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!

How To Embed A YouTube Video In A SharePoint Site

Our CEO, Peter Kalmstrom continues to share his vast knowledge of SharePoint with useful tips published on the kalmstrom.com website. Now he has released a demonstration on how to embed a video from YouTube into a SharePoint site.

All from guidelines to entertainment
Video demonstrations like the one above can be very useful to have on a SharePoint intranet, for instructions, lectures, information or maybe just for fun! A video from the latest office party will be a popular addition to the site, and it will enhance the good spirits within the group.

Not as easy as you might think
To embed a YouTube video in SharePoint one would think that you only have to add the embed code from YouTube into the SharePoint HTML, just like you do when you embed it in another website. And if you do so it looks very good at first ‒ but only until you save. Then the video disappears again.

Add a Web Part
To make the video stay also when you have saved the page, you must add a Content Editor Web Part and then add the embed code there. Peter shows you how to do that in a few easy steps. Try it, and you will have yet another way to use your SharePoint site!

kalmstrom.com demos
On the kalmstrom.com website you cannot only find demos in the Tips section. We also use them to present the various kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, and each one of the products has a Demonstrations page with a number of recorded instructions on installation, configuration and usage. The video demonstrations are of course not as easy to update as the manuals, but they are good complements that really show users and evaluators “how to do it”.

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!

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.