Sandboxed Solution Activation In Office 365 SharePoint

This weekend Microsoft silently made a change in Office 365 that highly affects installation and upgrade of the kalmstrom.com SharePoint sandboxed solutions. Existing installations will work as before, but new installations cannot be activated in SharePoint Online. We have of course already begun re-building our products to solve the problem.

No activation
It has been important to us to keep SharePoint sandboxed solutions and not only offer apps/add-ins, because add-ins are not supported by SharePoint 2010 and lower. Developing sandboxed solutions is a common way to add features to SharePoint, but Microsoft has now made it impossible to activate most sandboxed solutions in SharePoint Online.

In the long term we will go over to SharePoint add-ins, but we will not suddenly give up sandboxed solution because of this activation issue. By changing the way our sandboxed solutions are installed and upgraded, we can continue to offer a sandboxed solution that can be used also on SharePoint Online.

No problem for existing installations
kalmstrom.com Subscribers who use Office 365 SharePoint don't have to worry about their installations, because existing installations are not at all affected by the change.

However, the kalmstrom.com workgroup subscriptions allow free upgrades and an unlimited number of installations within the organization, and from this weekend and until new versions have been published subscribers who use SharePoint Online cannot take advantage of these benefits. No new installations can be made and existing installations cannot be upgraded.

No Office 365 trials
Currently we cannot offer the normal 30 days trial of the kalmstrom.com sandboxes solutions for evaluators who are using Office 365 and SharePoint Online, as the activation will not work for them. We have added info about the issue on all download and upgrade pages for sandboxed solutions.

We already know how to solve this new problem with SharePoint Online, and we are now giving highest priority to update all kalmstrom.com products that are affected by the new limitation. You can see their icons in this blog post.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

16 August: Templates Manager updated

24 August: Kanban Task Manager updated

9 September: Study Manager updated

7 October: TimeCard updated

New Senior Developer For kalmstrom.com Services

Today I am happy to introduce Mohammad Nadeem, Senior .NET Developer. Mohammad Nadeem joined the kalmstrom.com team in April, and he has proved to be a valuable team member. So far he has mostly worked with custom projects, but he will of course be included in the development of our standard SharePoint and Outlook products too. Here is his presentation:

During my eight years of extensive IT experience in .NET based enterprise and web applications, I have successfully deployed a wide range of high performance, cutting edge solutions to end customers with state of art.

I joined the kalmstrom.com team because I enjoy working with new ideas and concepts and wanted to learn more about the latest technologies, like PowerShell and SharePoint.

My work is my hobby, but apart from that I am a certified gym trainer and I play football and cricket. Some people call me a fitness freak! Like many other developers I find chess, open world HD video games and brain teasing puzzles fascinating, but I am also interested in poetry.

My favorite poetry line is "Kar buland khud ko itna ki khuda khud bandey se puche bata teri raja kya hai" (Raise yourself to such a level that God will ask you what you wish.) These words by Muhammad Iqbal guide me in life. I want to become a successful, well known person, not by earning a lot of money but by blessings from people I can help.

Together with some friends I have formed a group that performs voluntary social work. I believe that we live not for ourselves but for others. All people deserve equal rights, and I have always wanted to help those who are poor.

Ever since I did my engineering in Computer Science at the RGPV University, I have understood that I have strong interpersonal skills. I also know that I can come up with creative solutions to problems, something that is highly appreciated in my kind of work.

I think those qualities have helped me fit well into the kalmstrom.com team, and I am looking forward to conquer any future challenges together with my new work mates.

Mohammad Nadeem Ansari
Senior .NET Developer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Outlook Kanban Boards With New Views And Icons

The Outlook editions of Kanban Task Manager will soon be updated with new views and indications for overdue tasks and percent completed.

Four editions
The kalmstrom.com kanban style software for project and tasks management comes in four editions. Two of them are for Outlook, workgroup and single editions, and two are for SharePoint. The editions work on two different platforms, but we try to keep the features as similar as possible. This is especially important as the Outlook workgroup edition can synchronize with both SharePoint editions.

Kanban view
By default each Outlook task is shown as a color coded card on a kanban board with phases for the work process. These cards can be filtered in various ways, and they can be dragged to another phase and dropped there. New tasks can be created directly in the kanban view, and existing tasks can be opened and edited.

New icons
The coming updates of the Kanban Task Manager Outlook editions will give users more graphic information on the task cards. When a task is overdue, it will be indicated with a red left border on the kanban card.

When users fill out the % Completed field in the task, the value will be shown with an icon on the task in the kanban view. The high priority task in the image below is nearly finished.

Month view
Next version of Kanban Task Manager will have more views. The Month view gives two options: calendar and timeline. Here you can see when tasks are planned to start and end and which tasks are in the pipeline for the coming month, the current month – or whichever month you select.

In the timeline, the time slots can be dragged to change the start and due dates, and tasks can be edited or created.

Project View
In the Project View each project will be visualized in the form of a pie chart, so that it will be easy to see  how many tasks there are in each phase of each project. Only phases that have tasks for the specific project are shown.

Phase Columns
To allow users with few phases and big screens to use their horizontal space better, we will finally add a possibility to use more than one column of tasks in the same phase. In the image below there are many incoming tasks that are waiting to be moved through the phases. Therefore the "Not Started" phase has been given 2 columns, which shows more tasks with less scrolling and gives a better overview.

Work with the workgroup edition of Kanban Task Manager for Outlook V5 has already begun, and when it has been released it will be a quick job to update the single edition too. We will soon give you a chance to try the Kanban Task Manager Outlook editions.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

SharePoint Templates Manager For Desktop Office

Templates Manager for SharePoint was released as late as October 2015, but it has already become popular among evaluators and subscribers. Now we will soon release a client application, where users can select the SharePoint templates in their local Office applications.

Publish to all site collections
Most companies and organizations use templates to give their documents a consistent look and content, but SharePoint has no easy way to distribute templates to the whole farm or tenancy. With Templates Manager administrators only need to click on a button to publish all changes in the templates library to the whole organization, so our product enhances SharePoint in an important way.

                    

Desktop and browser
When files are stored in SharePoint libraries they can be edited either in each user's own Office installation or in the browser, with the online version of the Office application. So far Templates Manager has only supported the online version, but now we are developing a client setup.

With such a client installation, users can choose which version of the Office application they want to use in each case. The templates from SharePoint will be present in the desktop too.

First run
The first time a user opens Excel, Word or PowerPoint after the client has been installed, he or she will be asked to enter the SharePoint login details. Once this is done, the client knows where to search for templates every time an Office application is opened, and all the Excel, Word or PowerPoint templates from the Templates Manager SharePoint installation will be displayed to the user.

Templates Manager Client is still in the early development phase, but I hope to come back soon with a demo that shows how it works.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions