2016 Cloud And Mobile Functionality

A new year is born, and I am eager to learn what it will mean to the kalmstrom.com products. My intention is that we should use this year for consolidation and concentrate on our existing products, as we worked a lot with new development in 2015. Now it is time to let our older products take advantage of what we learned in that process.

More in the cloud
The trend towards providing more and more functionality in the cloud will continue in 2016. We are looking forward to seeing more BI features in Office 365, something that we can take advantage of to enhance the reporting features of the kalmstrom.com products.

We also want to improve the use of touch to interact with our products, as well as extending them to mobile devices. These enhancements will probably come later in 2016, but in the first quarter we hope to release other product updates.

Shared code
As I wrote in my blog post about challenges for the kalmstrom.com team in 2015, several new products were developed last year, and everyone in the team honed their skills. Thus the new development was very rewarding, and as we use shared code as much as possible we now hope to enhance existing products with new features. In addition we want to make them faster, simpler to use and more in line with the Office 365 experience.

Kanban Task Manager
Our first release in the new year will be version 4 of Kanban Task Manager for Outlook, which will come very soon. It will have WIP limits for the phases and lanes on the kanban board, and it will be possible to use the Status values of the Outlook tasks as phases instead of custom phases.

There are also extra enhancements for those organizations who use the Outlook version together with the SharePoint versions of Kanban Task Manager. You will soon have more info in the release blog post!

Later in 2016 all Kanban Task Manager versions will have a completed graph on each task card on the kanban board.There will also be a timeline for open tasks, where users will have an overview of when tasks are planned to start and end. It will be easy to drag and drop tasks to change the start and end dates.

TimeCard
The Outlook version of TimeCard will be updated to support synchronization with the SharePoint version, and thereby also with TimeCard Mobile.

We will add SharePoint as an alternative to a database for sharing and storage of settings and time reports, and when this option is selected TimeCard Workgroup may be used with TimeCard for SharePoint. Each user's SharePoint calendar will then synchronize with his or her Outlook calendar. This is useful for distributed teams, as the shared data can be reached from everywhere via the internet.

Folder HelpDesk
Version 14 of Folder HelpDesk for Outlook will have functionality similar to the one found in Kanban Task Manager, as we will add a kanban view to the already existing ticket views.

When you select the Folder HelpDesk kanban view, all issue tracking tickets will be shown as cards on a kanban board in Outlook. The cards can be dragged and dropped between or within the status phases as work proceeds.

Swedish Grammar app
Our smartphone app with grammar rules for the Swedish language was released in 2013, and now it is time for an update. Not because the grammar rules have changed, but we want to give the app a better design and make it work with Windows Phone, in addition to the current iOS and Android operating systems.

These were just some of our update plans for 2016. If you are more interested in our plans for another kalmstrom.com product, please look at the Plans page for that solution or contact us. We are always open for suggestions from subscribers!

Together with my colleagues in the kalmstrom.com team I wish all subscribers, evaluators and other blog readers a prosperous and peaceful 2016.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions