kalmstrom.com Products All Get Five Stars On Reopened French Office Marketplace

Microsoft's Office Marketplace is an important marketing channel for the kalmstrom.com products. We get many visitors to the website from Office Marketplace, and those visitors are exactly the people we want to reach. They are often skilled IT professionals who know what they are looking for, and most stay long on our site and study several pages. Many of them also download our products and eventually become Community Members.

Therefore we are happy that the French Office Marketplace now has reopened after being closed for several months. Five of our products are presented there: Calendar Browser, HelpDesk OSP, OLAP Reporting Tool, PF HelpDesk and TimeCard ‒ and they all have highest possible ratings: five stars!

Another SharePoint Certification For kalmstrom.com

Peter, our kalmstrom.com CEO took the Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Administration certification yesterday, so now Peter has 13 Microsoft certifications.

The test had several parts: Designing a SharePoint 2010 Farm Topology, Planning SharePoint 2010 Deployment, Defining a SharePoint 2010 Operations Strategy and Business Continuity and Planning for Search and Business Solutions. Of course Peter managed them all!

Congratulations, Peter, from the whole team. You are an inspiring leader!

ShareTask - Manage Your SharePoint Task List While On The Run

In earlier blogs I have told you about about the re-design of HelpDesk OSP, the kalmstrom.com application that connects SharePoint to Outlook. Today I can present the first image of ShareTask, another great product for SharePoint users. ShareTask connects SharePoint to iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch, so with this app in the smart phone you can work with your SharePoint Tasks while travelling, waiting for the dentist, seeing a boring TV show ‒ you name it.

ShareTask will work with all kinds of SharePoint lists. With ShareTask you may add, edit and delete SharePoint list items directly in your iOS device. You may change item status, add new comments and upload images from the camera or gallery to SharePoint.

HelpDesk OSP users will of course find ShareTask very convenient, but this app is an independent product. It does not require anything more than iOS, SharePoint and an internet connection. We hope many will discover and use this ingenious little app, which gives users an advantage that we so far not have seen on the market.

Update of iNameDays

iNameDays, the app that adds name days to the default iOS calendar, has already been updated. We wanted to give a possibility to click on the flag to select country, and we have also localized the descriptions for several languages. Now, we not only have the English description but separate pages in German, Russian, Spanish and Swedish also.

It is interesting to see how iNameDays has spread over the world. The app was released 9 February, and after just one week it had been sold to 19 countries. After that most sales have gone to these same countries, but some new have been added so that we now count 25 countries. Sweden is number one on the list, I think because of the possibility to also add Swedish week numbers, but we understand that the US also has many users of iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch.

Outlook-SharePoint Publishing and Syncronization

The usability overview and redesign of HelpDesk OSP is finished. Now the kalmstrom.com developers have begun implementing the improvements, but it will still take some time before we can release the new version. I have however published the new logotype and banners on the website, and here I can also show you how the new HelpDesk OSP buttons will look in the Outlook 2010 banner. Nice aren't they?

HelpDesk OSP can be used for anything you wish to publish from Outlook to SharePoint or Office Live ‒ just select a suitable list for it. To make this clearer we have decided to change the captions of the two bigger and most used buttons into "Convert e-mail" and "Blank ticket". The "Convert ticket" button is of course used for e-mail conversion, and data is taken from the e-mail. Use the "Blank ticket" button when data should be filled out manually or taken from the GAL or Contacts.

Both buttons work in two ways: when you click on the button an item will be created in the default SharePoint list, but if you press the arrow all lists used with HelpDesk OSP will be shown. Then you can easily select the right one to publish to.

You may take advantage of your SharePoint site in many different ways. Today I have published a Tip on how to synchronize Outlook calendars, contacts and tasks with SharePoint. It is a quick and simple procedure that may be very useful, but the possibility may be overlooked if you don't know it exists.

New Developer In kalmstrom.com Team

The kalmstrom.com team has a new Member, and I am happy to introduce you to Vijayant Rimza, our new junior developer. After taking his Master of Computer Application exam Vijayant started as trainee with us, and what we saw made us believe that he will eventually be as good as his older brother, our Lead Developer Jayant. Vijayant already has the ambition and the dedication, and he is very intent on improving his skills. Therefore he continues to study in his free time, both English and programming. We give him a warm welcome to the team.

Right now Vijayant is working with the implementation of the new design for HelpDesk OSP, the application for publishing to a SharePoint site via Outlook. His work at kalmstrom.com will be very varied, so it will give him excellent experience and a good opportunity to grow.

Vijayant has a gift that we were not aware of until I asked about his interests for this blog ‒ he paints and does pencil drawings, and very good also! Above you see him looking at one of his comic figures. This means that we suddenly have two artists in the company, even if only graphic designer Jitendra Joshi makes his living from the talent. I wonder how this will affect kalmstrom.com in the future? We surely have a very interesting time ahead of us!

Website Update For kalmstrom.com

     
The redesign of the kalmstrom.com website continues. After the latest update in January I was still not satisfied with neither background nor header, but now we have our own designer so I could easily get help.

Jitendra made some suggestions after my ideas, and we presented them to the rest of the team and also to some other selected people. I wanted to keep a dark background, but many in the group preferred something light. Some wanted grey, some blue and others white.

"Too dark, I get a headache!". "Too light, the actual content does not stand out." "Too dominating, the content disappears." "Boring!" The comments were many and pointed in different directions. I wanted a design that suits all but still looks interesting.

After many rounds of suggestions and discussions all could finally agree on a design which is not boring and not give headaches either. I have now implemented it and feel very satisfied. You can see some suggestions above, but welcome to the kalmstrom.com website to see the winning one. I hope you agree with me that it is good!

kalmstrom.com CEO Gets 12th MS Certification And Second For SharePoint

Today the kalmstrom.com team congratulates Peter, CEO of the company, who has passed his 12th Microsoft Certification and second SharePoint 2010 exam: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring. This exam validates that he has the configuration skills needed to administer a SharePoint 2010 installation.



Of course we already knew that Peter has those skills. He has been administrating our intranet for several years, and he also gives advanced lectures and courses for SharePoint administrators. Still, it feels good that he now also has an exam to prove his knowledge. He will take two more, to have the right to call himself a "SharePoint Master".

SharePoint is a platform for the future. We use both our SharePoint intranet and our issue tracking application HelpDesk OSP extensively. This helps us handle the contacts with Community Members and evaluators in an efficient way, and we can also easily share information within our geographically spread team. HelpDesk OSP is not only used for support cases but also otherwise when we wish to publish from Outlook to SharePoint. For example, when we were looking for new employees this past autumn we let the Outlook add-on automatically direct applications to a special list, where we could easily review them.

Congratulations, Peter! The whole team feel proud, even if Sigge and I probably take some extra pride in you as we are your parents! Who could have imagined this when we bought you your first computer?

kalmstrom.com Selected For Excellent Win7 Development

kalmstrom.com products were selected when CNET wanted to show applications whose developers have been extra skillful in taking advantage of the possibilities that Windows 7 gives them. As there are nearly 3 million developers building on Windows out there, we feel we have the right to be proud!
Around 100 applications were chosen, and only 17 in the group Business Related Software. No less than 3 of those 17 come from kalmstrom.com! Both the Workgroup and the Single version of TimeCard are included, as well as HelpDesk OSP, the kalmstrom.com application that connects Outlook to SharePoint or Office Live. We will do our best to live up to the honor and be in the frontline also in the future.

Calendar Browser V7 Updated - Quicker Loading And Easier Client Install

Today kalmstrom.com has released a new version of Calendar Browser. Many have downloaded Calendar Browser since version 7 was released, and we have had some reports about errors. This is normal, because even if we test thoroughly and Alena is a very good QA it is impossible for us to try all different configuration combinations out there.

One of the complaints was slow loading of Outlook when Calendar Browser Client was installed, and that is fixed now. We have also rectified a conflict and a Unicode issue. Some users found it troublesome that the client had to select folder during the client tool installation, so that is done automatically now. I must agree with them ‒ we should have thought about that from the beginning!

This time we will give all evaluators of version 7 a new chance. Just like Community Members you are welcome to upgrade your installation at the upgrade page. The upgrade will give evaluators another 30 days of trial.