Update Of kalmstrom.com Resource Booking Outlook Add-on

I am happy to announce that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has released a new version of Calendar Browser, the popular resource booking application for Outlook. To book resources with Calendar Browser is meant to be as easy as creating an appointment in the Outlook calendar, and for most users it is. However, two organizations had problems with Calendar Browser and could not use the add-on as they wanted. The kalmstrom.com team could solve the issues, and now we give the new version to all.

One Community Member wanted to use Calendar Browser on machines with multiple profiles installed on each PC, but that created difficulties in loading the calendars. With today’s version they can use Calendar Browser without problems.

The other Member had a lot of calendars full of recurring appointments, and that made the loading of the Overview very slow. We made the loading faster by making Calendar Browser load appointments from only a certain time to the Overview. By default the period is one month ahead, but each user can set the date range needed.

With today's update of Calendar Browser we have also taken another step to get rid of the dependency on Office Web Components, as they are no longer needed for the Example data. Evaluators with later Outlook versions might not have them installed since Microsoft has chosen to not install them automatically. Now these evaluators can create Example data without having to install OWC first. The integrated statistics tool still needs OWC, but we are working on that last part also.

Please refer to the Revisions page for a full list of the enhancements and bug fixes. Community Members have free upgrades, as usual.

Are you looking for a resource booking tool that is easy to learn and manage? In that case I recommend you to try Calendar Browser. I am sure you will like it and be yet another satisfied subscriber to a kalmstrom.com product.

Easier Resource Booking With Calendar Browser C7, Released Today

The kalmstrom.com team is happy to announce that we today have released version 7 of Calendar Browser for Outlook. This resource booking tool was one of the first that Peter built, and it has been very popular during its ten years on the market. Calendar Browser has of course been updated many times before, but we always kept the folder homepage design. When Office 2010 was published our developers faced a big problem, since it proved impossible to keep the homepage in Calendar Browser. Peter and Jayant finally found a solution - they always do! - and now we can give you a Calendar Browser that supports Office 2010.

As Calendar Browser V7 takes advantage of the possibilities given by the Fluent Interface/Ribbon it is even easier to use than the old version. The resource calendars are now visible directly in in the Outlook calendar view, and more standard calendar features are used. This also means that version 7 can only be used with Outlook 2007 and 2010. For the future this is the right way to go, but it means that we no longer can give an alternative for resource booking with Outlook 2003, which does not have the Ribbon. Community Members who have not upgraded to Outlook 2007 or 2010 will of course still get support for their Calendar Browser V6, but we no longer offer it to new customers.

Welcome to download and try the new Calendar Browser! If you are already a Calendar Browser Community Member, I recommend you to upgrade to version 7 (first upgrade your Office if needed). The responsible for Calendar Browser at each Calendar Browser Member organization will soon receive an e-mail with more info about version 7 and the upgrade. I hope you all will enjoy our rebuilt  tool!

Goodbye Calendar Browser V6

It is no longer possible to download Calendar Browser V6.1 from the kalmstrom.com website. As version 7 of our resource booking application requiered an extensive rebuilt, the documentation has to be renewed and the website info changed. We will do that during the quiet days after the Christmas celebrations, and then we hope to release Calendar Browser V7 during the first weeks of January.

I am sorry if this causes you any inconvenience. Please contact me at sales@kalmstrom.com if are a Community Member and need a setup of Calendar Browser V6.1. If you want to evaluate Calendar Browser, please be patient and come back in January to try the latest version instead!

PF HelpDesk V11.1 Released

The kalmstrom.com team is happy to have released version 11.1 of our issue tracking add-on for Outlook, PF HelpDesk. Some bugs are fixed in this update, but above all there are several enhancements that will make PF HelpDesk even nicer to work with.

Among the improvements are better handling of the ticket attachments, better possibilities to drag and drop or paste to the ticket and better use of the Open Ticket button. We have also added an option for excluding a machine from the automatic conversions of e-mails to tickets. This setting is placed under the E-mail folders tab, where you add the folders to be monitored automatically. For more information about version 11.1, please refer to the PF HelpDesk Revisions page.

