Issue Tracking And User Support In Outlook

Version 12 of the kalmstrom.com issue tracking application for Outlook will soon be released, and today I can show you the new slide show. If you are into user support or incident management  I suggest you have a look at it, to get an introduction to Folder HelpDesk!

Convert incoming Outlook e-mails into support tickets
With Folder HelpDesk incoming e-mails are converted into support tickets right inside Outlook, and a workgroup can co-operate on taking care of incidents, solving issues and giving user support without ever having to leave Outlook. The product is highly customizable, and you may use either a shared mailbox or a public folder to share the support tickets.

Slide show presentation
I have written about Folder HelpDesk before, both generally about version 12 and in descriptions of the automatic e-mails sent out by the application and of the e-mail history options. Maybe you have read these blog posts and want to know more? The slide show below gives you an introduction to Folder HelpDesk.

Helpdesk usage and settings
The show begins with some user support cases, where incidents are reported by telephone or e-mail and converted into tickets. After that presentation there are some slides for the administrator, where we show how to make the most common settings. Much more info can be found in the Folder HelpDesk user manual, which will soon be released also. The slide show is just an overview over how our issue tracking application works.

Statistics and reporting tool
Folder HelpDesk has an integrated statistics tool, OLAP Reporting Tool for Excel. This is an advanced report generator which gives managements a useful tool for creating all kinds of reports and study how tickets have been handled.

Knowledge base
There is also a knowledge base connected to Folder HelpDesk. Before a support case is closed you can save the ticket as a knowledge base article by just pressing a button in the Folder HelpDesk ticket. As the knowledge base articles can be full text searched and also sorted in categories, it is easy to find the solution to an earlier issue if it should occur again. The name of the knowledge base is KBase, and just like OLAP Reporting Tool it is also sold as a separate product.



Many organizations worldwide already know how the kalmstrom.com helpdesks can facilitate their user support and issue tracking. Folder HelpDesk has been on the market for 12 years - earlier under the names Outlook HelpDesk and Public Folder HelpDesk - and we will continue adding new features that will make the issue tracking even more smooth and easy.

Multiple Options For The Folder HelpDesk E-mail Thread

With Folder HelpDesk for Outlook you can convert incoming e-mails into tickets to make them easy to manage and co-operate on. Formatting and attachments are included in the tickets, and they can be organized in many different ways. Here is how Folder HelpDesk looks in Outlook:

All about one case in one ticket
If you work with support, handle incidents or manage incoming e-mails in some other way, you know that e-mails often go back and forth a couple of times between the helpdesk staff and the person who reports an issue before the problem is solved. During this process, and also for following up, it is convenient to have all these e-mails gathered in one ticket, and with Folder HelpDesk this may be done in different ways.

Automatic conversion
You may choose to let Folder HelpDesk monitor an Outlook folder and automatically convert all e-mails that come in to that folder into tickets. Outlook rules can be used for making sure the correct e-mails are converted. For the automatic conversion we offer two different kinds of e-mail threading. You may choose one of the methods or use both at the same time, which ever suits your organization best.

E-mail history in ticket body
When you select to save e-mails in the ticket only one ticket is created – when the case is first reported. After that all e-mails concerning the same case are added to the first ticket body in chronological order. Redundant forward chunks of the e-mails are removed through an intelligent algorithm, and only the required and latest replies are added to the body portion along with the HTML formatting and with a header portion that includes when the e-mail was received, from whom and so on.

E-mail history in subfolders
When the option to save e-mail history in subfolders is selected, subfolders with the ticket ID number will be created automatically under the Folder HelpDesk folder in Outlook. All the e-mails connected to the same ticket ID will be saved in the same subfolder. In the first ticket there will be two new tabs, Sent E-mails and Received E-mails, from where the e-mails may be opened, copied or deleted.
 
