Great Development Work On PF HelpDesk V11.3

Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook, the kalmstrom.com incident management add-on that may in fact be installed in any Outlook folder, will soon come in a new version. In PF HelpDesk 11.3 we have removed the folder homepage, above all to make PF HelpDesk compatible with Office 365. The combination of Office 365 and PF HelpDesk doesn´t really offer any specific featuers except the ones given by the products one by one, but in the future we plan to make more elaborate use of Office 365 specifically.

In earlier versions of PF HelpDesk the folder homepage was used for the different views, the search capability and the new ticket button. Now our developers have had to find new ways to handle that, and I must congratulate our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza to his elegant solution of the problem. In the Outlook ribbon he added a new search dialog, a gallery control that lets you switch between the PF HelpDesk custom views very easily and a "New ticket" button. For Outlook 2003, which we still support but which has no ribbon, he instead added this functionality to the right hand toolbar. This way you have all the PF HelpDesk buttons at the same place, and when I tried the Beta I found PF HelpDesk V11.3 even easier to work with than before.

The support for Office 365 is of course an important reason why we update PF HelpDesk so soon again, but there are also some new features. One of them is developed to help users avoid the conflict message when two people work at the same ticket. In version 11.3 the second person will get a warning and can just use the ticket in read-only mode. Another improvement is the option to not include attachments in the e-mails to callers sent from the ticket.

When we no longer use the folder homepage it was also possible to remove the dependency on Outlook View Control. This is an old technology that we think Microsoft might stop supporting, so it feels good to not depend on it anymore. Furthermore users had problems sometimes when OVC was not loaded properly.

I hope to very soon come back and tell you that PF HelpDesk V11.3 is released for all.