enhance in the future. We hope to be able to publish version 7 before Christmas, with at least most of the documentation also updated.

Three Generations In kalmstrom.com

In October Sigge and I had a dear visitor to our home in southern Spain. Our grandson Oliver ‒ Peter's eldest ‒ had holidays from school and came to see us. We had a nice time together and also took the opportunity to introduce Oliver to part of our work. During the week Oliver spent with us he learned and took over some of our administrative tasks, and now he has been managing them for well over a month. With a good result!

We of course knew that Oliver, being Peter's son, is very used to handling a computer. He had never before used a SharePoint intranet, but he promptly understood how it worked. We have also found that he is quick but yet careful, so that we can trust that his tasks are being performed correctly.

Oliver is still a student, but we hope he will make a great future for himself. It does not have to be within kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, but for now it feels good to have included the third generation in the family business! The image shows Sigge and Oliver while hiking by the Straits of Gibraltar.

NameDays For 2010 + 2011 Released

The kalmstrom.com team is happy to announce that the earlier problems with updating the iPhone calendar with new name days is solved. Today we have therefore released new NameDays files, which give you name days in your calendar for both 2010 and 2011. Note that the ics paths have changed, so if you already have subscribed you need to do so again.

Use NameDays with an Outlook or Mac OSX calendar or with iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch. You may also add NameDays to the Google Calendar for use in your Android enabled device.

By the end of 2011 we will change the NameDays files so that they contain name days for 2011 and 2012 instead. NameDays is a free product, and we don't request anything from you for using it. But you are of course most welcome to try our other products as well ‒ and to spread the word about them!