Continuous Studies Crucial To kalmstrom.com Developers

When you work in a business that changes as fast as ours, you have to be eager to learn new things to keep up. The Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team are all highly educated and intelligent, but they need some help from the expert, our CEO Peter, to learn the most advanced parts of new IT technology. Therefore he takes the opportunity to lecture on subjects important to the future development of the kalmstrom.com Office add-ons now that he is visiting the team in Indore.


A joy for both parties
These teaching sessions have not only been useful but also a great joy for everyone. “I am so proud of my team”, said Peter yesterday evening. “I really loved teaching them today!”

That is a very good testimonial coming from Peter. He is a Microsoft certified Trainer, and in addition to his work as CEO and program designer at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions he lectures on Sweden’s most advanced IT courses. Therefore he is used to ‒ and spoiled with! ‒ having clever pupils.

Lead Developer Jayant counters with: “Peter is a great teacher. Today we learned many new things about the endless possibilities of SharePoint. I am looking forward for tomorrow’s class.”  In the image above you can also see the developers Kanak, Sunil and Vijayant. I asked Siret for a photo, so she slipped into the conference room to take some for me. But the team was disturbed an "kicked" her out again after a few shots. They wanted to continue the studies in peace!

SharePoint expansion
Yesterday Peter was talking about general SharePoint-functionality, tips and tricks as well as development opportunities for kalmstrom.com. Today he will go into some detail on how to start expanding our range of SharePoint products.

Here are Peter's own words:
"So far we have mainly done client-side applications, but we intend to provide also server-side features and mobile applications that use the new SharePoint 2010 tools. All of our applications rely on a shared information store. Usually that is a network file share with a database in Access or SQL, but we hope to add SharePoint as an alternate choice for all of our applications shortly.

Thus Members of kalmstrom.com Community will be able to send their time reporting data directly to a SharePoint list from TimeCard and store meeting information in multiple calendar lists from Calendar Browser. We also hope to merge the features of our two issue tracking applications, HelpDesk OSP and PF HelpDesk by adding more server-side functionality to HelpDesk OSP. "

Saturday studies
When Peter is not visiting the team still has common studies. Every other Saturday is working day in India, but the kalmstrom.com team normally use these days for studies. They meet at the office and go through a program Peter has prepared for them, and in the evening they often have dinner together, when also the non-technical staff join in.

These Saturdays are much appreciated by the team, and in the end all users of the kalmstrom.com software will benefit from them. A knowledgeable team that work well together can do much to improve the products, and Peter welcomes all suggestions from his team and listens carefully to their opinions. When everyone pulls in the right direction it will show in the result!

Group Resources For Easier Booking With New Calendar Browser

The kalmstrom.com resource booking tool Calendar Browser for Outlook will soon come in a new version that will make it even easier to book a resource directly in the Outlook calendar. In Calendar Browser each resource has its own calendar, and users book a resource by making an appointment in the calendar of that resource.

Without calendar groups
Say that you wish to use Calendar Browser for booking rooms, vehicles and experts to held lectures. If you add all of these resources to one folder, the users have to see all the resource calendars when they want to book something. For organizations with just a few resources this works well, and for ten years satisfied customers have used Calendar Browser this way. However, for big companies with many bookable resources the new possibility to group the resource calendars in different Outlook folders will be very useful.

Group resources in multiple Outlook folders
If you make three calendar groups instead of one ‒ one Outlook folder for rooms, one for cars and one for teachers ‒ the people who book with Calendar Browser can choose calendar group depending of which kind of resource they wish to book. They of course know if they want to book a room or a car, so they just select the relevant Calendar Browser group in their Outlook calendar, search for the best alternative among the resource calendars in that group and make the appointment. Also, if they wish to see an Overview of future bookings and maybe book directly from the Overview, only one group has to be loaded ‒ which of course is quicker.

Admin does the work
To group resource calendars the administrator needs to make a multiple installation of Calendar Browser. In the example above there will be three installations in three separate network folders. The installation process also includes the creation of an Outlook folder.Just give each Outlook folder an appropriate name, like “Rooms” “Cars” and “Teachers”, and the users can easily add the calendar groups they need to their own Outlook. They just have to press an “Add CB Folder” button in the Outlook toolbar and choose among the calendar groups in a dropdown.



Calendar Browser buttons in Outlook
The Calendar Browser description button works like before: select a resource calendar and press the button to see a description of that resource. If you have several Calendar Browser folders in your Outlook, the Search and Overview buttons (and the Manage button if not hidden by the admin) will give you a choice among these folders. Select folder, and then the buttons will work for the calendar group of that folder.