We could not add the SQL Azure database alternative this time, but Abhishek is working on it so we will soon update PF HelpDesk again. Now I just want to say a warm thank you to all Members who have reported problems or suggested enhancements. Your help is much appreciated, and you are very welcome to upgrade your PF HelpDesk installations.

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? If you need a tool for handling incoming e-mails within a workgroup and still stay inside Outlook, I recommend you to take a look at Public Folder HelpDesk! In spite of the name it may also be installed in a shared mailbox.

Use PF HelpDesk V11.1 With SQL Azure

The kalmstrom.com team is currently developing version 11.1 of our Incident Management tool PF HelpDesk. It will be released now in October, and among the new features is a third database alternative: SQL Azure.

SQL Azure is Microsoft's cloud database, offered as a service and running in Microsoft datacenters around the globe. It is highly scalable, so you may either start small or serve a global customer base immediately. You only pay for what you use ‒ scale up when you need capacity and pull it back when you don’t.

PF HelpDesk has so far offered two database alternatives, Access and SQL Server. The Access database is free, but it  has security issues and only gives a storage capacity of 2 GB. This means that
you cannot handle large data requests, and if you are close to the maximum amount of data it will run slowly. Therefore we have often recommended customers to use an SQL Server database instead, and this is still a good alternative for big companies who need an SQL Server anyway. However, an SQL Server is not trivial to manage.

With an SQL Azure database Microsoft handles all maintenance. The environment is very secure and you don't have to think about backup and recovery. For a distributed team SQL Azure has another great advantage: you can reach it from any system. All you need is an internet connection!

Version 11.1 of PF HelpDesk will have more enhancements. Please refer to our Plans page and see what new features are "Under development".

Improved HTML Editor in Updated Public Folder HelpDesk

PF HelpDesk V11 has been updated again, this time with some enhancements and a couple of bug fixes. The most important improvement is the new HTML editor, which gives more possibilities than the old one. New buttons are added for font color and background color. A context menu is also added and will be shown when you right click on the editor. With the earlier editor font and color was sometimes changed  when a ticket was opened several times, but that will not happen with the new editor.

Please refer to the Revisions page for a description of all changes. We are grateful to Community Members who have pointed out to us how PF HelpDesk could be an even better application. All suggestions have not been implemented yet, but you can feel sure they are not forgotten! Welcome to upgrade PF HelpDesk, all Members!

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? If you are looking for an application that helps your workgroup cooperate on incident management inside Outlook, this is the perfect tool for you. It can be installed in a public folder or a shared  mailbox, and the full product may be tested for 30 days without any obligations.

Improved Manual for Resource Booking Application

The Administrator manual for
Calendar Browser, has been updated. This Resource management tool from kalmstrom.com Business Solution has been on the market for more than ten years, and even if the manual just like the application has been updated many times during that period, it was time for a new review again. This time we took help from our trainee, Niklas Svensson, who gave us valuable input.

During the early years nearly all users installed Calendar Browser in a public folder and also used public folder calendars for the resource descriptions. Today the situation has changed. Even if Microsoft has promised to support public folders for a long time ahead, some users prefer to use mailboxes. Therefore we have taken extra care to explain of the differences between use of public folders and mailboxes, both when it comes to installation and resource calendars.

Also with the new manual public folders are easier to manage, while mailbox installation and calendar creation require a deeper knowledge of Microsoft Exchange. Welcome to download the Calendar Browser Admin manual in DOC or PDF format!

