Indian Tragedy Causes Mass Demonstrations Against Gender Violence

The last days of 2012 were days of sorrow for many Indians, after a young girl was cruelly raped and beaten  to death. This tragic crime has affected people over the whole country, and many have taken to the streets to show their grief and rage.

Barbaric gang-rape
On December 16 a female paramedic student was raped and brutally assaulted by six men in New Dehli. She was severely hurt, and a wave of anger and shock at the men's cruelty spread over India. People of all ages and classes gathered in mass demonstrations  in New Dehli and many other places to demand forceful actions from police and authorities.

The rapists are now under arrest, but the protests continue and are not only directed against the criminals. The demonstrants also blame the mentality prevailing in parts of the Indian society for not only this crime but  many others involving violence against women.

International interest
News media all over the world covered the manifestations following the rape. The Swedish news-program "Rapport" reported directly from New Dehli, and the images in this article come from their videos.

We learned that many women in India have to struggle against society for independence and security and that a lot of Indians, both men and women, want to change this situation. These words from kalmstrom.com Office Manager Vipul Dindulkar illustrate the frustration that many Indians feel:

"What happened to that girl was highlighted just because it happened in the capital. Every day more than 400 females are reported being raped in India, and I am sure there are more cases that are not reported. The government has no political will to stop it. Right now the government has to make some tough decisions due to the mass protests, but in a democracy people should not have to go out on the streets to force   amendments in the constitutions."

Black Saturday
After having fought for her life for twelve days the raped girl died in a specialist hospital in Singapore this last Saturday. The day is already called "Black Saturday", and in India it was a day of mourning. People once again went out on the streets, but this time the manifestations were quiet and dignified.

National Day Against Violence
The Asian Centre for Human Rights wants the 29th December to be a "National Day for Protesting Violence Against Women". This day should be a reminder about the need to fight violence against women. "No other incident has either evoked or shocked the conscience of the nation as this particular incident," said  Director Suhas Chakma in a statement, according to several Indian newspapers.

Feeling of solidarity
I communicate with my Indian colleagues on a daily basis, so I followed the events with a special interest. My first reaction was horror and disgust at the men who were able to commit such a terrible crime and an intense compassion for their victim. Today my feelings are mixed, because I also feel proud of all Indians who refuse to accept what has happened. It has been comforting to see so many people united in a feeling of solidarity and fight for a more humane society.

Action already taken
At the kalmstrom.com office in Indore men and women work side by side as friends, and that is how we all want it to continue. The young girl who died last Saturday became a martyr. Her sufferings were not unnoticed but instead gave rise to a movement that I hope will bring something good.

Actually, our developer Anshul Takalkar told me today that in some Indian state's the governments have already changed the legislation and appointed new officers (male and female) to help women. "This situation is a tragedy for us, but it has united India and we are all asking for justice. Now I hope our country will be safer for women."

Kanban Board in SharePoint For Smooth Project Management

Now we have the gold version ready! Are you among the many who have waited for Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint? In that case you don't have to wait any longer, because now this Kanban style project management tool for SharePoint is released, and you are welcome to download and try it.

For dispersed teams
To use Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint you only need a SharePoint site, and therefore the solution is very suitable for geographically dispersed workgroups. The team members can reach their Kanban board from anywhere!

Another benefit of using SharePoint for project and task management is that Kanban boards for several workgroups are easy to reach for managers who supervise them. Please have a look at the introduction video below to get an overview of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint.



Getting rid of the Beta bugs
Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint was released as a Beta in November, and after that not only the kalmstrom.com QA Engineers but also Beta evaluators have reported bugs and suggested enhancements.

Now all the basic features of the new kalmstrom.com SharePoint solution are in place and work smoothly. A warm thank you to all who have shown insterest in our virtual Kanban board and spent time on evaluating the Beta version!

Standard SharePoint lists
Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint is a sandboxed solution that is uploaded to a SharePoint site collection and activated on each site where it should be used.

Standard SharePoint lists are used for the configuration and in the Kanban board, and the tasks are normal SharePoint list items. This means that all who have used SharePoint before will feel at home from the beginning, and the learning period will be very short.

Also the administrator can rely on earlier experience when managing Kanban Task Manager in SharePoint. He or she can handle the lists as usual, and permissions are set just like on any other lists.

Documentation and support
On the Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint download page you can find another video demonstration that shows the installation and configuration of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint. There is also a detailed manual and a slideshow, both downloadable. If you still have questions the kalmstrom.com team is here for you. We give free support to evaluators as well as users, so never hesitate to contact us!

Use with the Outlook version
The SharePoint version of Kanban Task Manager works well with the Outlook version, when SharePoint is selected as sharing option for the Outlook tasks. Then the two Kanban Task Manager versions actually use the same settings and configuration and only the place of the Kanban board is different. Users may even switch between the two versions without problems.

This is how we already use Kanban Task Manager within the kalmstrom.com team, and maybe it would suit your workgroup too?

Free for Community Members
The two versions of Kanban Task Manager are already among our most downloaded applications, and with today's release of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint we look forward to many new users of the kalmstrom.com Kanban boards, both among old and new Community Members.

Is your organization already using another kalmstrom.com product? In that case Kanban Task Manager is free, as Community Members may use as many of our solutions as they wish for just one subscription fee. We are looking forward to hearing from you!

Microsoft Accreditations For Business Intelligence And Cloud Management

Pre-sales Technical Specialist – that is how I can titulate myself after passing two Microsoft assesments in the last days. My best teachers are the kalmstrom.com technicians, who patiently answer my questions and share their knowledge, but I also try to improve on my own, often with the help of Microsoft tutorials.

kalmstrom.com build on Microsoft
As I am selling and marketing the add-ons and applications from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions I need to know a lot about the platforms they take advantage of. In the first place our developers make use of Outlook and SharePoint, but a range of other Microsoft products may also be used with the kalmstrom.com software. I wanted to learn more about some of them, and when I had a few quiet days around the holidays I  seized the opportunity.

Microsoft Sales Excellence Community
In July 2012 Microsoft launched its Partner Sales Skills Excellence program and the Sales Excellence Central web site. The website is a hub for learning and accreditations, in the first place intended for people selling Microsoft's own products. But all Microsoft partners are welcome to follow the courses and do the assesments, and to me this proved to be a good way of learning, and after passing an introductory Sales and Marketing assesment I had many interesting competencies to choose from. This time I took two of them.

Management and Virtualization
My first assessment was in the Pre-Sales Technical program and tested my knowledge about Microsoft's management and virtualization solutions, with emphasis on Office 365, Windows Server 2012 and System Center 2012. I know Office 365 fairly well as we use it within kalmstrom.com, and I also use Hyper-V and virtual machines frequently. It was interesting to learn more about the parts I was not as familiar with.

Business Intelligence
In the second assessment I had to show what I know about using SharePoint and SQL Server for analysis and statistics purposes. During the studies I realized how heavily Microsoft rely on Excel, and I understood better why our CEO and applications architect Peter has decided to use Excel reports in all kalmstrom.com applications. Most of them currently have an OLAP solution, but the Excel reports will be easier to use without giving less information.

Proof of expertise
Besides giving me a better understanding of Microsoft products I meet in my work, the accreditations gave us two more award tiles for the kalmstrom.com About us page. Learning is part of the job description for all members of the kalmstrom.com team, and getting a proof of expertise is just an added bonus.

Festivities In Dark Swedish Midwinter

Today is the shortest day of the year on the northern hemisphere, when  the sun at noon is at its lowest altitude above the horizon. In Sweden this time is filled with festivities intended to ease the darkness and bring light into our lives despite the cold and long winter nights.