Grouping calendars may also be useful even if you have only one kind of resource. Maybe you want to separate rooms on different locations or cars of different sizes? I believe the new version of Calendar Browser will be useful to many organizations, and we all look forward to the release. It should come before the end of this year, and as usual upgrades are free for Members of kalmstrom.com Community. I will come back and tell you when it is time!

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.

kalmstrom.com Develops Cloud-Connected Outlook Add-ons

To stay strong and be able to meet future development requests, the kalmstrom.com team has taken on a task that will change our products profoundly. User's don't have to worry, because they will still recognize the product they like and are used to, but the architecture behind it will be much different. The reason for this long term investment, is of course the technical development of the products we build on but also general changes in the business world. We see a future where teams continue to get more mobile and geographically dispersed, and therefore we want to re-build all of our applications for more web-based usage.

All of the kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons have relied heavily on Outlook public folders or mailboxes for information sharing. This still works well in most organizations, and we will continue to support that usage. However, if we stand still, keep the current architecture and only add new features to our products, there will come a time when they have become old-fashioned. We don't want to wait for that day to make the necessary changes, because then we will prevent Member organizations from meeting and embracing the future. Members of kalmstrom.com Community deserve better! The products from kalmstrom.com must always be a help to make business more efficient.

Our developers have started with the comparatively simple application KBase. This is a knowledge base that is totally integrated in Outlook. The articles may also be embedded in a SharePoint site or OWA or be published to web pages with just a click of a button. The new KBase will have an ASP.NET MVC back-end and an SQL database, which will contain all of the tickets. We will supply this database for free if the user organization does not have an in-house or hosted SQL server or uses SQL Azure. Version 3 of KBase will have both a fully featured web interface and also, of course, an Outlook-interface. In addition, we will also make the web interface fully mobile and touch-friendly.

The new technique will also mean that our products will support the 64-bit version of Office 2010. Some Member organizations have asked for this, but we think most users will stay with the 32-bit version anyway. There are very few add-ons on the market that support the 64-bit version of Office, and the 64-bit version is only needed in special cases. However, for those who need it we want to give that support also.

The kalmstrom.com developer team has been working with this project for over a month, but I did not want to tell about it until we knew that the brilliant ideas of our CEO Peter was possible to realize. His understanding of how different techniques can be combined to create something new is the basis for kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, and now he has once again proved his skill.

From Trainee To Junior Developer With kalmstrom.com

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has a new junior developer. If you follow this blog you might recognize Kanak Joshi, because I introduced her as our trainee in July. Kanak had then been with us for some weeks, and we had already seen that she performed her tasks willingly and quickly.

Now we have understood that Kanak is also a quick learner and a person who can find her own solutions. This is exactly what we need in the kalmstrom.com team, and therefore we were happy to offer Kanak a position as junior developer.

We are certain that Kanak will contribute to the kalmstrom.com development with new and clever ideas. When Kanak has learned our products better she will also take part in our user support. We prefer to have our technicians engaged in the support, to be able to give the knowledgeable service we are praised for and also to give them first hand understanding of any problems. Kanak will be a good help in remote sessions and second line support.

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions Has Achieved Microsoft Silver Partnership

Today I can write a much happier blog post than yesterday, because now I have good news to share with you: kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has become a Silver Partner to Microsoft. Only 5 % of all Microsoft Partners reach this level, so it really makes us stand out on the market.

To be Silver Partner we had to show Microsoft:

• That our products are good enough ‒ by passing certain Microsoft tests
  
•  That we have the sufficient knowledge in the team ‒ by passing certain Microsoft exams
  
• That our customers like the products ‒ by giving references to Microsoft

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has reached Silver level as Independent Software Vendor. Maybe you ask why it is not “Software Developer”? That is due to Microsoft’s definitions: a “software developer” is someone who sells code and all rights to it. We instead maintain the legal rights to our products and sell licenses for use, so “Software Vendor” is the correct term for kalmstrom.com .

I have now placed the Silver Partner logo on our homepage, so all visitors can see that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions is reliable and experienced at working with Microsoft technologies. It is a security for new visitors to know that we hold a high standard, and we hope it will further increase the demand for our products and services. The Silver Partnership also gives the kalmstrom.com team other advantages, like access to more Microsoft resources. This will be useful in our future development work.