Manual addition to any ticket
You may also convert the e-mails you want to create tickets from manually, by simply pressing a Folder HelpDesk button in the Outlook ribbon. In this case you may take the e-mail from any folder. A choice is given: create a new ticket or add the e-mail to an existing ticket. When you select the "Add" option you can search for earlier tickets in several ways, and you may also press the button “Only caller tickets”. Then all earlier tickets from the same caller will be shown, and you may easily select the one you want to add the new e-mail to. In this case the new e-mail is added to the body of the existing ticket.   

New version
Folder HelpDesk is the new name for the kalmstrom.com long time flagship product Public Folder HelpDesk. From version 12 we will remove “Public” from the name, as the application may be installed in any Outlook folder. Most of the features described here also exist in the current version, but in version 12 we will add new possibilities. This, along with many other improvements, makes the release of Folder HelpDesk something worth waiting for. In a couple of months we hope to give you a chance to try it!

Enhanced Auto-Emails In New Folder HelpDesk For Outlook

The kalmstrom.com issue tracking add-on for Outlook has the capacity to send out a number of automatic e-mails. The upcoming version 12 will have nicer default templates, and it will also be easier to customize them.

Run the helpdesk in any Outlook folder
We plan to release the new version of the kalmstrom.com Outlook helpdesk in about two months. Just like before it will work completely inside Outlook, and to emphasize that it might be installed in any Outlook folder we have decided to rename it. From version 12 the current Public Folder HelpDesk will be called Folder HelpDesk.

Enhanced default templates
Folder HelpDesk will not have the same default templates for automatic e-mails as earlier versions. If you have used or tried PF HelpDesk you know that the templates could have a nicer look. Our thought earlier was just to give a simple structure for the users to customize, but from version 12 all the default templates have a more elegant design from the beginning. I hope you like the template below, for the automatic e-mail to the caller when a ticket is closed.

HTML Editor for customizations
To make customizations of the templates easier, Folder HelpDesk has an HTML Editor under the Templates tab in the Settings, where all the different templates are gathered. You don’t even have to know HTML code to make changes in them. The Editor is of the type WYSIWYG – what you see is what you get – so you can change the text as you like in the editor, and the HTML code will be changed accordingly.

New checkbox for sending
Folder HelpDesk has a checkbox where you can enable/disable each automatic e-mail. When you wish to use the default text for the caller e-mail when a ticket is closed, just check the box at that template and an e-mail with the correct info will be sent to the correct caller each time a Folder HelpDesk ticket is closed. If you want to change the template, just do that first and then check the box for sending.


Many new features
The new templates and the HTML editor are only two of the many new enhancements in Folder HelpDesk. As this is one of the most popular kalmstrom.com applications many are waiting for the new version. When your organization is a Member of the kalmstrom.com Community you may upgrade for free. The only thing we request from you is some patience until the release!

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)

New Square Logo for kalmstrom.com After Microsoft Remark

The regular kalmstrom.com logotype in the head of this blog is rectangular, but we have felt an increasing need for a good square logotype also. I therefore asked our graphic artist Jitendra Joshi to create a square logo for use with social networks as Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, on Microsoft Pinpoint and in other places that require square logos.

 I wanted Jitendra to create something that would show that we built our applications on Microsoft's products, and he came up with a suggestion that we all liked. Unfortunately Microsoft did not like it as much as the kalmstrom.com team did!

The old square logotype was a mixture of icons that reminded of Microsoft icons for the platforms kalmstrom.com build on ‒ Outlook, Excel and SharePoint. Jitendra also added the globe present in the Tallstugan and the HelpDesk OSP logotypes, and that globe was the only part that could stay.

Here I show the old logotype, probably for the last time. It is not worth jeopardizing our good relationship with Microsoft because of a logo, so when the PinPoint staff complained about the logo with their icons we knew we must remove it. Jitendra had to create something new to replace the unsuitable logotype.

