2011 - An Eventful kalmstrom.com Year

The year 2011 was a year full of action when it comes to world politics, and at the end of the year we have many worries and unanswered questions. You know them as well as I do, so here I will instead concentrate on kalmstrom.com. That makes it possible for me to write a happier blog!

120 blog posts in 2011
One year is a long time in the IT business, where changes happen quickly and we hear news nearly every day. In 2011 I wrote 119 blog articles, except this one, and most of them were about kalmstrom.com events. If you want more info about something I mention here, just use the Search function to the left to find the post or posts.

New staff
In the beginning of 2011 several new people joined the team, and this has had ‒ and will have ‒ a strong impact on the kalmstrom.com software. Most visible has of course been the work of graphic designer Jitendra Joshi, but our three new developers has contributed just as much.

Silver Competencies
One of the new developers, Vijayant Rimza, has tested our products for a Microsoft Silver Partnership. They passed the tests, and as we also fulfilled the other qualifications we could gain no less than two Silver Competencies, first Independent Software Vendor and then Business Intelligence. A warm thank you from the whole team to the Community Members who helped us with references for Microsoft. The Silver competencies, together with Peter’s personal Microsoft certifications, make kalmstrom.com Business Solutions stand out on the market, and we have already noticed an increased interest for our Office applications.

Product updates
All kalmstrom.com products have been updated, and most of them several times. HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint and the resource booking application Calendar Browser have new major version numbers, V3 and V7, and PF HelpDesk has reached both 11.2 and 11.3. kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, The kalmstrom.com tool for time reporting from within the Outlook calendar had version 4.3 the whole year, but in January 2012 we plan to release kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, TimeCard V4.4 with new, interesting features.

iOS apps
During 2011 kalmstrom.com Business Solutions also published two apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod: iNameDays gives you name days in the standard calendar, and with ShareTask you get the SharePoint tasks into your handheld and can manage them with a finger.

Extended compatibility
When Microsoft introduces new platforms the kalmstrom.com developers are usually quick in making our products compatible. In 2011 we extended our product support to Office 365, and the Windows Azure database was added as a third alternative for our Outlook issue tracking tool PF HelpDesk. We also started the development of a new application, HelpDesk OSP Azure, which we first will use for the kalmstrom.com support before we start marketing it.

New Partner
In May kalmstrom.com begun cooperating with a new partner, and for the first time ever we agreed to market a product that is not our own: PamFax. Peter was involved in the development of the first version of this convenient tool for online faxing when he was product manager at Skype, though, and we also use it ourselves. I translated the application into Swedish, and our new Sales and Relations Officer, Siret Toots, made the Estonian translation.

More extensive Tips section
The Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website is popular, and during the year we have added a number of new articles. By the end of 2011 Peter made a series of demonstrations for various useful tricks with Excel and SharePoint.

Now we look forward to the new year with great confidence. There is no crisis in kalmstrom.com! I will come back with a blog post about future development next week, and until then I wish all blog readers a great New Years Eve!

Evening Enjoyments For The kalmstrom.com Team

Peter’s and Siret's week with the kalmstrom.com team in Indore has nearly come to an end. I have earlier told you about their excursion to Mandu and their work and studies during the other days. This article will be about the evenings.

Indian cooking
The kalmstrom.com Sales and Relations Officer loves to cook, so she was delighted when she was invited to the home of Lead Developer Jayant and Developer Vijayant, and she was allowed to take part in the dinner preparations. Here is Siret's story:

"Last night I was given a cooking lesson with an Indian Mama in her kitchen. Is there anything more awesome? We started with a curry, and the next step was making wheat bread and corn bread. From a dough of flour, water and just a pinch of salt we rolled little balls which were
flattened and fried on upside turned pans. Then just a quick turn in the open flame to give it color and that’s it!


Mrs. Rimza had already stuffed okra with dried mango and chili paste, so all we had to do was to fry them in oil. Masala Chicken was to be the last recipe. The food was fragrant, colorful and beyond tasty! I have bought with me all the necessary spices, and now I am looking forward to returning to my own kitchen to try things out.
I am so grateful to Jayant's and Vijayant's mother and to Jayant's wife for opening their kitchen to me!"



Going to the movies
One evening the whole group went to see Mission Impossible 4. It was a good movie to see with the team, because half of it was filmed in nearby Mumbai and the bad guy was Swedish! (The company owners, Peter, Sigge and I, are Swedish too.)

Fast food was served in the movie theatre, and Siret had a three year old eating a big hamburger right above her! She got her share of it, but apart from that she said it was all fun.

Farewell dinner
The last evening Peter took Siret and the Indore team members to a dinner. They went to a newly opened restaurant and were very well taken care of by the staff there.

This visit to Indore has been a wonderful experience to Peter and Siret, and they have been fantastically well received by the Indore team members. But it has also been very intense, so now they will take a short vacation to rest before they return to the Swedish winter.

Continuous Studies Crucial To kalmstrom.com Developers

When you work in a business that changes as fast as ours, you have to be eager to learn new things to keep up. The Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team are all highly educated and intelligent, but they need some help from the expert, our CEO Peter, to learn the most advanced parts of new IT technology. Therefore he takes the opportunity to lecture on subjects important to the future development of the kalmstrom.com Office add-ons now that he is visiting the team in Indore.


A joy for both parties
These teaching sessions have not only been useful but also a great joy for everyone. “I am so proud of my team”, said Peter yesterday evening. “I really loved teaching them today!”

That is a very good testimonial coming from Peter. He is a Microsoft certified Trainer, and in addition to his work as CEO and program designer at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions he lectures on Sweden’s most advanced IT courses. Therefore he is used to ‒ and spoiled with! ‒ having clever pupils.

Lead Developer Jayant counters with: “Peter is a great teacher. Today we learned many new things about the endless possibilities of SharePoint. I am looking forward for tomorrow’s class.”  In the image above you can also see the developers Kanak, Sunil and Vijayant. I asked Siret for a photo, so she slipped into the conference room to take some for me. But the team was disturbed an "kicked" her out again after a few shots. They wanted to continue the studies in peace!

SharePoint expansion
Yesterday Peter was talking about general SharePoint-functionality, tips and tricks as well as development opportunities for kalmstrom.com. Today he will go into some detail on how to start expanding our range of SharePoint products.

Here are Peter's own words:
"So far we have mainly done client-side applications, but we intend to provide also server-side features and mobile applications that use the new SharePoint 2010 tools. All of our applications rely on a shared information store. Usually that is a network file share with a database in Access or SQL, but we hope to add SharePoint as an alternate choice for all of our applications shortly.

Thus Members of kalmstrom.com Community will be able to send their time reporting data directly to a SharePoint list from TimeCard and store meeting information in multiple calendar lists from Calendar Browser. We also hope to merge the features of our two issue tracking applications, HelpDesk OSP and PF HelpDesk by adding more server-side functionality to HelpDesk OSP. "

Saturday studies
When Peter is not visiting the team still has common studies. Every other Saturday is working day in India, but the kalmstrom.com team normally use these days for studies. They meet at the office and go through a program Peter has prepared for them, and in the evening they often have dinner together, when also the non-technical staff join in.

These Saturdays are much appreciated by the team, and in the end all users of the kalmstrom.com software will benefit from them. A knowledgeable team that work well together can do much to improve the products, and Peter welcomes all suggestions from his team and listens carefully to their opinions. When everyone pulls in the right direction it will show in the result!

Beautiful Trip To Historical Mandu Brings The kalmstrom.com Team Together

On the second day of Peter’s and Siret’s visit to Indore, the Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team took them to the historical town of Mandu. It was founded in the 10th century and is full of interesting monuments.  The town is beautifully situated among lush hills around 100 kilometers from Indore, and the team had hired their own bus to take them there.

Peter:
"I was impressed by the well-preserved castle from the 15th century. It had indoor plumming, air-conditioning, a theatre and lots of other modern facilities. The only problem seems to have been that there were too many blondes in the harem, but they solved that by adding a lake with henna in the water. I tried to push Siret into it, to see if it still worked, but she was surrounded by admirers who did not allow it."

Above kalmstrom.com CEO Peter with his Indore team, all young and very talented people. From the left Vijayant (Developer), Vipul (Office Manager), Peter, Jitendra (Graphic Designer), Sunil (Developer), Jayant (Lead Developer), Kanak (Developer) and Neha (QA Engineer).

Siret:
"There is India you see as a tourist and then there is India you see when you are traveling with some local friends. Peter Kalmström and I just returned to our hotel in Indore after spending an amazing day in Mandu. Off the beaten track, exquisite architecture, fascinating local life and good food. Thank you Team for taking us there!”

Two Executives. I doubt it is history or architecture Peter and Jayant are discussing here below. Rather some new, fascinating kalmstrom.com product!

The photos from Mandu are taken by Siret, Jayant and Jitendra. Thanks for sharing them!

kalmstrom.com CEO Visits New kalmstrom.com Office In Indore, India

Today I can show you some photos from the new kalmstrom.com office in India. The team had outgrown the old premises, so it felt great when they could move into new ones last week. All is not in order yet, of course, but the internet connection and the new furniture is in place, and there is a temporary sign on the door and a welcoming painting on the marble floor. The office is situated on the top floor of this house in Indore, and it has a nice, shady balcony with a view.

kalmstrom.com CEO Peter arrived in Indore Sunday, and Lead Developer Jayant Rimza and Office Manager Vipul Dindulkar took him to the office for a first look.

Peter tried the new desks and chairs and was happy that the white board was in place in the conference room for his lectures later this week.

As the kalmstrom.com team works in two time zones, the two
clocks are important pieces of equipment. Since users of the kalmstrom.com software are found all over the world, we would actually need more clocks!

I sincerely hope our Indian team members will enjoy their office and find it a stimulating work place. They are worth it!

Great People At The Great Wall

I have greetings from kalmstrom.com CEO Peter and Sales and Relations Manager Siret Toots. They have now arrived in Indore and met the Indian Members of the kalmstrom.com team, but before that they made a short stop in Beijing. None of them has been there before, and they found the city innovative, fun and exciting and would very much like to go back there. Maybe they can find a reason connected with the kalmstrom.com Office add-ons?

The photos are taken at the Great Wall, and Siret tells about the image above:
“Here we are by the Chairman Mao’s stone declaring the climbers as heroes. Half way up we knew what he meant! The steps are murdering, uneven and high, but the views take your breath away! (It might have been the climb also). It was freezing cold, minus seven centigrees, but that helped. I cannot imagine climbing the wall behind us in +30.”

The Great Wall of China is a series of fortifications, originally built to protect the northern borders. The first ones were built as early as in the 5th century BC, and they have been maintained ever since.

kalmstrom.com's First Year On Facebook

Yesterday it was one year since I created a page for kalmstrom.com Community on Facebook. It was something “everyone” did, but I actually did not know much about Facebook and had not used it earlier. Today it is interesting to see that the kalmstrom.com Community page fills an important function even though it has not developed in the direction I envisaged.

Expectations on exchange of ideas 
When I created the Facebook page I hoped it would be a place for discussions among Members of kalmstrom.com Community. We had then talked for a rather long time about creating a forum for users of the kalmstrom.com Office applications, but we never found the time for really doing it. Maybe the Facebook page could be something similar? I never dreamed about thousands of “fans”, but I hoped to get a reasonably steady group of contributors.



Not the Forum I had thought
I had pictured a page where Community Members and other interested parties would comment our Outlook add-ons, ask questions about features and usage and give suggestions on enhancements. But those discussions have stayed in support e-mails and online chats, between the kalmstrom.com staff and the individual Members. It has not at all found its way to the Facebook Community page.

More than the foreseen fan category
After only a few weeks the new kalmstrom.com Community page had 30 Facebook fans. They were of course the team members, and a number of enthusiastic Community Members liked the page at once. This was as expected, as well as the users who dropped in later. But we were also delighted to see that so many of our friends and relatives wanted to follow the doings of kalmstrom.com via Facebook. This was a nice surprise, because we work in a specialized niche and not everyone can understand what we really do.

Diversified group
Today the kalmstrom.com Facebook page has more than 50 fans, and they are a mixed company. One dominant group is of course users of our products, and another one is friends and relations to both the Swedish and the Indian team members. Then there are also a few people we don’t know, with whom we have had no other contact.

The fans are spread over the world, just like the kalmstrom.com software. 16 comes from Sweden, 14 from India and 10 from the US. We have also two fans in Russia and Malaysia and one in each of the countries Netherlands, Moldova, Finland, Poland, UK, Switzerland, Australia, Canada, Estonia and Norway.

A different kind of meeting place
The kalmstrom.com Facebook fans like our entries and comment on them now and then in a few words, but they never actually bring something new into the discussion. It seems that following the kalmstrom.com page instead has been a convenient way to get information about what happens to the products and the team members and to learn when a new blog post is published and what it is about. Articles are often commented on at our Facebook page instead of here in the blog itself.

Keeping the Facebook page up to date is a quick and enjoyable task, and even though it did not turn out to be like I thought it would, it serves a purpose. We reach more people via Twitter and LinkedIn, but to kalmstrom.com clearly Facebook is the most social of the social media.

Merry Christmas With 16 Year Old Kalmstrom Family Photo

Another year has gone by, and I want to write a new article to wish all blog visitors a Merry Christmas. These Christmas blogs usually get many readers, and the Christmas post from 2009 is actually one of the most read ever. There are still some people reading it every day around the globe!

Peter and Oliver
In the image above you see two members of the kalmstrom.com team ‒ but not as you usually see them. The Santa is our CEO Peter, who is also my son, and on his arm he is holding his first born, Oliver. Today Oliver is 17 years old, and he works part time with administration of trials, purchases and subscriptions of the kalmstrom.com Office applications. If you want to have a present-day look at them both together, please see the Christmas card at the bottom of the kalmstrom.com home page.

At home in Tallstugan
The photo is taken in Peter’s first house, which actually was a big log house. The address was Tallstugan, Simonstorp, Åby, which means “Pine cottage, Simon’s cabin, River village”. Cute address, wasn’t it? The next owner of that house had to accept a street address instead, but by then we had already let Tallstugan live on in the name of our company, the family business behind the brand kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

A snowy cottage in the woods
On Christmas Eve Peter slipped down in the basement, took on the Santa Claus dress and grabbed a lantern and the sack with Christmas presents. Then he went out the back way into the snowy woods that surrounded Tallstugan. There, among pines and firs, he lit his lantern and started to plod through the snow towards the door to the patio. Inside Oliver, and later also his brother Joakim, was keeping watch through the windows. When they saw the lantern and the figure holding it they screamed of a delight that was mixed with a bit of horror. At that time they did not understand that Santa was their father, but as you see Oliver was brave and let Santa hold him ‒ after he had delivered the presents!

Dispersed holiday celebrations
This year Peter is not celebrating Christmas with his children, as he and Siret are on their way to Indore to meet with the Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team. Sigge and I will stay on our island off the Swedish east coast, but Oliver and my mother, the kalmstrom.com Matriarch, will at least celebrate Christmas together.

I wish the users of the kalmstrom.com software and all others who also follow my blog a wonderful Christmas weekend!

Invent The Future While Listening To Customers

Yesterday I saw an article with the provoking title: “Mark Cuban on Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers”. My first reaction was astonishment, because in kalmstrom.com Business Solutions we pride ourselves with ALWAYS listening carefully to our customers.

Listen to complaints but don’t ask about the future
When I read the article I understood what the American business magnate meant, and I realized that the kalmstrom.com CEO Peter had told me the same thing at various occasions, but not in such drastic words: “Yes, we should listen to our customers ‒ or Community Members ‒ and help them solve their problems, but we should not turn to the customers when it comes to decisions about the path for future development. That is my job.”

Peter climbs the trees
In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I saw a metaphore I liked: if a group of workers are building a road through a jungle, the staff must have good equipment and know how to do their job in an efficient way ‒ but someone also has to climb to the tree tops and make sure that the road is built in the right direction. Otherwise it will not be useful to anyone, no matter how smoothly the work on the ground is running. Peter is that person.

Future technologies
As Peter is a software developer the challenge of staying ahead and show the direction means to choose which techniques to use among all the interesting and feature-rich technologies that is constantly released out there, and to build applications that take best possible advantage of them. Maybe the users of the kalmstrom.com software do not even understand what can be done until they have seen it? But Peter can understand it, and that is why he has chosen to make the products compatible with new platforms like Office 365 and Windows Azure, even though most Community Members still don’t even think about transferring to them. When they want to do it, the kalmstrom.com applications they use should be compatible.

New design
Another example on Peter’s capacity of “inventing the future” (as Mark Cuban puts it) is the extensive development work that is currently going on at kalmstrom.com. Our developers Kanak Joshi and Sunil Patel are working full time with the creation of a new KBase application, which we hope to release soon.  The rest of the kalmstrom.com team has also been engaged in their work, because what we learn from this development with new techniques will be used in the future development of our more advanced products.

Welcome with suggestions
This said I want to make it clear that I don’t mean that Community Members are not welcome with suggestions on new features for the products they use. You are! No one knows better than you what needs to be improved for efficient daily use. But Peter and his developers are the ones who can judge how to achieve the goal in the best way and with best conditions for future upgrades.

PF HelpDesk sponsorship
A very good example on how users and developers can cooperate to improve a product is the joined efforts of Community Member Swiss Post and kalmstrom.com. The PF HelpDesk administrator at Swiss Post sent us a list of features they wanted to include in a future version of this kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool. They were willing to sponsor the development, but instead of adding those features to the current version of PF HelpDesk Peter decided to incorporate them in the next version. This version will be totally rebuilt and partly web based, and even if Swiss Post must wait longer for their features they will get them in a product that will keep for many years ahead. This way Peter could listen to customers and still keep focus on the right direction!

New kalmstrom.com Tip: How To Add JavaScript To SharePoint

To help you get the most out of your SharePoint site, Peter Kalmstrom, Microsoft certified SharePoint expert and CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, has published another demo to the kalmstrom.com Tips section.

JavaScript + SharePoint = great possibilities
JavaScript used in a SharePoint site creates a powerful combination. You can put JavaScript in the master page of the site, so that it affects all pages, and you may also make a page layout that affects some pages or only one. With his new demo Peter wants to push those in the right direction who know how to use JavaScript but have not yet tried it with SharePoint. There are a lot of instructions on more advanced details available out there but not so much on how to actually do it in the right way from the beginning.

Hello World dialog
As a simple example Peter shows how to integrate a dialog with the text "Hello World" in a SharePoint 2010 site with the help of JavaScript ‒ and how to make it stay there! The trick is to use the Content Editor web part, which allows you to embed any markup right in the page. If you just add the piece of JavaScript to the HTML code of a page, it will not be saved. Peter also demonstrates how you can test and troubleshoot the JavaScript you have created. Welcome to have a look and try it yourself!

Connect Outlook to your SharePoint site
To get the most out of your SharePoint site you should also connect Outlook to it. HelpDesk OSP is a kalmstrom.com Outlook add-on that converts incoming e-mails to items in any SharePoint list. With HelpDesk OSP you may also publish to SharePoint directly from Outlook. This application helps you track, share and distribute issues also within a group that is geographically spread.  HelpDesk OSP is used by many Members of kalmstrom.com Community, and we also utilize it ourselves for the kalmstrom.com support e-mails. 

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Auto Upgrades Or Not? Microsoft IE Decision And Apple Blunder Inspires Discussion In The kalmstrom.com Team

Users who stick to old versions are not popular among developers, who struggle to create new and better versions and of course want people to take advantage of what they have achieved. At the same time I can understand users who hesitate to upgrade. You know what you have, right? And as long as it works …

Microsoft introduces automatic upgrades for Internet Explorer
Because of this conflict between a company’s urge to spread the latest versions and some users’ sluggishness when it comes to upgrading, it was with great interest that we read Microsoft’s announcement last week. The giant has done what the kalmstrom.com team has discussed many times but not yet applied ‒ introduced an auto-update system, originally designed for security patches. Now Microsoft has decided to utilize that system to “force” users to upgrade to the latest version of Internet Explorer compatible with the operating system.

Apple locks users out of App Store
Another, and more harsh way to make users upgrade is to simple lock them out. That is what Apple has done with users of iOS 3.1.3. Since the update of 16 December these users have not been able to update existing apps, download new ones, rate apps, or view screenshots in App store. In this case I beleive it is unintentional from Apples side, though.

Auto-upgrade for the kalmstrom.com applications?
Other browsers, like Firefox and Google Chrome, already have the auto-upgrading, so Microsoft’s decision is not revolutionary news in any way. However, that and Apple's blunder once again brought up the discussion in the kalmstrom.com team. Should we introduce automatic upgrades for our Outlook add-ons? Members of kalmstrom.com Community have free upgrades, and most of them upgrade quickly when a new version is released. Some wait until there is a problem, though, and we would like to find a way to help them avoid the irritation and disturbance that comes with all software errors.

Companies turn off automatic upgrades?
Microsoft’s automatic upgrade is turned on by default in new PCs, but in many companies they turn it off since they prefer to have more control over the upgrade process. This possibility is of course also open with the Internet Explorer upgrade on Windows machines. However, if kalmstrom.com Business Solutions would spend time on introducing auto-upgrades maybe it would still not be that much used??

