Outlook Task Management Tool Updated

Kanban Task Manager is the kalmstrom.com application for project and task management inside Outlook. It was released as late as in June, but today we have published an update to correct a few mistakes that were not discovered during the pre-release testing.

Complex environment
The kalmstrom.com products are thoroughly tested before they are released, but they work in a complex environment with a nearly unlimited number of variables. We are therefore grateful for reports from users and evaluators, who have found problems not yet discovered by the kalmstrom.com team.

Quick updates
When Kanban Task Manager was published and many downloaded and tried it some issues occurred for few of the evaluators. These errors are now fixed, and we can release a new version. We cannot guarantee that this version has no bugs at all – what software developer could? – but we can promise that we will solve serious issues with highest priority. Furthermore we have begun using Kanban Task Manager for our own project management, which of course means that we are constantly testing the product.

Empty dropdowns issue solved
Some evaluators reported that their Kanban Task Manager dropdowns in the Outlook tasks were not visible or were empty and did not show the Project, Phase and Responsible even though these values were present in the settings. This was a problem that made the application useless, so the users who reported it quickly got a fix for it. It was a connection issue, and now it is solved for all.

Excel reports works fine also with Outlook 2003
We opted for Excel reports in our new project management application, instead of using our old statistics tool that requires installation of Office Web Components. Excel really gives many possibilities for creating reports, but in the first version of Kanban Task Manager the reports did not work well for Outlook 2003 users. Now these problems are solved also. Kanban Task Manager does not only support modern Outlook versions like Office 365 Outlook and both versions of Outlook 2010 but is also backwards compatible to Outook 2003. Then the Excel report should also support back to 2003, of course.

Enhancements
Several enhancements have also been made in the first update of Kanban Task Manager: The most important one is that the application now also works with SharePoint workflows. There are also some other, smaller things:

• Only changed settings will be saved when the settings are saved, for a quicker process
• A screen is added to show that the settings are loaded after the Configure button has been pressed
• A waiting image is shown after click on the Synchronize all tasks button. When this button is used everything is updated, so it takes a bit more time than the automatic sync every five minutes when only changed data is synchronized.

You are all welcome to try Kanban Task Manager. It is a new product, and we will continue developing it and add more features. As Kanban Task Manager is licensed with a subscription model, upgrades are always free, so you will get all of the improvements if you start a subscription now.