The kalmstrom.com VIP Status – What Does It Mean?

The kalmstrom.com SharePoint and Outlook Solutions are licensed with a subscription system, and there are three subscription levels. All three levels include free use of the kalmstrom.com software, support and upgrades, but the Premium Subscription level also includes some other benefits. One of them is called VIP status.

Support priority
The most important part of the VIP status is perhaps the first priority of support cases. We of course try to help all kalmstrom.com Subscribers as soon as possible, but if a Premium Subscriber gets a problem with their kalmstrom.com Solution, the team postpones all other tasks to assist the Premium Subscriber as soon as possible. The support mailbox and the online chat are supervised nearly 24/7 even if the office is not officially open, so we can act very quickly if needed.

“In the event we had problems with TimeCard the people and helpdesk of Kalmstrom did a great job in solving the issue on a very short notice”, says Jeroen Graafland at Hay Group, a long time Premium Subscriber. And he adds: “When we discover a bug this is solved on a very short notice and deployed very easily via the update function of TimeCard.”

Influence on development
Another important factor for the Premium Subscribers is the chance to influence future development. Our CEO Peter makes the final decision, as he is the one who can best judge the paths kalmstrom.com should follow towards the future, but he does his very best to include the requests from Premium Subscribers in his plans.

No registration
Premium Subscribers have a special copy of their kalmstrom.com Solution, with the Premium organization logotype on the major forms. We return their confidence by making the Premium copy register free, so VIP Subscribers do not have to hassle with registration keys.

Worth the extra cost?
The Minimum and Medium subscriptions give good value for money, so we don’t recommend the Premium Subscription for all. If you have a small team managing incoming e-mails with Folder HelpDesk or HelpDesk OSP there is no need for a Premium Subscription.

But say that you are a big organization and have one hundred people reporting their time with TimeCard or booking resources with Calendar Browser – then we do recommend for you to consider the Premium alternative. It is there, among big companies and state and municipal authorities, we find the kalmstrom.com Premium Subscribers.

More info
Welcome to contact us if you have questions about VIP status and Premium Subscription. We will do our best to help you judge if it is the right alternative for your organization!

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

(This blog post was updated 4 March 2015)

Exchange Resource Calendars Or Calendar Browser for Outlook?

Sometimes people ask us why they should use Calendar Browser for Outlook when they already have the built-in Exchange Resource Calendars. The answer is that Calendar Browser supplies a range of features that cannot be found in Exchange Resource Calendars. These are some things you can only do in Calendar Browser:

Book extra services
With Calendar Browser you may place a supply order with each booking, like catering services, conference material or IT equipment. The admin defines a list of extras that may be booked, and then the user just click
a button in the appointment and fill out the number of items in the dialog that opens.




Search free resources
Calendar Browser has a search function that lets you search for resources that are free on a specific date and time and have a specified number of seats.

Calendar Descriptions
Calendar Browser helps you create elaborate descriptions of each resource. You can describe your calendars with full html, including pictures, links and dynamic content. Use a URL or take advantage of the Calendar Browser HTML editor, where you may either create your description directly or paste existing code.

Structured booking
Many organizations require a Project and/or Cost Center to be filled out when a resource is booked. This may be set to mandatory with Calendar Browser, and the kalmstrom.com add-on can also prevent double bookings or recurring bookings.

Overview of bookings
Even though the ability to view calendars side by side is getting better with each version of Outlook, Calendar Browser´s Overview feature contains many views that Outlook itself cannot yet match, for example the month joined month view and the printable schedule view. There are also dedicated views for showing all extra services booked for a particular day, allowing service staff to print a list of what they are to assemble for the day´s meetings. All of these views are nicely printable.

Statistics
Once your resources are being booked it is only a matter of time before someone asks you for statistics on the usage. Calendar Browser can output all of its data to an SQL or Access database. We also provide a fully featured statistics tool, our own OLAP Reporting Tool, that will allow you to analyze the data in a dynamic way. Once the old appointments are safely in the database you can option to remove them from the Outlook calendars, which improves Exchange performance.

Try it!
Does it sound interesting? If you want to see if Calendar Browser really can help your organization to get a more efficient resource booking system than the Exchange Resource Calendars, you are welcome to download and try the full version of Calendar Browser for 30 days without any obligations. We give support during the evaluation period too, so please contact us if you have questions.

Outlook Booking Tool Updated With Support For Office 365 And Resource Grouping

kalmstrom.com has today released version 7.1 of the resource booking application for Outlook, Calendar Browser . The first version was released over ten years ago, and ever since then this Outlook Calendar tool has been improved and adapted to new technologies.

Outlook Resource Calendars
The CEO and creator of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions got the idea to Calendar Browser when he was looking for a good resource booking software for a client and did not find anything on the market. Peter then decided to use what the client already had and liked - Outlook and Exchange - and built an add-on for it.

He let his client save info about the organization’s bookable resources in calendars, and people booked the resources by simply creating an appointment in the applicable calendar. Calendar Browser was born, and since then it has grown to a mature and popular product that is used worldwide.

Multiple installations
One of the new features in the latest release of Calendar Browser is the possibility to make several installations in the same Outlook. For big organizations with many bookable resources this is an important enhancement: Fewer resource calendars must be loaded if you separate them into several installations. Maybe all users do not need to choose between all resources, and then it is convenient for them to never see those resources at all.

Group Calendars after content
With multiple installations the administrator can group the resources in ways that make them easier to manage. Maybe you have rooms at several locations, or maybe you have several different kinds of bookable resources? Group them into separate installations, and the users can add the groups they need to their Outlooks and skip the rest.I have already written a blog article about multiple installations of Calendar Browser, so please read it if you want a more detailed description. There is also a faq on how to perform a multiple installation.

Support for Office 365
As usual kalmstrom.com aims to support the latest technologies, and therefore we have made Calendar Browser V7.1 compatible with Office 365, Microsoft’s new cloud-based platform. This means that all major kalmstrom.com products now have support for Office 365.

View Personal Calendars
Calendar Browser may be used with all kinds of Outlook calendars - public folders, direct booking mailboxes or personal calendars. Therefore Calendar Browser is not only a booking tool but also a tool for viewing calendars. Instead of adding resource calendars you may add the calendar of each user. The Overview feature of Calendar Browser can then display several kinds of views of the content in many people's calendars.

Upgrade or Try
Members of kalmstrom.com Community are welcome to upgrade to version 7.1 of Calendar Browser without any cost. If your organization don’t use this kalmstrom.com tool yet, you are very welcome to download and evaluate Calendar Browser for 30 days without any obligations. We will give you all possible assistance to make it a happy experience!

2011 - An Eventful kalmstrom.com Year

The year 2011 was a year full of action when it comes to world politics, and at the end of the year we have many worries and unanswered questions. You know them as well as I do, so here I will instead concentrate on kalmstrom.com. That makes it possible for me to write a happier blog!

120 blog posts in 2011
One year is a long time in the IT business, where changes happen quickly and we hear news nearly every day. In 2011 I wrote 119 blog articles, except this one, and most of them were about kalmstrom.com events. If you want more info about something I mention here, just use the Search function to the left to find the post or posts.

New staff
In the beginning of 2011 several new people joined the team, and this has had ‒ and will have ‒ a strong impact on the kalmstrom.com software. Most visible has of course been the work of graphic designer Jitendra Joshi, but our three new developers has contributed just as much.

Silver Competencies
One of the new developers, Vijayant Rimza, has tested our products for a Microsoft Silver Partnership. They passed the tests, and as we also fulfilled the other qualifications we could gain no less than two Silver Competencies, first Independent Software Vendor and then Business Intelligence. A warm thank you from the whole team to the Community Members who helped us with references for Microsoft. The Silver competencies, together with Peter’s personal Microsoft certifications, make kalmstrom.com Business Solutions stand out on the market, and we have already noticed an increased interest for our Office applications.

Product updates
All kalmstrom.com products have been updated, and most of them several times. HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint and the resource booking application Calendar Browser have new major version numbers, V3 and V7, and PF HelpDesk has reached both 11.2 and 11.3. kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, The kalmstrom.com tool for time reporting from within the Outlook calendar had version 4.3 the whole year, but in January 2012 we plan to release kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ons, TimeCard V4.4 with new, interesting features.

iOS apps
During 2011 kalmstrom.com Business Solutions also published two apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod: iNameDays gives you name days in the standard calendar, and with ShareTask you get the SharePoint tasks into your handheld and can manage them with a finger.

Extended compatibility
When Microsoft introduces new platforms the kalmstrom.com developers are usually quick in making our products compatible. In 2011 we extended our product support to Office 365, and the Windows Azure database was added as a third alternative for our Outlook issue tracking tool PF HelpDesk. We also started the development of a new application, HelpDesk OSP Azure, which we first will use for the kalmstrom.com support before we start marketing it.

New Partner
In May kalmstrom.com begun cooperating with a new partner, and for the first time ever we agreed to market a product that is not our own: PamFax. Peter was involved in the development of the first version of this convenient tool for online faxing when he was product manager at Skype, though, and we also use it ourselves. I translated the application into Swedish, and our new Sales and Relations Officer, Siret Toots, made the Estonian translation.

More extensive Tips section
The Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website is popular, and during the year we have added a number of new articles. By the end of 2011 Peter made a series of demonstrations for various useful tricks with Excel and SharePoint.

Now we look forward to the new year with great confidence. There is no crisis in kalmstrom.com! I will come back with a blog post about future development next week, and until then I wish all blog readers a great New Years Eve!

How TimeCard Can Report Time For People Who Don’t Even Use TimeCard!

TimeCard “Report on behalf of” feature
In an earlier blog post about TimeCard I introduced a new feature that will come with the next version of this kalmstrom.com application for time reporting from within the Outlook calendar. The new TimeCard feature is called “Report on behalf of”, and it allows one person to report the time other people have appointed in their calendars.

No TimeCard installation
The kalmstrom.com team of course wants everyone to use TimeCard, but with the new feature it is actually possible to report time also for people who don’t have TimeCard installed on their computers. It could be for example someone who needs to use a Mac instead of a PC. Let’s call this person Linda.

Shared calendar
In this case a person with TimeCard installed - I will call him Jack - must have access to Linda’s Outlook calendar. This calendar may very well be on Microsoft's cloud based Office 365, if Linda and Jack are not connected in a local network.

Add person to the TimeCard database
For this to work Linda has to be added to the central database used for TimeCard reports. If Linda is not there the first time Jack reports her time, he will be asked if he wants to add her. Adding persons to the database may also be done manually or with a little tool for add/edit/delete users that the kalmstrom.com team has developed and will send to Community Members on request.

Tagging appointments with time reporting data
As Linda has no TimeCard application installed, she cannot tag her appointments with the values that convert them into timesheets. Instead John will to that for her. This is easily managed, since the values for Customer and Project ‒ or whatever John’s and Linda’s company has chosen as metadata visible to the end users ‒ are selected from dropdowns.

Reporting time
When John has tagged Linda’s calendar appointments with TimeCard values he simply clicks the OK button to report her time. When Linda is added to the database and Jack has entered her calendar, her name comes up as the default name in the User dropdown John can choose from when he reports time. To be sure everything is right he is also asked if he is sure he wants to report time for Linda.

Staying in Outlook
As TimeCard is fully integrated in Outlook John never has to leave it when he reports time. After reporting Linda's hours he may go to a new calendar and repeat the process for another person ‒ or continue working with other tasks in Outlook.

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.

Absurd Call From CNET

In August I blogged about the unacceptable wrapping the cnet site Download.com had begun practicing. They wrapped other downloads into installers, so when downloading from Download.com you could get unwanted programs that made changes to your computer and could be difficult to get rid of.

Product downloads from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions must NEVER give anything else than the clean and genuine software the downloader wants to try or use, so we decided to remove all our products from the cnet site.

After I had explained why we wanted to withdraw cnet's right to host our products, they were quickly taken away without further comments. However, today we got a "heartbreaking" e-mail from cnet: "We miss you ‒ please come back!"

In this impudent e-mail cnet tries to entice kalmstrom.com to return to Download.com, and their method is outright shameless: they offer us a chance to win hotel nights, a flight or entrance tickets to the International CES in Las Vegas! (Which by the way is free if you registered before 1 September.) I feel both angry and ready to laugh at this ridiculous attempt.

We require a lot more than that to budge from our convictions. To give up our principles and let someone tamper with our installation files would be to give up kalmstrom.com!

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.

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.

kalmstrom.com Selected For Excellent Win7 Development

kalmstrom.com products were selected when CNET wanted to show applications whose developers have been extra skillful in taking advantage of the possibilities that Windows 7 gives them. As there are nearly 3 million developers building on Windows out there, we feel we have the right to be proud!
Around 100 applications were chosen, and only 17 in the group Business Related Software. No less than 3 of those 17 come from kalmstrom.com! Both the Workgroup and the Single version of TimeCard are included, as well as HelpDesk OSP, the kalmstrom.com application that connects Outlook to SharePoint or Office Live. We will do our best to live up to the honor and be in the frontline also in the future.