PF HelpDesk V11 Optimized for Office 2010

Today kalmstrom.com has released an update of PF HelpDesk V11 that is fully optimized for Office 2010, 32 bit version. The PF HelpDesk buttons are no longer hidden under the Add-Ins tab. When you open Outlook three PF HelpDesk buttons – Manual Conversion of e-mails into tickets, Open Ticket and Shortcut to the PF HelpDesk Outlook folder – are shown under the Home tab of the ribbon, see the first image above. These are the buttons you may need outside PF HelpDesk, when working with e-mails, so it is convenient to always have them at hand. When you open the PF HelpDesk Outlook folder, more buttons are shown in the ribbon, refer to the second image above. These are the buttons you may need when working inside PF HelpDesk, and if you have used PF HelpDesk with earlier Office versions you will recognize them as the buttons of the right hand toolbar. Members of kalmstrom.com Community are very welcome to upgrade their installations! Office 2010 64 bit will have to wait, but note that PF HelpDesk just like our other products works on all 64 bit operating systems. It is just the Office version we don’t support. Next in turn for Office 2010 optimization is TimeCard Workgroup and after that Calendar Browser. I will report back to you about the progress!

Ticket Toolbar With New Functions in PF HelpDesk V11

Today kalmstrom.com has released an update of Public Folder HelpDesk , our issue tracking tool for Outlook that also may be installed in a shared mailbox. Above you see the new ticket toolbar strip. It has been changed after Members have pointed out how it could be enhanced. As always it is the people who use the application each day who best can tell us how to improve it, so we are grateful for all suggestions. Even if we cannot realize them all, and certainly not at once, you can feel sure that we remember them.

The new toolbar has a button for Save and Close Window to the left. Further to the right we have new buttons for High and Low Importance and also a new button for Print Ticket. The old buttons Save, Close Ticket, Create Task, FAQ, Forward and Add to KBase are placed in the same order as before between the new buttons, and Delete Ticket is left on the far right side.

Some bugs were also fixed in this release, and I suggest that you take a look at the Revisions page if you are already using PF HelpDesk V11. All Community Members are welcome to upgrade!

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk V11 yet? Please download the application! I am sure you will like it.

PF HelpDesk V11 With New Technologies For The Future

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 is released! Many users have waited for the new version of this tool for incident management inside Outlook. So have the kalmstrom.com team, as V11 builds on more stable technologies than earlier versions.

It has not been an easy task to change the build and at the same time keep and even improve the benefits of the Outlook integration, but our skillful developers Jayant Rimza and Bahrur Ipham has managed it. QA Engineer Dina Romanova’s scrupulous testing and close cooperation with the developers has also been crucial to the creation of version 11, and our trainee, Niklas Svensson, has given valued input. Thank you all, for your efforts!

As I have written some earlier blogs about PF HelpDesk V11, you probably already know about the two major improvements, the new ticket form and the new installer. Welcome to visit the version 11 page for an overview and the Revisions page for a full list of the enhancements!

Since the ticket form is new, the upgrade was a tough nut to crack. At one stage there were two manual steps to perform, and not very easy ones either! Fortunately these issues were solved too, and now the upgrade is automatic. You may perform it from any client, and you only need to select your PF HelpDesk Outlook folder in the process. Then the installer will do the rest.

Upgrades are free for Members of kalmstrom.com Community, and the PF HelpDesk admin in each organization will get a personal e-mail with the new registration key. Then you may just upgrade and enjoy! If you are not a Member yet, I recommend you to join us as soon as possible to benefit from the advantages.

Updated PF HelpDesk V11 supports Office 2010

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 was released nearly three weeks ago, and the interest for our incident management tool for Microsoft Outlook has been great! This was expected, and expected was also that some of all who downloaded the new version would have problems.

Our products work in such a complex environment that it is virtually impossible to test every combination of software and ways of using them. Therefore we are always grateful for reports from users.

As always our technicians have done their best to solve the problems as quickly as possible, and today we have published an update where all known bugs are solved. The users who have complained about errors have been very helpful in the troubleshooting, and they have already received files that have solved their problems.


We get more and more questions about Office 2010. PF HelpDesk V11 and our other products already work with the new version of Office, but we have not yet optimized them for Office 2010. For PF HelpDesk this means that you will find the toolbar on top if you use Outlook 2010, in the last tab.

