2015 Plans And Expectations

Once again I am writing a blog post about kalmstrom.com plans for a new year. As usual I am steaming with ideas and looking forward to make them real, and I am glad I have a talented team who supports me in my ambitions.

All of us are also eager to test the new SharePoint and Office technologies that 2015 will bring. It will be an inspiring challenge to find out how we best can use them to enhance the kalmstrom.com Solutions.

Releases in Q1
Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint V3, will have a responsive kanban board with swim lanes and several other enhancements.
TimeCard Workgroup V6 will have a SharePoint sharing option, so that TimeCard calendars in Outlook and SharePoint can be synchronized.

New kalmstrom.com Solutions
In the beginning of the year we will also release two new kalmstrom.com Solutions. One of them is Study Manager for SharePoint, a solution that lets teachers add exercises and tasks to SharePoint, where their students can work with them. This solution can be used for any subject, so it is useful not only to schools but to all companies and organizations that perform some kind of education.

SP Attach builds on an old idea, given to me as a challenge at a Microsoft conference in Seattle. Sending e-mail attachments inside an organization is an insecure method that fills up peoples mailboxes. SP Attach publishes the attachment to a SharePoint document library, which is much better for file sharing, and adds a link to the file in the e-mail.

Smartphone apps
During my visit to Indore in the end of December, we decided that Senior Developer Shahnawaz Khan and our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza should make a concentrated effort to start a good in-house mobile development.

Their first project will be a TimeCard app for smartphones. With TimeCard Mobile you can tag events with for example project and customer and synchronize them with your TimeCard for SharePoint calendar.

Folder HelpDesk
The TimeCard app is a big project, as it will be our first in-house mobile app. Another extensive development task this year is version 14 of Folder HelpDesk for Outlook. We will re-build Folder HelpDesk from the ground, even if the foundation will continue to be in Outlook, where there is a lot of functionality we will build upon. But Folder HelpDesk will no longer rely on a shared network folder and an Outlook public folder/shared mailbox.

Instead we will use three options for sharing and storage of data: an Access database, an SQL Server database or a SharePoint site. The SharePoint sharing option will eventually merge with our other issue tracking solution, HelpDesk OSP - but then we are probably well into 2016!

2015 begun in an excellent way, as there were two new subscribers when we opened the mail on the morning of January 1. The future is bright for kalmstrom.com :-)
Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions