2015 Challenges Successfully Passed!

It is time to look back on yet another prosperous year. 2015 has given us many new subscribers, and new challenges have given us valuable opportunities to hone our skills.

We have been digging deeper into our core competence areas by enhancing our main Outlook and SharePoint products as well as releasing new ones. We also took on some new challenges by releasing a mobile app and successfully managing sponsored product development.

Study Manager
In March we released a new SharePoint solution for online training. Study Manager was a sponsored kalmstrom.com Solution, requested by teachers who wanted to add self-correcting exercises and tasks to SharePoint and supervise their students' work with them.

These teachers took a more active part in the testing than sponsors usually do. They were by no means SharePoint experts, so their participation in the development process made us catch several points where we had taken things for granted.

Even if this early user input took some extra time, I was convinced that it was beneficial and would make Study Manager easier to manage for teachers and students. Later this was confirmed in a testimonial: "Also those students who are not used to computers can work with the exercises, as Study Manager is so easy to use."

Templates Manager
Every organization wants their documents to have a consistent look and content, and the best way to achieve this is of course to use templates for different kinds of documents.

However, Microsoft has not given a good solution for templates management in SharePoint. In the second half of 2015 the kalmstrom.com team did something about that: we released Templates Manager.

With Templates Manager administrators and other template creators can publish and update templates to the whole SharePoint farm or tenancy by just pressing a button. We have also made the template search quick and smooth, so that everyone can find the right template to use at each occasion.

TimeCard for SharePoint Mobile
In the beginning of the year we hired our own Mobile App Developer, Madhur Trivedi, and his first release was an app that takes the information from the TimeCard for SharePoint calendar and displays it in a mobile friendly user interface. That way, users can tag events with time reporting information in smart devices that synchronize with the TimeCard for SharePoint calendar.

Now Madhur is working on an app that connects to SharePoint tasks lists. The rest of the team is busy with enhancements of existing products, and next to be released are new Outlook versions for Kanban Task Manager and TimeCard.

Team efforts and celebrations
It is fascinating to work with talented colleagues who find solutions when many others would have given up. As our 2015 product challenges has been managed in triumph, it felt wonderful to finish the year with joyful celebrations at a big wedding partyin Indore.

I have written about the marriage between Monika and Vijayant Rimza earlier this month, so here I will just give you one of the official wedding photos.

Now we are looking forward to a new year, and I will soon come back with my thoughts on the future.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions