Useful Tools For A Good Support Service

Even if the kalmstrom.com solutions are built to be easy to use, they work in a complex environment and problems may occur. The most vital for a successful support is of course the attitude and skills of the people giving it, but technical aids make a big difference in how smoothly the customers can be assisted. Here are some products we have found useful.

Sharing and organizing support e-mails
The most important support aid is our own application HelpDesk OSP. This Outlook plugin converts incoming e-mails to list items in a SharePoint 2010 intranet, where they can easily be shared and organized.

The kalmstrom.com HelpDesk OSP runs on a server and converts e-mails automatically around the clock seven days a week, and we have customized the SharePoint list to suit our needs. This way we can easily keep track of all cases and have a clear picture of the different issues and the actions taken to solve them.



Online chat service
I have earlier written a whole blog post about the Provide Support chat service we use, but I will still mention it again because this is a great tool. Provide Support were slow in optimizing their tool for Windows 7 so that multiple windows did open when there was a new chat call, but otherwise the tool has worked fine.

This product is easy to use, and the support given by Provide Support is good – via their online chat, of course! The image above shows the control panel Visitors tab, where the support staff can see who is visiting the website and what they are looking at. It is very interesting!


Remote session software
After having used the free Microsoft application SharedView for remote sessions during several years we decided to switch to TeamViewer this summer.

SharedView served us well until we and others started using Internet Explorer 9 and Windows 7. Then SharedView was not reliable anymore, and we found it strange that Microsoft was not keeping their own product up to date even if it was free.

Maybe the problems are fixed now, but we are satisfied with TeamViewer and appreciate that nothing has to be installed on the machine our technicians need to take a look at.

With these tools and the knowledge of the kalmstrom.com support staff,  issues are usally solved without delay, and we know our Community Members appreciate our fast service. It feels great when users and evaluators praise the support team for quick and helpful support, and we do our outmost to live up to it.

New kalmstrom.com Tip: How To Add JavaScript To SharePoint

To help you get the most out of your SharePoint site, Peter Kalmstrom, Microsoft certified SharePoint expert and CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, has published another demo to the kalmstrom.com Tips section.

JavaScript + SharePoint = great possibilities
JavaScript used in a SharePoint site creates a powerful combination. You can put JavaScript in the master page of the site, so that it affects all pages, and you may also make a page layout that affects some pages or only one. With his new demo Peter wants to push those in the right direction who know how to use JavaScript but have not yet tried it with SharePoint. There are a lot of instructions on more advanced details available out there but not so much on how to actually do it in the right way from the beginning.

Hello World dialog
As a simple example Peter shows how to integrate a dialog with the text "Hello World" in a SharePoint 2010 site with the help of JavaScript ‒ and how to make it stay there! The trick is to use the Content Editor web part, which allows you to embed any markup right in the page. If you just add the piece of JavaScript to the HTML code of a page, it will not be saved. Peter also demonstrates how you can test and troubleshoot the JavaScript you have created. Welcome to have a look and try it yourself!

Connect Outlook to your SharePoint site
To get the most out of your SharePoint site you should also connect Outlook to it. HelpDesk OSP is a kalmstrom.com Outlook add-on that converts incoming e-mails to items in any SharePoint list. With HelpDesk OSP you may also publish to SharePoint directly from Outlook. This application helps you track, share and distribute issues also within a group that is geographically spread.  HelpDesk OSP is used by many Members of kalmstrom.com Community, and we also utilize it ourselves for the kalmstrom.com support e-mails. 

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

Export Excel Lists and Connect Them In SharePoint

The kalmstrom.com CEO, Peter Kalmstrom, is a Microsoft certified expert on both Excel and SharePoint, and he is happy to share his knowledge. Now he has published another demo on how to transfer data from Excel to SharePoint. This time he shows how to export Excel lists, and then he explains how to connect the two new SharePoint lists on a page.

If you use SharePoint but don’t know how to export Excel lists to your site or how to connect lists in SharePoint, I sincerely recommend you to watch it. Also if you already know it, you might still get some other useful tips from Peter’s demo.

Export Excel lists to SharePoint
Peter starts with exporting his Excel lists “Customers” and “Countries” to a SharePoint site. In the “Customers” list there are some multiple line fields that cannot be used for sorting and filtering but Peter shows how to change them into single lines.

Connect SharePoint lists
Peter continues by showing how to connect the Countries list and the Customers list on a page, so that he can select a country and see what customers come from that country.

The possibility to connect two SharePoint lists to each other on a separate page is very useful. On the kalmstrom.com intranet SharePoint site there is one list for Customers and one for Purchases. Of course you can have all the info in one list, but loading, filtering and sorting works better if we separate the data into two lists. The two lists are connected on a CustomerPurchases page, though, and when I open a customer organization on that page I can see all data for that organization + all their purchase information.

More info on the kalmstrom.com website
In the Tips section of www.kalmstrom.com the various tricks are listed in the order Peter shows them, and for each trick the steps he performs in the video demonstration are described more in detail. Welcome to have a look at the article “Export Excel lists to a SharePoint site and connect them”. The kalmstrom.com Tips section also contains pages with tips on Outlook, Skype, Exchange, SMS and more. These tips are not directly connected to the kalmstrom.com products for Office, Exchange and SharePoint ‒ for them we have a lot of documentation on other pages. Here we have instead gathered information that may be useful for many, either you are a kalmstrom.com Community Member or not. Welcome to see for yourself!

Integrate Excel in SharePoint With Excel Web Services

Another demo by the CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has been published on the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website. This time Peter shows how to embed an Excel model on a SharePoint site. It is done with the help of Excel Web Services, which is included in the SharePoint 2010 Enterprise license and also in the more advanced Office 365 licenses.

Excel model
As example Peter has chosen a model that shows how much revenues in dollars change when sales increase ‒ or decrease ‒ with certain percentages, and he starts by creating that model in Excel 2010. When the table is finished he also makes a graph of the data, to show the changes in a clearer way.

Save to SharePoint
In the second step Peter saves his model table and graph to the company’s SharePoint site, so that people who don’t use Excel also can see it. Maybe you even want to display it to all employees on the intranet homepage? Peter shows how to do that also. 

SharePoint and Excel expert knowledge
Peter Kalmstrom is a Microsoft Certified specialist on both Excel and SharePoint, and he has promised to take his time to make more demos of this kind in the future. So if you want to learn some more tips and tricks on Excel or SharePoint, keep an eye on this blog and on the kalmstrom.com Tips pages!

Peter Kalmstrom, SharePoint Expert, Software Developer and Professor

The kalmstrom.com CEO is a true renaissance man. Peter is not only a skilled software developer with expert, Microsoft certified knowledge of Office and SharePoint, but he is also a good professor. He likes to teach, and therefore he has chosen to conduct a number of advanced courses for IT professionals.

SharePoint development

Last week Peter had a‎ 5-day SharePoint-course for developers on the subject of  Developing Solutions with SharePoint 2010. The course gives an overview of all the different kinds of SharePoint development. Both server-side and client-side data access methods are covered, and the attendees get a chance to try as well Silverlight as Java script and .NET coding against SharePoint.

SharePoint a flexible tool

Lately Peter has held no less than four different whole-week courses, covering SharePoint from the developer, administrator, power user and designer/

webmaster perspectives.

Peter finds SharePoint an extremely wide platform, with an immense potential for building applications, collaborating and managing documents. By teaching Peter can let others share his knowledge about all of these things.

Rewarding task

Peter himself also learns a lot from the attendees on his courses. They come from large Swedish organizations and consulting agencies and possess experiences that Peter is interested in learning from. He brings his new knowledge to the kalmstrom.com team and lets it influence his decisions, and that way Peter's teaching sessions in the end also benefit kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

ShareTask For Android Next kalmstrom.com App

August has been a month of several important announcements in the IT business. Steve Jobs has stepped down as CEO of Apple, Hewlett-Packard wants to spin off its PC division and Google will buy Motorola Mobility.

As we see it now, only the Google-Motorola news will directly affect the future of kalmstrom.com. It will not mean any big changes of our plans, but since Motorola for several years has had Google's Android as the only operating system in all of their smart phone devices, we think Android will grew stronger with Google's acquisition of Motorola Mobility. This has made us prioritize something we have been talking about for a while: a ShareTask for Android devices.

Even if kalmstrom.com does not strive to be big on smart phone apps, we want to help our customers take advantage of the mobility benefits they give. Therefore we have begun developing apps in fields close to our own products together with partners who are experts on development for mobile devices. ShareTask for Android will be such a product.

In cooperation with softage.ru, kalmstrom.com has earlier developed an app for iPhone, iPad and iPod touch that gives you the SharePoint Task list directly in the handheld. You can edit the tasks, add new ones, attach images and much more with just a finger. Now we want to give Android users the same possibility, and earlier this week we signed the contract with our partner.

We have not only created ShareTask together with softage.ru but also iNameDays, an app that adds name days in the standard iOS calendar, so I feel sure that our new project will be successful. I will come back to you about it as soon as there are more news to tell

HelpDesk OSP For Outlook And SharePoint - Version 3 Released Today

Today kalmstrom.com has released a new version of the incident management tool for Outlook and SharePoint, HelpDesk OSP. I have written about the new design and the Blank ticket options earlier, so here I will concentrate on another important improvement  ‒ the facilitation of the login to SharePoint from Outlook.

That the login to the SharePoint site is easy is of course essential for users of HelpDesk OSP, so version 3 has several enhancements to simplify it. For example, HelpDesk OSP now tries to load the default network credentials for authentication and only asks for credentials if there is no success. HelpDesk OSP V3 will also correct the path if a user writes the list URL instead of the site URL when selecting SharePoint site. Our support staff has seen that error quite often even though we have done our best to inform about the correct way to do it. For use with Office 365 we have added a new authentication type: Claims-based Authentication.

Please refer to the HelpDesk OSP Revisions page for a full list of enhancements and bug fixes. Community Members are welcome to upgrade, but you will need a new registration key this time. Contact me, and I will send it to you.

If you are new to HelpDesk OSP, I recommend you to try it! You may evaluate the add-on for 30 days without obligations, and remember that it works with all SharePoint sites and templates. HelpDesk OSP is a very versatile tool for any kinds of publishing from Outlook to SharePoint.

Connect Office 365 To Cloud-Based HelpDesk From kalmstrom.com

In the blog post from 6 June, "kalmstrom.com Goes Cloudy", I mentioned that we have started developing a totally cloud-based version of HelpDesk OSP, the kalmstrom.com add-on that connects Outlook to SharePoint. The new version will be called HelpDesk OSP Azure, and  today I can tell you more about it.

HelpDesk OSP Azure will run on Windows Azure and convert e-mails received in Exchange 2010, in-house or online (Office 365), into list items on a SharePoint site. This conversion will be automatic and happen 24/7 with a minimum of configuration. Just like with HelpDesk OSP it will be possible to decide in what way the e-mails should be converted ino tickets, and you can of course use your custom SharePoint list fields also.

You will access HelpDesk OSP Azure directly via the web, and above you can see the user interface for the login page. On the HelpDesk OSP Plans page, Peter explains in an animation how HelpDesk OSP Azure will work. Welcome to have a look into the future!

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!