Siret and Jayant gave helpful suggestions, and the result was the logo you see above this blog post. For smaller sizes we chose a white band with the kalmstrom.com text. We think this new logotype is catching and tells how widespread the kalmstrom.com products are, so we feel satisfied with the change. The Microsoft staff also liked the new logotype, so now everyone is happy again!

kalmstrom.com Earns Microsoft Silver Competency Of Business Intelligence

In August I had the great joy of blogging about the first Microsoft Silver Competency for kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, which was awarded to us in our capacity of Independent Software Vendor. As only few of the Microsoft partners reach this level, the first Silver Competency was an important step that made the kalmstrom.com Office applications stand out on the marketplace.

We have seen a significant raise in the number of serious evaluators this autumn, and I think the Microsoft Silver Partnership is at least part of the reason. Now we have achieved yet another Silver Competency, and even if it does not feel as fantastic as the first one we are happy about it.

BI Expertise
To gain the Business Intelligence Silver Competency we of course had to show Microsoft that we have the required know-how also in this field. Two assessments had to be taken: Sales and Marketing + Microsoft Licensing Online. I managed both!

Another important factor in earning the BI Competency was that all the more advanced Outlook add-ons from kalmstrom.com have an integrated statistics application, OLAP Reporting Tool. One of them had to pass a Microsoft test, and we chose to enter with PF HelpDesk, the issue tracking software that works inside Outlook.

The third requirement was met when helpful Members of kalmstrom.com Community gave us the right to use them as Microsoft references for our products. A warm thank you from the whole kalmstrom.com team!

Updated Silver Partner logo
If you look at the kalmstrom.com homepage (or above), you can see that the kalmstrom.com Microsoft Partner logotype has been updated with the new BI Competency. This shows new visitors that kalmstrom.com Business Solutions holds a high standard and is reliable and experienced at working with Microsoft technologies.

Licensing and marketing benefits
To show their appreciation of the Silver Competency, Microsoft gives us several advantages over other partners, like a number of MSDN Subscriptions. They are valuable to the kalmstrom.com team, as they give us most of what we need to develop applications on the Microsoft platform.

Microsoft also gives us a prioritized marketplace exposure and access to various marketing resources. All this means that the second Silver Competency will help kalmstrom.com Business Solutions grow and develop even better products than before!

OLAP Reporting Tool Gives Community Statistics

Last week kalmstrom.com Community celebrated 2 years, and we have now looked at the statistics a bit, of course using our own applicationOLAP Reporting Tool. Here are some interesting facts and changes.

How many products?
Community Members are entitled to use the kalmstrom.com applications freely, without any extra costs for additional products. This is obviously not the feature that dips the scales in our favor, though, because ever since the start most of the Community Members have been using only one of the kalmstrom.com products.

The main selling point when choosing kalmstrom. com is something else. Organizations search for a product that fits their needs, and when they discover the kalmstrom.com solution they find it worth the money regardless of the possibility to have more. Today 87 % of the Community Members are using one product, 8 % are using two and only 5 % are using three products. Nevertheless we will keep that option open to all our current and future Members.

What products?
PF HelpDesk has been the kalmstrom.com flagship for many years, and this tool for issue tracking within Outlook is still the most popular one. After it TimeCard for Outlook and HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint has approximately the same number of user organizations. Calendar Browser is used by only 10 % of the Community Members, but during the last few months we have had two new Premium Members on our resource booking application for Outlook. As we also see an increasing interest in evaluating Calendar Browser, we believe it will have a higher user percentage next year.

Who are the Community Members?
All kinds of organizations have joined kalmstrom.com Community, from small local businesses over public and governmental entities to large worldwide companies. It is fascinating to see how the percentage of Members from outside Europe and USA has grown during the two years of kalmstrom.com Community. From 8 % after 6 months the figure has now risen to 22 %.

We still get most new Community Members from Western Europe and the US, but we are excited about the kalmstrom.com expansion in other parts of the world. The fact that they know about and trust kalmstrom.com Business Solutions in New Zeeland, Australia and Canada is no surprise, but we now also have Members in South Africa, Russia, United Arab Emirates, Singapore, Hong Kong, Greenland and Barbados ‒ just to mention some of the new countries.

