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!

Raised Value For kalmstrom.com Products

In November 2009 kalmstrom.com BusinessSolutions introduced a subscription system for all more advanced products, which I wrote about in two blogs,8 November and 16 November. During these two years the kalmstrom.com software applications have been much improved. Generally speaking our development work follows three paths, even if they intermingle.

The first path is to make the kalmstrom.com Officeadd-ons compatible with new Microsoft technology. In 2009 most of our customers still used Windows XP or Vista, but Windows 7 was released during the autumn and the kalmstrom.com team updated the products to support the new operating system. At that time we had already updated the products for in Office 2007, and when Office 2010 came one year later we could take full advantage of the ribbon ‒ which brings us to the second path.

When new technology is introduced the kalmstrom.com developers don’t just ask themselves how to make our software compatible with it. Another very important question is to ask how to use the new technology to our advantage, to make the kalmstrom.com products better and easier to work with. That is the second development path: to continuously make the applications better. Here we have a big help from Community Members. They use our products on a daily basis and often give us suggestions to enhancements. We always listen, and if possible we realize the customer’s request.

The third path is for the long run, and it is the responsibility of our CEO and our Lead Developer. Peter and Jayant follow very closely what happens in our branch and among all interesting new technology they try to select the most suitable to build on for a strong future. 

During the two years of kalmstrom.com Community we have not raised our Community fees, but now we feel it is time to do so. Old monthly subscribers who don’t break the subscription will still pay the old fees, but yearly subscribers and all new Community Members will have to pay a bit more.

We will use the extra revenues to hire more developers and another QA Engineer. This way the development work can advance faster, and I am sure both old and new Community Members will appreciate the improvements during the next two years of kalmstrom.com Community.