The country with the polar night
In the northern part of Sweden, above the polar circle, the sun does not raise above the horizon for several weeks in December and January, and also the rest of Sweden is very dark. The kalmstrom.com office is situated in the southern part of the country, and here we actually had six hours of daylight today. But as the globe angles away from the sun, the rays do not give any warmth and the light is weak.



Winter solstice celebrations
Nowadays the winter solstice occurs on December 21 or 22 each year, but with earlier calendars it has been on both 12 December and 24 December. These days have been celebrated in Sweden since ancient times.

Lucia
In modern time Swedes celebrate Saint Lucia in the morning of 13 December, but when the night before the 13th was really the longest one of the year people feared that supernatural powers were ravaging outside and that it was best to stay awake. Young men who wanted to show their courage went from house to house early in the morning, singing and shouting to keep the dark forces at bay.

Midwinter festival
The holiday we now call Christmas has its origin in the Yule festival on the darkest day of the year and was celebrated long before the Nordic countries were Christianized. The harvest and autumn slaughter were over, and people prepared for the dark and cold winter that lay ahead of them. To make life a bit easier they gathered to feast on the fresh meat.

Christmas celebrations
Today I am sorry to say that we celebrate Christmas much the same way as before, by eating too much. Giving presents is another strong tradition, and the Swedes seem to buy more and more every year.



The Kalmstrom clan had a big gathering a week ago, when Peter's eldest son turned 18. (On the image above kalmstrom.com CEO Peter is dressed as Santa Claus, holding the same son seventeen years ago.) Because of this and the bad weather for travelling, some of us have chosen to have a more quiet Christmas this year. This means that Sigge and I will be at home here in Sweden, and Peter and Siret will be in their home in Spain.

Our Indian colleagues are Hindus and do not celebrate Christmas, but the 25 December is a bank holiday so so they will have a chance to spend a bit more time with their families.. The Swedish team members will be online on and off, so should you get problems or have questions one of us should be able to answer e-mails during the holiday too.

The kalmstrom.com team wishes all Blog readers the best of holidays!

Resource Booking Tool With Support For The Latest Office

Today kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has published version 8 of its popular resouce booking tool for the Outlook calendar. The new version of Calendar Browser supports both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Office 2010 and 2013, and it has Excel reports for the study of passed resource usage.

Book resources in the Outlook calendar
With Calendar Browser the resources within an organization or a company can be booked via the Outlook calendar, so resource booking is not more difficult than adding an appointment to the calendar. This makes Calendar Browser very easy to use, but it is still a powerful tool with many good features, like resource descriptions, search for free resources, ordering of supplies, a bookings overview and Excel reports for analysis and statistics.

64-bit support
Most Members of the kalmstrom.com Community do very well with the 32-bit versions of Office 2010 and 2013, but we have had some requests for 64-bit support. Therefore we are upgrading all our products to support both versions of Office 2010 and Office 2013.

Maybe you don't know what version you have? Don't worry about that. The kalmstrom.com developers have managed to make everything work even if you don't know the version! Calendar Browser will detect it and act accordingly.

Excel reports
Calendar Browser V8 has a new archive and statistics tool. This tool will first archive old Outlook calendar appointments to a database and then generate Excel reports from the data.

A number of default reports are included, and as all the Excel features may be used with these reports they are very easy to modify. Also custom reports can be created, and all the Excel reports, also the modified and custom ones, will be refreshed with new data at the next archiving. Please see the demo below for an introduction to the tool.



Free upgrades
We urge all Community Members to upgrade their Calendar Browser installations. When the central installation is upgraded each client will be prompted to upgrade the client tool – if that has not already been done centrally with the MSI file included in the download. Please refer to the Calendar Browser Revisions page for a full list of the enhancements.

Try it!
Do you have a good system for resource booking in your organization, or maybe you want to try something new? Maybe you like our idea of resource booking in the Outlook calendar?