Discount to schools and charities
As both Sigge, Siret and I are former teachers it feels good to be able to give a 50 % discount on the Community fees to educational institutions. The kalmstrom.com products are especially popular among universities. We also grant this discount to charities, and we hope it will give them a possibility to do a bit more good with the money they else would have paid for software ‒ or give them the possibility to work more efficiently with software they could not afford at all without the discount. The percentage of schools and charities has been relatively stable at around 18 % all the time during the two years since we launched kalmstrom.com Community.

Promising future for kalmstrom.com Community
Looking back gives knowledge and inspiration, but mostly the kalmstrom.com team is looking forward instead. We study the development in our branch, carefully choose our battles and select the challenges that might be useful to overcome or sidestep. The future for kalmstrom.com Community looks bright, and next blog will probably be about future plans or new releases again.

HelpDesk OSP For Outlook And SharePoint - See The New Design

Soon kalmstrom.com Business Solutions will release a new version of HelpDesk OSP, and today I can show you the new slideshow for this incident management tool. Most screenshots come from Outlook 2010 and a SharePoint 2010 site on Offce 365. It might take some time for the slideshow to load, so I suggest you read this blog post before you take a look.

Version 3 has a new design, which we hope will make it very user friendly. After listening to input from Community Members, we have also decided to change the captions on two of the Outlook buttons, to better explain what it is all about. "Create ticket" has become "Convert e-mail", and "New ticket" is "Blank ticket" in V3.

The Blank ticket button now gives the alternative to create a totally new ticket, without picking  caller info from the Outlook Contacts or GAL. Also this feature comes after a request from a Member organization, where people wanted to use HelpDesk OSP for entering new list items to the company's SharePoint intranet directly from Outlook.

More new features have been added to the new version of HelpDesk OSP, and I will tell you about them when I announce the release. We have just a few small adjustments left, so it might even be this week!

kalmstrom.com Uses, Resells And Develops For Office 365

The kalmstrom.com team is geographically distributed, so our intranet is a vital place for sharing and cooperation. It simply must work, and therefore only the best is good enough. We begun using SharePoint very early, and as our CEO Peter is a Microsoft certified SharePoint specialist he has been able to configure the site to make the most of it.

When Office 365 was introduced Peter saw the advantages of this cloud based service, which also has SharePoint 2010. A subscription was necessary anyway, because we need to test our products with Office 365, but Peter decided that we should use Office 365 for our internal purposes too.

We manage our support e-mails with our own product HelpDesk OSP, and today we have it running all the time on a server, automatically converting e-mails from our OWA on Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite into tickets on our SharePoint site in Office 365. We will however soon start testing our new HelpDesk OSP Azure. It will run on Windows Azure and convert e-mails received in our Office 365 Outlook into list items on our Office 365 SharePoint site.

As you understand the kalmstrom.com team has a deep understanding of Microsoft's cloud-based platforms. It was a logical step to apply for authorization to resell Microsoft Online Services. We were granted this right in July, and we have already sold Office 365 to one company after advising them on what subscription and configuration would suit their needs. Always feel welcome to contact us for consultation!

PF HelpDesk V11.3 Released

Late Friday night we could release version 11.3 of Public Folder HelpDesk, the kalmstrom.com incident management tool for Outlook, and during the weekend the updated documentation has been published too. In my blog post of 21 July I told you about the support for Office 365 and the removal of the folder homepage, and I also mentioned some other improvements that will make PF HelpDesk even better for new and current users.

Another enhancement for evaluators is that the PF HelpDesk Example data is no longer dependent on the Office Web Components. The OWC have been very convenient and we have used them in our products for a long time, but since they are not installed automatically with Outlook 2007 and 2010 we want to gradually transfer to other techniques. Even if the Outlook 2003 OWC works fine with later Outlook versions also, it means extra trouble to download and install them if you don't already have them on your PC. In the new version OWC is still needed for the Settings and Statistics, but we will change that too eventually. For just working with the tickets there is no need for OWC.

