SharePoint Sharing Option For More kalmstrom.com Applications

The kalmstrom.com developers are not only adding new features and fixing bugs. They also improve our software on long time basis, to keep them strong in the future. One part of that work is to allow use of Microsoft SharePoint with more kalmstrom.com products than the current HelpDesk OSP and ShareTask.

SharePoint site instead of database
The first step of implementing the extended use of SharePoint is to add a SharePoint site as a an alternative for sharing data to an Access or SQL Server database in the kalmstrom.com products. When the SharePoint sharing option is selected the data will be saved in SharePoint lists instead of database tables, and neither a shared file server nor an Exchange server is required - only a SharePoint site that may very well be hosted. kalmstrom.com Business Solutions uses SharePoint 2010 on Office 365, which works just fine.

Kanban Task Manager first out
The first product to be released with the new SharePoint sharing alternative will be the new kalmstrom.com product Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. With Kanban Task Manager you can share information about projects and tasks within the workgroup. All the ongoing projects can be seen in Outlook on all PCs, and when one member of the group creates a new task, changes a task or drags it to another phase, all the other group members can see it in their PCs also. The Sharing Options dialog above is from Kanban Task Manager, and eventually similar dialogs will be used in more kalmstrom.com applications.

KBase V3 coming next
Work with version 3 of KBase, the kalmstrom.com knowledge base, is well on its way. KBase has up till now worked totally inside Outlook. It is installed in a public folder or a shared mailbox, and everyone who wants to read, add or edit articles must be connected to the local network. You can publish articles as webpages or embed them in a SharePoint site, but KBase V3 will be a better alternative for those Community Members who today have KBase embedded in their SharePoint sites. With KBase V3 and the SharePoint sharing option selected, there will be a direct contact between the KBase installation in Outlook and the SharePoint site. As soon as an article has been added or edited in Outlook it can be read on the SharePoint site.

TimeCard reporting to SharePoint
For our more complex products a SharePoint addition will give even more benefits. After the Kanban Task Manager and KBase releases we plan to give the kalmstrom.com time reporting Outlook add-on the same new option. This will mean that users will be able to report their time to a SharePoint site and no longer have to be connected to a databasen or report via an ASP page. All they need is an internet connection!

Our kalmstrom.com CEO has all available Microsoft certifications for SharePoint 2010, so I am sure he will develop the new SharePoint alternatives to be both user friendly and efficient. I will of course come back with further info about our development projects in future blog posts.

Invent The Future While Listening To Customers

Yesterday I saw an article with the provoking title: “Mark Cuban on Why You Should Never Listen to Your Customers”. My first reaction was astonishment, because in kalmstrom.com Business Solutions we pride ourselves with ALWAYS listening carefully to our customers.

Listen to complaints but don’t ask about the future
When I read the article I understood what the American business magnate meant, and I realized that the kalmstrom.com CEO Peter had told me the same thing at various occasions, but not in such drastic words: “Yes, we should listen to our customers ‒ or Community Members ‒ and help them solve their problems, but we should not turn to the customers when it comes to decisions about the path for future development. That is my job.”

Peter climbs the trees
In the book The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People I saw a metaphore I liked: if a group of workers are building a road through a jungle, the staff must have good equipment and know how to do their job in an efficient way ‒ but someone also has to climb to the tree tops and make sure that the road is built in the right direction. Otherwise it will not be useful to anyone, no matter how smoothly the work on the ground is running. Peter is that person.

Future technologies
As Peter is a software developer the challenge of staying ahead and show the direction means to choose which techniques to use among all the interesting and feature-rich technologies that is constantly released out there, and to build applications that take best possible advantage of them. Maybe the users of the kalmstrom.com software do not even understand what can be done until they have seen it? But Peter can understand it, and that is why he has chosen to make the products compatible with new platforms like Office 365 and Windows Azure, even though most Community Members still don’t even think about transferring to them. When they want to do it, the kalmstrom.com applications they use should be compatible.

New design
Another example on Peter’s capacity of “inventing the future” (as Mark Cuban puts it) is the extensive development work that is currently going on at kalmstrom.com. Our developers Kanak Joshi and Sunil Patel are working full time with the creation of a new KBase application, which we hope to release soon.  The rest of the kalmstrom.com team has also been engaged in their work, because what we learn from this development with new techniques will be used in the future development of our more advanced products.

Welcome with suggestions
This said I want to make it clear that I don’t mean that Community Members are not welcome with suggestions on new features for the products they use. You are! No one knows better than you what needs to be improved for efficient daily use. But Peter and his developers are the ones who can judge how to achieve the goal in the best way and with best conditions for future upgrades.

PF HelpDesk sponsorship
A very good example on how users and developers can cooperate to improve a product is the joined efforts of Community Member Swiss Post and kalmstrom.com. The PF HelpDesk administrator at Swiss Post sent us a list of features they wanted to include in a future version of this kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool. They were willing to sponsor the development, but instead of adding those features to the current version of PF HelpDesk Peter decided to incorporate them in the next version. This version will be totally rebuilt and partly web based, and even if Swiss Post must wait longer for their features they will get them in a product that will keep for many years ahead. This way Peter could listen to customers and still keep focus on the right direction!