You are very welcome to download Calendar Browser V8 from the kalmstrom.com website and try it for 30 days without any obligations. The possiblity to create example data for the test makes it quick and smooth to see how Calendar Browser can imnprove the resource booking process in your organization.

Senior Developer New Head Of The kalmstrom.com Support

The kalmstrom.com Support staff is highly praised for patience and good problem solving capacity, and we intend to continue the good work now when another of the kalmstrom.com developers has taken over the responsibility for the support work.

Senior developer head of support
Jitu Patidar has been with kalmstrom.com for nine months, and as he is a senior developer with good earlier experience he has now learned the kalmstrom.com applications so well that he can take over the responsibility for the support management.

That Jitu would help with support e-mails and remote sessions when he knew the products was intended from the start, so when the earlier responsible had to leave us we already had a great developer ready and able to take over the task. After a short introdution period Jitu is now managing his added responsibility with dedication and skill.

Marriage and move
Kanak Joshi, who earlier made sure that all support cases were taken good care of, has left the kalmstrom.com team to marry and move to another town.  Priyanka Kokne, a junior developer, has also moved with her family and therefore had to resign her promising position at kalmstrom.com. We thank both Kanak and Priyanka for their good work and wish them all the best on their new locations.

Replacements
We have known for a while that Kanak and Priyanka would leave us, so we have taken steps to ensure that results and progress will not suffer. We have already hired two new team members, one of whom has already started and another will start next month, but as kalmstrom.com is an ever growing company we are happy to say that we are on the lookout for more talented people with interviews being conducted on weekly basis.
                          
Current support staff
Now most of the kalmstrom.com support services are taken care of by four people:

Jitu supervises the cases, answers e-mails and chats in English and performs remote sessions.

Jayant, our Lead Developer, mostly helps with difficult cases in the background, but he also takes care of remote sessions.

Vipul answers e-mails in English, and Sigge answers in German and Swedish. Sigge can also answer urgent cases in English outside office hours.
                          
Other team members also join in when necessary, because the support is a priority – not only for the sake of the user with a problem but also because engaging in support cases is a good way of understanding how the kalmstrom.com applications can be enhanced,. The kalmstrom.com QA Engineers study the support cases thoroughly.

Support to users and evaluators
A subscription to one of the kalmstrom.com Solutions includes support and free upgrades, and we also give support to evaluators. When people take the time to try one of the kalmstrom.com products, we feel we should make an effort from our side also, to give the best possible chances for a successful trial period.

You are always welcome to the kalmstrom.com Support. Jitu and the team will take good care of you!

Light Therapy In Northern Bus Stops

Sweden is known as the land of the midnight sun, but this time of the year people in the northern part of the country  hardly see the sun at al. To combat problems due to lack of sunlight, the town of Umeå  has installed phototherapy lights in some of their bus stop shelters.

Winter blues
The short days an the lack of light in Sweden wintertime can result in what we call "winter depression". When this disorder affects people who are otherwise mentally healthy they feel tired, weak and low-spirited without any real cause. When they are exposed to specific wavelengths of artificial light, so called light- or phototherapy, these symptoms are often alleviated.

Bus stop shelters – new engergy resource

In Umeå, 400 kilometers north of Stockholm, the energy company decided to do something about the winter depressions, and in a pilot project they have installed phototherapy lamps at 30 of the town's bus stops. The projects is meant to give people an energy boost when they stand in the brightly lit shelter waiting for a bus.

Clean energy
The light in the bus shelters is said to be harmless, with all of the ultraviolet radiation filtered out, and the electricity that powers the lamps comes from renewable sources.

Blinding
I have not been to Umeå myself this year, but I saw in Swedish television that commuters and passers by were quite happy with the extra light in the bus shelters. Drives have complained that the lights are blinding, though, so some of them have been subdued to avoid accidents.