If you are using PF HelpDesk and your organization has joined kalmstrom.com Community, you are welcome to upgrade your installation. You may see all the changes on the PF HelpDesk Revisions page.

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? Welcome to download the application and test it for free. It can be installed in any Outlook folder ‒ public, shared or private.

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.

kalmstrom.com Trainee Builds New Reporting Tool

After Peter left Skype he has had more time to lead the work at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, and we have all seen the difference it has made. We also have a good Lead Developer and a Senior Developer, so now we feel we have the strength to take on trainees more often than before. These are young people who need much guidance, but they can also give fresh input.

Today I am happy to introduce Kanak Joshi, who joined the team a couple of weeks ago. Kanak took her Bachelor of Engineering degree last year, and now she wishes to continue learning application design and development.

Kanak's first task at kalmstrom.com is to create an Excel application that may be used for reporting and statistics. The tool she has begun building is intended as a replacement for our OLAP Reporting Tool. It will create an Excel workbook with reports and graphs for all the information in PF HelpDesk. Later her work will be the basis for similar tools for our other applications also. One benefit of this is that we will remove the dependency on the Office Web Components. This task will give Kanak new knowledge at the same time as she helps us build something many Community Members will find useful.

Kanak likes travelling and painting, and we share a hobby ‒ gardening. "Every morning when I see the flowers in my garden I feel enthusiastic", she says. I understand the feeling, and I am sure Kanak will do good if she brings that enthusiasm into her work! You can find more info about Kanak Joshi at the kalmstrom.com Team page.

Praise For HelpDesk OSP In New Testimonial

A few days ago a Community Member from the U.S. made the whole kalmstrom.com team happy by sending us a good testimonial on HelpDesk OSP. As you might have seen we placed some testimonials on the kalmstrom.com home page when we redesigned it. We plan to circulate snippets from testimonials on the home page, and now we replaced a Calendar Browser testimonial with excerpts from this new one. If you use one of our products, maybe you also want to share your experience of it?

Heather White, Prospect Development, UC Berkeley, first tells what our product has meant for her team: "Helpdesk OSP has been an incredible help to my team in our business process. It saved our unit several thousand dollars over competitor products and allowed us to leverage tools we already own, eliminating the need for additional training."

We also appreciate that Heather writes about how they make use of Helpdesk OSP. This is often the most interesting part of a testimonial for those who are new to the product. "Our team can now share information on our SharePoint site with just one click. We use Helpdesk OSP to initiate and track data and service requests from the schools we serve, making a complex process much more simple and transparent.”

Welcome to read more testimonials ‒ and of course to send us your own!

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.

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!

ShareTask Published At App Store - Cooperate on SharePoint Tasks While Mobile

The kalmstrom.com team gets new reasons to celebrate every day! This time we are happy that ShareTask has been approved and is up for sale at App Store. This app lets you manage your SharePoint tasks directly in your iPhone, iPad or iPod touch, and I think it will be very popular. Community Members who use our incident management tool HelpDesk OSP will of course make use of ShareTask, but we think many others will also find it convenient. ShareTask is an app for all who want to be able to continue working with SharePoint task items while on the run.

ShareTask is not just an app that connects to a SharePoint site, but it actually puts the list in the iOS device. It is designed to be easy to handle with a finger, but a keyboard may of course also be used. ShareTask uses many standard iOS features, that every iPhone or iPad owner is familiar with, and on top of them we have added the extras that make this app so special.

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has developed ShareTask in cooperation with softage.ru. kalmstrom.com CEO Peter had the idea ‒ of course! ‒ and figured out how make it reality. Then softage developer Alexander Songolov together with QA engineer Alena Prokudina and graphic designer Jitendra Joshi from kalmstrom.com did most of the work. Try ShareTask, and I think you will agree with me that they have done an excellent job!

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!