We are very grateful to the Community Members who gave us references, and I also want to say a big thank you to the kalmstrom.com team members. You should all feel proud and take credit for our joined achievement!

New kalmstrom.com Trainee Helps In .NET Framework Project

As I told you a couple of weeks ago kalmstrom.com has decided to take on more trainees, and today I am happy to introduce Sunil Patel. He is Master of Computer Applications, which is a three-year Professional Master's degree in Computer Science awarded in India, and he joined the kalmstrom.com team in the beginning of July.

Sunil already had experience from several projects where he worked as a developer/programmer when he chose to become a trainee at kalmstrom.com to learn more. We appreciate his ambition and believe our cooperation will be good for both parties.   

During his first weeks Sunil has transferred the PF HelpDesk web form code into ASP.NET, a Microsoft server side scripting technology which enables scripts embedded in web pages to be executed by an Internet server. Sunil's work is part of our long-time plan to make more extensive use of the .NET Framework environment. Our youngest application, HelpDesk OSP, was built on the .NET platform from the beginning, but our other products still use some older technologies that we need to replace. This transfer will give us great possibilities for future development of our products.    

Sunil has of course also participated in the study sessions that Peter and Jayant have held with the younger team members. Ongoing education has always been important for kalmstrom.com, but we have now taken it a step further and set apart certain work hours for common studies and discussions. I am sure this will reflect in the kalmstrom.com products and benefit our Community Members in the long run.

Sunil is very interested in cricket. During his studies he was a member of the college team, and now he plays for for the Star Cricket Club in Indore. Welcome to the Team page, if you wish to read more about Sunil and the rest of us.

Great Development Work On PF HelpDesk V11.3

Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook, the kalmstrom.com incident management add-on that may in fact be installed in any Outlook folder, will soon come in a new version. In PF HelpDesk 11.3 we have removed the folder homepage, above all to make PF HelpDesk compatible with Office 365. The combination of Office 365 and PF HelpDesk doesn´t really offer any specific featuers except the ones given by the products one by one, but in the future we plan to make more elaborate use of Office 365 specifically.

In earlier versions of PF HelpDesk the folder homepage was used for the different views, the search capability and the new ticket button. Now our developers have had to find new ways to handle that, and I must congratulate our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza to his elegant solution of the problem. In the Outlook ribbon he added a new search dialog, a gallery control that lets you switch between the PF HelpDesk custom views very easily and a "New ticket" button. For Outlook 2003, which we still support but which has no ribbon, he instead added this functionality to the right hand toolbar. This way you have all the PF HelpDesk buttons at the same place, and when I tried the Beta I found PF HelpDesk V11.3 even easier to work with than before.

The support for Office 365 is of course an important reason why we update PF HelpDesk so soon again, but there are also some new features. One of them is developed to help users avoid the conflict message when two people work at the same ticket. In version 11.3 the second person will get a warning and can just use the ticket in read-only mode. Another improvement is the option to not include attachments in the e-mails to callers sent from the ticket.

When we no longer use the folder homepage it was also possible to remove the dependency on Outlook View Control. This is an old technology that we think Microsoft might stop supporting, so it feels good to not depend on it anymore. Furthermore users had problems sometimes when OVC was not loaded properly.

I hope to very soon come back and tell you that PF HelpDesk V11.3 is released for all.

PF HelpDesk With Support For Office 365

The development of support for cloud solutions continues at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. Our Outlook helpdesk was recently updated to a new version, Public Folder HelpDesk V11.2. It has full support for Russian and several other enhancements, but above all it gives the possibility to use Microsoft's cloud-based SQL Azure database for tickets and settings. Now the kalmstrom.com team takes one step more towards the clouds by making PF HelpDesk compatible with Office 365 also.   

Microsoft’s cloud based Office is still only available in Beta, but far-seeing  Community Members have already shown an interest in using our products with Office 365. HelpDesk OSP and TimeCard already work with Office 365, but the products that have a folder homepage in Outlook must be rebuilt.   

PF HelpDesk may be installed in any Outlook folder, and the folder homepage solution has been used ever since the application was created more than ten years ago. It has many advantages: it gives a nice graphical interface, displays the views and provides a handy search capability. The homepage is also involved when you create a new ticket ‒ but it cannot be used with Office 365.   