I have also felt the tug of the winter blues, so I welcome this experiment. Maybe the time spent waiting for the bus is too short to give any real benefits, but I think the sheer knowledge that you are getting some extra light can cheer you up a bit when you are feeling low.

kalmstrom.com Application Development In Focus

Application news dominated the kalmstrom.com Blog in November, and as we also got our Application Development Silver Competency last month this is understandable. Applications are what we do!

SharePoint version of Kanban Task Manager
In November we released Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint Beta, and the two articles about this new kalmstrom.com tool for keeping track of projects and tasks in SharePoint had many readers. So far we have very few reports about problems, so we hope to release the finished version soon.

Resource booking in Outlook
Another product that will be released soon is version 8 of Calendar Browser, our application for resource booking inside the Outlook calendar. This is one of  our most mature and popular Outlook add-ons, and the update will make it compatible with both the 32- and the 64-bit versions of Outlook 2010 and 2013. Calendar Browser V8 will also continue to support Outlook 2007 and Office 365 Outlook, and it will have Excel reports for analysis of resource usage.

Folder HelpDesk for Outlook
The kalmstrom.com helpdesk for Outlook and Exchange will come in a new version in the beginning of 2013, and the development work has already begun. In November I wrote two blog posts about this application, one about our general plans for Folder HelpDesk V13 and 14 and one about how Folder HelpDesk can track time spent on a ticket.

Pay for one, use all
The kalmstrom.com applications are licensed with a subscription. Subscribers become Members of the kalmstrom.com Community, and I know our Community Members are looking forward to these enhanced products.  You see, if a Member organization wants to use another kalmstrom.com product besides the one they frst subscribed to, they can do this without any extra costs at all – with support and upgrades included!

Get Super Performance From An Average Laptop

Today I welcome the CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, Peter Kalmstrom, who wants to share with you how he is getting really fast and powerful computers for half the normal cost without too much engineering. As I use one of Peter's ehnhanced machines myself, I can confirm that it works very well.

Super performance at low cost
I travel a lot, so regretfully my computers tend to get banged about quite a bit and need to be replaced often. Thus I don't want to invest a lot, but of course I want – and need! – the utmost in performance. Here is my "recipe":

1. Focus on the screen – how large of a laptop do you want?
2. If you plan to run virtual machines, also check that the processor is powerful enough to handle them and has virtualization features that can be enabled.
3. Buy the cheapest possible computer with the right screen (and processor).
   
4. Take out the hard drive and replace it with a solid-state drive (SSD).
   
5. Take out the RAM and replace it with more RAM.
   
6. Done!

I have tried this several times, and the price tag is less than half compared to a laptop pre-configured with (almost) all of the options I now have. My method does not work if you are a hard-core gamer, though. In that case you need a graphics card with higher performance than you will get in a cheap laptop, and they cannot be replaced like the hard drive and RAM.

Taking out the hard drive and RAM
Earlier the hard drive could often be found buried under the keyboard or motherboard, and to remove it included removing not only dozens of screws but also other parts of the computer.

Nowadays the hard drive is often placed directly under an access panel, just like the RAM, and then you will have no problems. If you can do Lego or assemble IKEA furniture, you can do #4 and #5 too. You will probably find information on how to do it in the laptop manual, and there are also a lot of instructions on the net.

Choosing the right replacements
Selecting the right memory and hard drive might be a bit tricky. Look for the cheapest SSD with transfer speeds of over 500 Mb/s.

My choice
I chose a PC with a 17.3 inch screen in full HD, which is what I really want. It only weighs 3 kgs (which I can handle during my travels) and it has space for two 2.5 inch hard drives and a DVD-player. I then added a primary SSD of 240 GB and a secondary 750 GB Hybrid drive.

Reinstall the OS
After changing the hard-drive you need to re-install the operating system which is not so easy, but if you have read this far you probably know how to do it! Windows 8 installs in 10 mins on the SSD.

I hope you have found my tip useful. If you want to see more, please have a look at the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website. There you can find tips and tricks like this one and tutorials on SharePoint, Outlook, Excel and more.