The improvement work continues, so our Members can feel confident about the future of PF HelpDesk.

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 - One Step Closer to ITIL

The release of Public Folder HelpDesk V11 comes closer. In this version of our Outlook issue tracking application we have made an adjustment to ITIL terminology: The earlier terms Problem, Problem Type and Problem Category have been replaced by Incident, Incident Type and Incident Category.

In ITIL backed organizations the term Problem is used for recurring errors which need a long term solution, while Incident is an error that have a relatively quick solution. As most issues reported to a helpdesk is of the Incident kind, we decided to use that term instead.

As the PF HelpDesk V11 ticket form is easy to customize, you may of course use any terms that suits your organization in the tickets. However, from version 11 Incident is the default term for the problems, suggestions and other issues that PF HelpDesk helps workgroups to cooperate on.

First Setup of PF HelpDesk V11

I have received the first setup of version 11 of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk. Our developers still have some problems with the upgrade procedure to solve, but I could make a new installation and record a Presentation demo where you may see the new HTML ticket form

Another improvement in the new version is that we use our own installer, which you can use as many times as you wish. This means that it will be much easier to install and upgrade multiple installations with PF HelpDesk V11. Welcome to watch the demo!

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 with better ticket form

This month the kalmstrom.com team has tried to prioritize work with the new version of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk. The most important improvement in version 11 ‒ and a big one! ‒ is that the ticket form is changed. Because of some bugs in the Outlook forms we have chosen to not use them in most of our solutions, but for PF HelpDesk we earlier judged the benefits greater than the disadvantages. However now our skillful developers have found a way to keep the benefits and get rid of the problems!

The new form has two parts, an upper part built in HTML and a lower built in Visual Basic 6. The HTML part contains the fields that are most interesting for users to customize, and since we use well known HTML code here it will be easier than before to adapt the ticket to the needs of the organization. Another advantage with the new ticket form is that it loads faster than the old one.

Even if the ticket form will be easier to customize we want to give you a good default ticket. Right now we discuss the layout within the team. Many suggestions have been sent back and forth, but now I know that it will be something like in the image above, even if details might change before release. Our QA engineer, Dina Romanova, has started testing version 11, and we all hope that she does not find too many bugs, so that we soon can publish the new version of PF HelpDesk. We know many are waiting for it out there!

Minor Update of Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook

In his latest newsletter Peter hoped that there would be no more releases of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk, before version 11, but today we had to make a minor update since several users had problems converting e-mails containing attachments. If you get an error report that talks about attachment, I recommend you to upgrade ‒ if you have a support contract, of course, but nowadays most of our users have that.

The work with PF HelpDesk V11 continues, and we plan to have a prototype ready for testing by the end of this week. I look forward to see what our developers have managed this time, and I promise to keep you informed!

PF HelpDesk fully supports Unicode

As you might have heard we are working on version 11 of Public Folder HelpDesk, (which also can be installed in a shared mailbox). That release will hopefully come this spring, but in the meantime we also make some improvements to the current version of this popular issue tracking application.

We want all our products to fully support Unicode, and today most of them do – also PF HelpDesk after today’s new release. The Unicode support for PF HelpDesk proved to be a real challenge, but as usual our Lead Developer Bahrur Ipham managed to solve the problems.

In version 11 we will try to redesign the templates and notifications settings, because the current design is not optimal. Today it has been a bit better, though, since we have added a template for the alert 'Automatic email to responsible on reply received' and a checkbox under the Others Settings tab for enabling it. The alert is sent to the responsible staff when an email reply from the caller is received by the helpdesk, if the box is checked and some text is added to the default template. The manual is updated with this new information.

As usual Community Members and Support Customers are welcome to upgrade your installations. And if you have not tried PF HelpDesk yet but need a good way to cooperate around support cases within Outlook, you are welcome to download and try PF HepDesk for 30 days.