Since the folder homepage solution does not work with Office 365, we have to find new ways to give these functions in PF HelpDesk. At the same time we cannot accept that Members who don't want to use Office 365 gets something that is not as good as before. Ideally the next version should be better for them also. This is not an easy task, but our developers are experts on ingenious solutions. They already have a plan for how to both replace the homepage and make PF HelpDesk even better for all.
  
Most changes are made “behind the scene”, and many users will never notice them. What the helpdesk staff will see is the new search dialog and the addition of a gallery control. This control will show all custom views, and you can easily switch views from there. And to create a new ticket? Isn’t that the most important feature of all? Yes, it is, and don't worry - we will solve that also :-)   

Since Community Members are already waiting to use PF HelpDesk with Office 365, we have made the development of the new version a high priority task, and we hope to release it soon. I will come back with more info about this exciting project later.

Update Of E-mail Converting Application For Outlook

kalmstrom.com has already updated Public Folder HelpDesk V11.2 even if a new version of this incident management tool for Outlook was released as late as 30 May. When we see that something is not right we always do our outmost to correct it as soon as possible. In this case it was upgrading Community Members with SQL Server databases who got problems.

When we added the SQL Azure database alternative we introduced support for stored procedures, to give higher security. In the process we added the same support for SQL Server, without thinking through the consequences as much as we should have done. Now Community Members with SQL Server databases who upgraded their installations of PF HelpDesk had to add permissions over the stored produces manually, and that showed to be a bad solution. We decided to remove the stored procedure support in the SQL Server database alternative again and add it later together with an automatic permission process.

Microsoft also created problems for us soon after the release of PF HelpDesk V11.2. A new Office 2010 update made PF HelpDesk give a security warning when the PF HelpDesk Outlook folder or Settings was opened. This is now fixed, and I hope all old and new users will be happy with their application!

kalmstrom.com Goes Cloudy

As you might have understood from previous posts in this blog, we are very excited about cloud-based services in general and  Microsoft´s offerings in that area in particular.

We just released a new version of  PF HelpDesk, the kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool for Outlook, and it has support for the cloud-based SQL Azure database. This is not because many have been asking for it yet, but because we felt the urge to learn the new technology. We attempt to stay ahead of the curve and understand what our customers want before they even request it!

Now Community Members and Evaluators are asking if our applications work with Office 365 every day. The answer is that HelpDesk OSP and TimeCard already supports Office 365, and we will very soon update PF HelpDesk and Calendar Browser to support it too. However, they still work on the client-installed Microsoft Office applications we all know and love - not directly from a cloud-based service. That is where we are heading, though. We will of course continue to use and support client-based technologies, but we will expand into cloud-based services also.

One experiment-project we just concluded was a synchronization-engine between the cloud-based Office 365 and the likewise cloud-based ERP-system Fortnox. We used the Exchange Web Services and Fortnox´s API to enable synchronization between the ERP system and an Outlook Contacts list in Office 365. This was exactly what the Swedish building company Melander Bygg AB needed.

We will continue to build upon this experience to enable a variant of our other issue tracking product, HelpDesk OSP, to run entirely in the cloud, converting e-mails received in Office 365 to tickets in a SharePoint ticket list. We will of course retain the control of how the e-mails are converted, support for custom fields  in SharePoint and more. I will come back with more info about this product later on.

PF HelpDesk V11.2 Released - SQL Azure New Database Choice

Public Folder HelpDesk V11.2 has been released! Public Folder HelpDesk is an issue tracking application for Outlook, and in spite of the name it can be installed in any Outlook folder, public, shared or private. We thank our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza, who was responsible for the development of version 11.2 and has done a great job with a difficult and time consuming task.

The most important new feature of the kalmstrom.com Outlook helpdesk is a third database alternative, SQL Azure. Microsoft's cloud database is a good alternative to Access, because it gives better storage capacity and security. SQL Azure is not free like Access, but you only pay for what you use. You don't have to bother with managing your own SQL Server - with SQL Azure Microsoft handles all maintenance. For a distributed team SQL Azure has another advantage: you can reach it from any system. All you need is an internet connection!

If you prefer you own SQL Server database, we have good news for you also: changes in the code will give your PF HelpDesk better performance after upgrading to V11.2. Several other enhancements have also been added and bugs were fixed, so if you are already using PF HelpDesk I suggest you take a look at the Revisions page .

All Community Members are welcome to upgrade! We will not mess with your database, so if you want to try the SQL Azure alternative you must make a new installation of PF HelpDesk.If you prefer to continue using your current Access or SQL Server database, you can just make an ordinary upgrade.

