New Developer At kalmstrom.com Fixes Task Manager Reports

I am happy to tell you that we have yet another developer in the team. Priyanka Kokne begun working with us a month ago, and she has already proved that she is an asset to the team.

A talented artist
In the photo to the right Priyanka poses in front of two of her drawings – because Priyanka is not only a skilled developer but also a talented artist. At the bottom of this article you can see an example of what she can do with water colors.

Programmer and tester
Priyanka has a Bachelor of Engineering exam from Shri Vaishnav Institute Of Technology & Science in Indore, and she is also certified in manual and automated software testing. This combination makes her a good programmer, and we are glad that she decided to join the kalmstrom.com team after having worked with application analyze and development for other companies for a couple of years.

Kanban Task Manager Reports
Priyankas first task for kalmstrom.com has been to create the reporting application for our new and not yet released product Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. This add-on helps a team to visualize tasks and co-operate on projects.

The kalmstrom.com developers have added dropdowns for Project, Phase and Responsible to the Outlook Tasks and also made it possible to drag Tasks between different Phases. The data from Projects, Phases and Tasks can be exported to Excel, where they may be studied in different ways. For each project Kanban Task Manager offers various reports:

• Total Tasks per Project
• Total Tasks per Phase
• Time spent per Phase
• Status of Tasks per Phase
• % Completed Tasks per Phase
• Total Tasks per Responsible
• Overdue status of Tasks per Phase

Priyanka has made sure the reports handle the correct data, and she has also added functionality that makes it easy to work with the data and look at them from different angles.

Badminton player
When working developers mostly use the brain, the eyes and the hands, and the rest of the body does not get much exercise. Priyanka keeps in good shape by dancing and playing badminton, and she achieved many badminton prizes at school level. She also enjoys gardening, just like me.


Welcome to kalmstrom.com, Priyanka!

One Year Behind The kalmstrom.com Scene

Some members of the kalmstrom.com team are highly visible – like me! You look at the work of our designers as soon as you visit the kalmstrom.com website or use our products, and you meet other team members in support and sales chats and e-mails.

But there are others in the team whose contributions are equally important, even if they are not as easy for everyone to see and appreciate. In this post I will let kalmstrom.com developer Vijayant Rimza represent those team members.

Two brothers
Vijayant – or Rinku, as we call him – joined the kalmstrom.com team one year ago. He then had a good education but not much experience, so he was willing to start as a trainee. We soon saw his skills and hired him as developer instead. Rinku is the brother of our Lead Developer, but he fully earns his place in the team on his own merits. On the image above our CEO is thanking Rinku for good cooperation, and it is obvious how proud his brother Jayant is feeling.

Silver Certification Test
Rinku was the developer who tested our products with a special tool that Microsoft provides to Partners. The result of these tests, together with our other achievements, made us Microsoft Silver Partners as both Independent Software Vendor and Business Intelligence specialists.

Premium copies
Premium Members of the kalmstrom.com Community get their own copy of the application they use. This copy does not have to be registered, and it has the logotype of the Premium Member organization. Rinku is the developer who is creating these copies, and he also makes sure they are updated when we release a new version of the corresponding standard product.

HelpDesk OSP development
In August kalmstrom.com released version 3 of HelpDesk OSP, the add-on that connects Outlook to SharePoint. Rinku created a significant part of the new version, that had a new design , several new features and a simplified login to the SharePoint site. HelpDesk OSP works with any SharePoint site, and we use it ourselves with our Office 365 SharePoint.

Getting rid of the OWC dependency
Several of our applications require installation of the Office Web Components on at least the administrator machine. As OWC have not been installed automatically since Office 2003, evaluators with Office 2007 and 2010 have to download and install them separately. During the autumn one of Rinku’s tasks has been to handle this problem, and we will see the effects of his work in coming new product versions.

Kanban Task Manager
Right now Rinku is engaged in an exciting new product – the Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. This software will visualize the work with Outlook Tasks and make it easy for a workgroup to work together on projects. As SharePoint will be one of the options for sharing and storage, the members of the group may very well be geographically dispersed.

Vijayant Rimza is ambitious, and in addition to the studies necessary for all team members, to keep up with the latest technologies, he also takes courses in Business Management. It has been a pleasure working with Rinku this past year, and we look forward to a continued good cooperation for years to come!

Fast Calendar Browser Fix Thanks To Community Member

Calendar Browser for Outlook was recently updated with support for Office 365 and a possibility to group resource calendars. We have now made another release of our popular resource booking application.

Smooth upgrades for most
Version 7.1 of Calendar Browser was released in January, and Community Members upgraded their installations without issues – until one Member suddenly reported a problem.  Mr. Paul Jennings at Wolff Olins LLC got a permission error when he started Outlook, and since all permissions were correct he was invited to a remote session with one of the kalmstrom.com developers. It showed that this error came due to a saving conflict in the Calendar Browser settings item. It was a bug in version 7.1 that only would affect a few, and it has now been fixed.

One Member report helped another
Very soon after the report  from Wolff Olins another administrator of Calendar Browser contacted us with the same issue, but then we already knew what the problem was. Both Member organizations got help quickly, and now we have released the updated Calendar Browser for all. Even though all Community Members probably have upgraded already, we want to make sure that no evaluator of Calendar Browser will get this error.

Quicker client tool
kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Jayant Rimza took the opportunity to test a new idea, and since it worked as expected he also made another change in the new Calendar Browser setup. This change makes the client tool both load and work faster, and even if it was not slow before it is a valuable enhancement.

Good example
The Community Member who reported this error is a good example on how cooperative users can improve a kalmstrom.com product for all. Paul Jennings wrote an e-mail that clearly described the problem, allowed a remote session where Jayant could see what caused the issue and last but not least showed a positive attitude when he had to come back for another remote session before the problem was solved for him.

Many of the kalmstrom.com Community Members have a similar outlook (sic!) on life and work, and that makes our work rewarding and encouraging. Thank you!