New Manual for HelpDesk OSP and Demos for Calendar Browser

Good documentation is essential to give users a chance to understand the software they are working with and avoid problems. Therefore we always do our best to present our information in ways that are appealing and easy to understand. Now we are happy to present our new video demonstrations for Calendar Browser, updated to version 6.1. Some more will be added, but the most important ones are there. Welcome to click any Demonstrations link in the Calendar Browser See also boxes, or go directly to screencast.com, where we host them.

Also HelpDesk OSP has new documentation, a manual for administrators who want to use SharePoint workflows to enhance HelpDesk OSP. In this manual we describe how to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, a free product nowadays, to create workflows for sending automatic notifications and for keeping track of time spent on each ticket. Welcome to download it from the HelpDesk OSP manuals page!

Calendar Browser Resource Management Tool Improved Again

Two weeks ago kalmstrom.com Business Solutions published an update of Calendar Browser with many improvements. However, there were still some things we wanted to make better, so today we had another release of our resource management software.

New in this version is info about Date in the Orders and Appointments lists in the Calendar Browser Overview, which is useful if you select a period of several days. Furthermore it is no longer necessary to restart Outlook after certain changes in the Calendar Browser Settings, and when an appointment is made with the calendar icon it will no longer show today's date but the day selected for the booking.

We have all been working intensely with Calendar Browser during the last few weeks. Not only has the application itself taken a step forward, but we have also new video demonstrations. Even the slide show has had a face lift. Welcome to enjoy the enhanced Calendar Browser!

Resource Management in Outlook for All Languages

The kalmstrom.com resource management application Calendar Browser has been updated to full support of Unicode. With Calendar Browser you can book resources and supplies just as easy as you make an appointment in the Outlook Calendar, and the administration is given smart tools for descriptions of the resources and for following up their use. In this release Calendar Browser has also been given an overall enhancement, as a number of smaller issues has been fixed. Refer to the Revisions page for a full list of the improvements.

Now you can describe your resources in a correct way whether your language is Russian, Arabic, Hebrew, Greek, Chinese etc. and of course also our special Nordic characters are supported. These resources might be anything that you need to share and book in advance within the organization - machines, rooms, cars and even people whose services may be booked. No wonder Calendar Browser has been so popular during its comparatively long life.

Peter first developed Calendar Browser for a Swedish town in the year 2000, when they could not find a suitable product for their room booking. After that the demand for this application grew, and he decided to market a standard solution. As you understand some of our users have been with us for many years now, and it feels really good to be able to offer them a continuously improved application.

Welcome to upgrade, Members and Support Customers, and welcome to try Calendar Browser if you have not yet tested it. You will be surprised that such an easy to use software can be so effective!

A Prosperous 2010 to All Readers

The first day of 2010 is here, and Sweden still has very cold weather with as much snow as in the Christmas image below.

The image for this post was taken another cold year, in the spring, when you could use ice yachts on the Swedish lakes. I chose it as a symbol of the light and fun that I hope this new year will bring to all of you.


Sigge and I will return to Spain tomorrow and change snow for rain - but hopefully also some sunshine. During our stay in Sweden we have of course had meetings with Peter to discuss kalmstrom.com, beside the family gatherings. I have already told you about the Facebook page, one of the ideas that was born in these talks. More will follow ...

We look forward to the coming year and the challenges it will surely bring. I am now testing the Beta version of Office 2010, like the developers have done for quite a while, and making our products compatible is of course one of our most important tasks.

In the plans for the first quarter of this new year is the release of PF HelpDesk 11. It will have part of the ticket html-based, for easier customizations and to avoid the problems with Outlook forms. We also look forward to welcoming many new Community Members. During 2010 we will hopefully get at confirmation that the new Community and subscription system is such a good idea for both customers and company that we believe it is.  

The kalmstrom.com team and I wish all blog readers a prosperous 2010. We also want to say a warm thank you for the past year to our Community Members and Support Customers. We cannot make your year for you, but if we can make your work smoother, so that you get more time for the really important things in life, we feel happy about that!