Do you need a tool for organizing and sharing incident reports and want the team to work with them inside Outlook? Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? Please download the application! I am sure you will like it, and our support group is here for you if you have questions.

Estonia - New Market For kalmstrom.com

Today I have the pleasure to introduce to you our new translator, Siret Toots from Estonia. Siret will localize all kalmstrom.com products for Estonian. Calendar Browser and HelpDesk OSP are already finished, and the translated phrases will be added to the next updates of those products.

Siret will also be responsible for the marketing of PamFax in Estonia and for the translation of this tool for easy and secure faxing into Estonian. Later Siret will complete the kalmstrom.com Finnish phrase lists, which need an update as some phrases are missing and shown in English instead.

It is not easy to translate our phrase lists, because you need to understand the product and not only know the language well. For example, if you find the word "book" in the phrase list for our resource booking tool Calendar Browser, you need to understand that it means "reserve" and is not referring to a book you can read. Siret is both dedicated and cooperative, so I feel confident that she will give us good translations and eventually new Members of kalmstrom.com Community.

HelpDesk OSP Already Supports Office 365, Microsoft's New Small Business Platform

As the kalmstrom.com products are built on Microsoft's we continuously have to update them to adapt to and take advantage of new technology. Not this time, though. When Microsoft now announces changes in their online SharePoint platform for small businesses, we are happy to say that our application already works with the new product.

The kalmstrom.com incident management tool, HelpDesk OSP, supports both SharePoint and Office Live Small Business, even if nearly all Community Members prefer to use it for publishing from Outlook to SharePoint. Now Microsoft has announced that they will close down Office Live Small Business, probably from November 2011. Instead they offer the cloud-based Office 365, now available in a Beta version. As HelpDesk OSP works with all SharePoint sites, no matter if they are hosted online or in-house, it already supports Office 365.

The reason why Microsoft will remove Office Live Small Business is that they wish to give small companies a more comprehensive, professional-grade set of productivity tools. In Office 365 Microsoft brings together online versions of several communications and collaboration tools, including Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Lync Online and Office Web Apps. Just like kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, Microsoft has chosen to use a subscription model for their new product.

Community Members can use HelpDesk OSP with Office 365 even today, and very few use Office Live anyway, so we have now removed all references to Office Live from the kalmstrom.com website. From the next version of HelpDesk OSP it will not be possible to connect to Office Live anymore. We will rewrite the manual before the next version of HelpDesk OSP is released, but for now we have chosen to keep the Office Live parts there and just explain that it will be taken out.

We are happy with Microsoft's decision, even if it means some extra work for us to remove the Office Live alternative from our tool. Now Members will get a better alternative than Office Live, and it will be easier to configure HelpDesk OSP when no choice between two platforms has to be made. The continued development and testing of the application will be quicker when we don't have to take Office Live into consideration, and the documentation will also be simpler. Everything points to a great future for both SharePoint and HelpDesk OSP!

Microsoft + Skype = Great Opportunities For kalmstrom.com

After months of speculations about who would buy or partner with Skype, we today have heard the outcome: Microsoft will acquire Skype for 8,5 billion dollars. The affair will bring many benefits to both consumers and enterprises, and it will give kalmstrom.com exciting new opportunities. Our CEO, Peter, has developed add-ons for Microsoft products for twenty years and earned 15 Microsoft certifications. He also has deep knowledge about Skype, as it was only six months ago that he left a position as Product Manager for Skype Toolbars.

When Peter begun working for Skype in 2005 it was still owned by the two creators, and they had recently bought Peter's add-on Outlook Skype. Under Peter's more than five years in the company it grew to be one of the really big, and the Skype product was much improved. That phone numbers on web pages turn into clickable buttons is just what you expect today, but it was only a few years back that Peter initiated the development of this Skype feature.

It seems that Skype will be a separate business division inside Microsoft, called Microsoft Skype. Two giants have joined forces, and it will be very interesting to see what the deal will bring in the future. I am sure I will have reason to come back to it several times ‒ always with the kalmstrom.com angle, of course!

New kalmstrom.com Headquarters On Legendary Island

Kalmstrom Enterprises AB, the company behind the brand kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, has moved its headquarters to an island in the Baltic sea. Öland is situated near the south eastern coast of Sweden.

Even if it is an island it is no tax paradise ‒ quite the contrary, since the local tax is rather high ‒ but it is a paradise when it comes to nature. The southern part is a UNESCO World Heritage, and many other areas are also protected in various ways.

