kalmstrom.com Welcomes Graphic Designer

The kalmstrom.com team has a new member, graphic designer Jitendra Joshi, and today I am happy to present him to you. Jitendra has been with us for some weeks now, and we have all enjoyed working with him. He has not yet learned all our products, but he is responsive to our suggestions and understands how to implement our requirements into good design.

Currently Jitendra is cooperating with Alena and Jayant on redesign and usability analyze of HelpDesk OSP, and eventually all our products will have the same treatment. We hope for improvements of the website too, first a new and more interesting background. Jitendra will also help us with quick mockups for development suggestions, as on the Calendar Browser Plans page, so that both team members and sponsors more easily can understand how new features will look and work.

Jitendra's greatest interest is design and art, and he likes to do pencil sketches. You can see his self portrait above, and here below is another drawing from his varied portfolio. Cute, isn't it? If you wish to see a photo of Jitendra and read some more about him, welcome to the About us page!

Buyers All Over The World Want Name Days In Their Default iOS Calendar

One week ago iNameDays, the first iOS app from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, was published at the iTunes App Store. iNameDays adds name days to the default iOS calendar, not to a separate calendar as other apps do.

iTunes gives us sales reports for iNameDays each day, and most interesting is the information about what countries the buyers come from. It turns out that we in one week have sold iNameDays to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch users in no less than 19 countries: Brazil, China, Finland, Germany, Greece, Hungary, Italy, Israel, Japan, Mexico, Netherlands, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland and USA. News travel fast these days!

kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Celebrates Two Years In The Team

kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Jayant Rimza has today been with us for two years, so the kalmstrom.com team once again has reason to celebrate - just like all Members who benefit from Jayant's competence. The photo above was taken at his wedding this last autumn, when Peter visited India.

When Jayant started working for kalmstrom.com on 16 February 2009 we knew that he had the education and experience we were looking for, but we did not know if he also had the intelligence and creativity we need. There is no good way to test that in advance. Therefore we were happy when Jayant suggested a very smart solution for the TimeCard Export to Excel feature when he had been with us for only a short time.

Jayant continued to show his ingenuity, and when our former Lead Developer Bahrur Ipham left us in April 2010 it was a natural thing that Jayant should take over his role. As Lead Developer you don't only have to be a good programmer but also be able to direct the rest of the team, cooperate more closely with Peter, Sigge and me and over all take on a more extended responsibility. Jayant has managed this in an excellent way.

Today Jayant gets part of our revenues and has become like a partner and friend. We appreciate his work and dedication, and so do our Members. We notice that from all good ratings he get in support chats. "Patient and professional. Always a pleasure to work with", is just one example from all the positive comments. I agree!

iNameDays published at App Store

Today the kalmstrom.com team celebrates that the iOS app iNameDays was published at the iTunes App Store. We are happy that our little app was accepted at once and hope that many will find it useful. With iNameDays you get the name days in your default iOS calendar, where you have your other calendar info. There are several other apps that can give you name days in a separate calendar, but as far as we know  iNameDays is the only one one the market that uses the default one.

Everyone can afford iNameDays, because the cost is very low, 0, 79 EUR or 0,99 USD, and you may pay in many different currencies. In the image we show the price in Swedish crowns, and for Swedish users of iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch we also offer Swedish week numbers. Week numbers are often used for business planning in Sweden, so we think many will appreciate this addition to their smart phone calendar.

iNameDays was developed in co-operation with our partner Softage.ru, and developer Alexander Songolov did a great job. Our QA Engineer Alena Prokudina managed the difficult task of writing specifications and coordinating the work, and graphic artist Iuliana Urechi helped us with the design and transformed our ideas into something better.

The co-operation with Softage will continue, and we are now working on a SharePoint Task Editor for iOS. More about that one in a later blog ...

The Importance Of Design - Which kalmstrom.com Application?

Design is a matter of great importance that we feel we have neglected too long. A good design is not only nice to look at. Above all we need design skills to enhance the function of our products and make them easier to understand and work with. Now kalmstrom.com has found a good graphic artist who wants to work with our products. I will tell you more about Jitendra later, but today I will show you the figure above, that will be used for one of our products. Guess which one?

If you know our software and look not only at the distributed figures but also at the icon in the middle, you will probably find the answer: HelpDesk OSP,  the software that connects Outlook and SharePoint/Office Live. I think the figure is a striking symbol for co-operation on support questions that reach the organization via Outlook and are handled by people that might be spread all over the world ‒ like the kalmstrom.com team!

HelpDesk OSP may of course be used for anything you wish to publish to a SharePoint site via Outlook, like job applications, internal messages or suggestions on different topics. However, most of our Community Members acquire the application to handle their support cases in a more efficient way, even if they later make use of it for other things also.

Welcome to the HelpDesk OSP Plans page if you wish to see the screen where the figure above is used and learn more about what will happen to this issue tracking product in the future. We look forward to making it even better!