Easy upgrades
The result of our discussion was this time the same as before ‒ for now we will not introduce auto upgrades but concentrate on making the upgrades of our products as easy as possible. We know we have already come a long way in that respect. “It was the smoothest upgrade I ever experienced from any software. Ran the install and 5 minutes later we were back up and running, “ says René Le Blanc, IT Manager at Gowlings, a Member of kalmstrom.com Community and user of PF HelpDesk, the kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool for Outlook.

However, we will continue making improvements on both the server and the client side. We already supply MSI installers for Community Members with many client users, and the kalsmtrom.com developers always look for ways to enhance the upgrade experience for the users. That way we hope to persuade all users to upgrade willingly and voluntarily!

kalmstrom.com Welcomes New Office Manager

Today I am happy to introduce a new member of the kalmstrom.com team, our Office Manager Vipul Dindulkar, who has been with us for a month now.

The proper education
Vipul has worked as an office administrator for five years, and during this time he also completed his Master of Business Administration, studying in his free time. Before that Vipul had achieved a degree of Bachelor of Computer Science degree, so he has just the right background for his new position with kalmstrom.com.

A new office for the Indian staff
We have already seen good example on Vipul’s energy and drive. When he joined the team a month ago his most urgent task was to find us a new office in Indore, because we had outgrown the old one. Vipul went around looking, photographing and negotiating, and everything was reported back to us in tidy Excel lists and images. We decided on a good office that the Indore team members liked, and Vipul arranged to have it renovated and furnished in a very short time.

Increased efficiency
Now Vipul will start on more ordinary office tasks. He will take care of the administration for our Indian office, where most of the actual development and testing of the kalmstrom.com software takes place, and some of the general kalmstrom.com administrative tasks will also be his responsibility. As Vipul has a background in computer science, he can also assist in more technical matters when needed, and that is important to us.

We hope that Vipul will enjoy working in the kalmstrom.com team, and I am sure he will be a good help in making the administration efficient.

New Microsoft Recognition For kalmstrom.com CEO

A month ago I wrote a blog post about the kalmstrom.com CEO Peter Kalmstrom, and I called him a true renaissance man because of his many talents - Outlook, Excel and SharePoint specialist, innovative developer and a good teacher. Now Microsoft has also given him recognition, as Peter has earned the Microsoft Certified Trainer certificate.

Peter allowed to teach for Microsoft Certifications
According to Microsoft definitions “Microsoft Certified Trainers (MCTs) are the premier technical and instructional experts on Microsoft technologies, and are the only individuals authorized to deliver training for Microsoft Certification.” Peter has no less than fifteen such certifications in his expert fields, Outlook, Excel and SharePoint, and as he also has good teaching skills he is really well equipped to instruct others.

Congratulations, Peter!
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions recently earned its second Microsoft Silver Competency, this time for excellent insight in Business Intelligence procedures and products. This achievement is the result of a team work, and all members of the kalmstrom.com team can and shall share the glory. In contrast the new Trainer recognition is Peter’s accomplishment only. The rest of us can only applaud and congratulate him!

How To Embed A YouTube Video In A SharePoint Site

Our CEO, Peter Kalmstrom continues to share his vast knowledge of SharePoint with useful tips published on the kalmstrom.com website. Now he has released a demonstration on how to embed a video from YouTube into a SharePoint site.

All from guidelines to entertainment
Video demonstrations like the one above can be very useful to have on a SharePoint intranet, for instructions, lectures, information or maybe just for fun! A video from the latest office party will be a popular addition to the site, and it will enhance the good spirits within the group.

Not as easy as you might think
To embed a YouTube video in SharePoint one would think that you only have to add the embed code from YouTube into the SharePoint HTML, just like you do when you embed it in another website. And if you do so it looks very good at first ‒ but only until you save. Then the video disappears again.

Add a Web Part
To make the video stay also when you have saved the page, you must add a Content Editor Web Part and then add the embed code there. Peter shows you how to do that in a few easy steps. Try it, and you will have yet another way to use your SharePoint site!

kalmstrom.com demos
On the kalmstrom.com website you cannot only find demos in the Tips section. We also use them to present the various kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, and each one of the products has a Demonstrations page with a number of recorded instructions on installation, configuration and usage. The video demonstrations are of course not as easy to update as the manuals, but they are good complements that really show users and evaluators “how to do it”.