Öland is also famous for the many historical monuments, and on the image above you can see the biggest one, the castle ruin of Borgholm. It is named after the small town you can see behind it. The royal family of Sweden has its summer residence, Solliden, by the sea not far from the ruin ‒ and Sigge and I live in the upper right corner of the image :-)

Borgholm is a good town for a business, because the authorities are eager to attract new companies to the area. A significant part of the population works in the tourist industry, but the internet has given new possibilities to live and work on the island.

The leaders of Borgholm want to take advantage of that and persuade more people to move to the island. Sigge and I did just that, and now we look forward to continue our work in an environment that is both stimulating and healthy.

How To Archive SharePoint List Items

SharePoint gives great customization possibilities, but sometimes it might be difficult to know what can be done and how to do it. All are not SharePoint experts, like kalmstrom.com CEO Peter Kalmstrom!

We of course want to do our best to help users get the most out of our products. Therefore we were happy to document how to archive old helpdesk tickets, when a Community Member who uses the kalmstrom.com application HelpDesk OSP asked about it.

Now we have added instructions for archiving to the HelpDesk OSP Workflow Manual, and we have also published a new video demonstration on the subject.


Since an archiving workflow can be useful for all SharePoint users, not only if you connect Outlook to SharePoint with HelpDesk OSP, we have also added a description in the website Tips section.



Addition in July 2013: Now we also have this demo in a SharePoint 2013 version!

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

Addition, Nov. 2014: For customized archiving to an Access or SQL Server database, use the new kalmstrom.com Solution SP Archive!

kalmstrom.com Products All Get Five Stars On Reopened French Office Marketplace

Microsoft's Office Marketplace is an important marketing channel for the kalmstrom.com products. We get many visitors to the website from Office Marketplace, and those visitors are exactly the people we want to reach. They are often skilled IT professionals who know what they are looking for, and most stay long on our site and study several pages. Many of them also download our products and eventually become Community Members.

Therefore we are happy that the French Office Marketplace now has reopened after being closed for several months. Five of our products are presented there: Calendar Browser, HelpDesk OSP, OLAP Reporting Tool, PF HelpDesk and TimeCard ‒ and they all have highest possible ratings: five stars!

Outlook-SharePoint Publishing and Syncronization

The usability overview and redesign of HelpDesk OSP is finished. Now the kalmstrom.com developers have begun implementing the improvements, but it will still take some time before we can release the new version. I have however published the new logotype and banners on the website, and here I can also show you how the new HelpDesk OSP buttons will look in the Outlook 2010 banner. Nice aren't they?

HelpDesk OSP can be used for anything you wish to publish from Outlook to SharePoint or Office Live ‒ just select a suitable list for it. To make this clearer we have decided to change the captions of the two bigger and most used buttons into "Convert e-mail" and "Blank ticket". The "Convert ticket" button is of course used for e-mail conversion, and data is taken from the e-mail. Use the "Blank ticket" button when data should be filled out manually or taken from the GAL or Contacts.

Both buttons work in two ways: when you click on the button an item will be created in the default SharePoint list, but if you press the arrow all lists used with HelpDesk OSP will be shown. Then you can easily select the right one to publish to.

You may take advantage of your SharePoint site in many different ways. Today I have published a Tip on how to synchronize Outlook calendars, contacts and tasks with SharePoint. It is a quick and simple procedure that may be very useful, but the possibility may be overlooked if you don't know it exists.

New Developer In kalmstrom.com Team

The kalmstrom.com team has a new Member, and I am happy to introduce you to Vijayant Rimza, our new junior developer. After taking his Master of Computer Application exam Vijayant started as trainee with us, and what we saw made us believe that he will eventually be as good as his older brother, our Lead Developer Jayant. Vijayant already has the ambition and the dedication, and he is very intent on improving his skills. Therefore he continues to study in his free time, both English and programming. We give him a warm welcome to the team.

Right now Vijayant is working with the implementation of the new design for HelpDesk OSP, the application for publishing to a SharePoint site via Outlook. His work at kalmstrom.com will be very varied, so it will give him excellent experience and a good opportunity to grow.

Vijayant has a gift that we were not aware of until I asked about his interests for this blog ‒ he paints and does pencil drawings, and very good also! Above you see him looking at one of his comic figures. This means that we suddenly have two artists in the company, even if only graphic designer Jitendra Joshi makes his living from the talent. I wonder how this will affect kalmstrom.com in the future? We surely have a very interesting time ahead of us!