Watch The First Calendar Browser V7 Demo!

Now it is only a matter of days before version 7 of our resource booking application for Outlook is released. The Calendar Browser documentation is being updated while the testing continues, and as you see from the video demonstration above we now have a functioning product. Just some smaller adjustments have to be made before we can give Calendar Browser V7 to all Members who need a booking system that works with Office 2010.

Welcome to have a look at the demo! I think you can see just from this short video that it will be a joy to book resources with the new Calendar Browser.

Calendar Browser 7 with Support for Outlook 2010

In August we felt forced to share the news that Calendar Browser, our resource booking application for Outlook, would not be compatible with Office 2010. There were big problems with Calendar Browser and the Outlook 2010 Calendar. I know, problems are for solving and that is what our developers do all the time, but in this case the task seemed nearly hopeless. But only nearly, because now the problem is solved and we have begun developing Calendar Browser V7!

After many discussions and discarded ideas our CEO Peter and Lead Developer Jayant could find a solution that will not only solve the problem with Outlook 2010 but also make Calendar Browser strong for the future. The most important change in version 7 will be the removal of the folder homepage. During Calendar Browser's ten years on the market the folder homepage has been the main user interface in all versions. Now we will instead move that functionality to the Calendar Browser Client Tool, and the Microsoft Fluent Interface/Ribbon will display the needed buttons and fields.

In our efforts to solve the issue we discussed building a totally new resource booking software, to help all users of Calendar Browser who sooner or later would get problems because the application did not support Outlook 2010. We will probably still build something that uses SharePoint, just like we already have helpdesks for both Exchange and SharePoint. But when the immediate problem is satisfactory solved this can be allowed to take its time and  must not be rushed. This feels very good, and I congratulate Peter and Jayant who found the solution. I also congratulate the users of Calendar Browser. Now you can soon upgrade to the latest and best versions of both Outlook and Calendar Browser . I will of course come back with news in the blog, and we have also created a Plans page for Calendar Browser. Welcome to visit it!

Use PF HelpDesk V11.1 With SQL Azure

The kalmstrom.com team is currently developing version 11.1 of our Incident Management tool PF HelpDesk. It will be released now in October, and among the new features is a third database alternative: SQL Azure.

SQL Azure is Microsoft's cloud database, offered as a service and running in Microsoft datacenters around the globe. It is highly scalable, so you may either start small or serve a global customer base immediately. You only pay for what you use ‒ scale up when you need capacity and pull it back when you don’t.

PF HelpDesk has so far offered two database alternatives, Access and SQL Server. The Access database is free, but it  has security issues and only gives a storage capacity of 2 GB. This means that
you cannot handle large data requests, and if you are close to the maximum amount of data it will run slowly. Therefore we have often recommended customers to use an SQL Server database instead, and this is still a good alternative for big companies who need an SQL Server anyway. However, an SQL Server is not trivial to manage.

With an SQL Azure database Microsoft handles all maintenance. The environment is very secure and you don't have to think about backup and recovery. For a distributed team SQL Azure has another great advantage: you can reach it from any system. All you need is an internet connection!

Version 11.1 of PF HelpDesk will have more enhancements. Please refer to our Plans page and see what new features are "Under development".

Development of Public Folder HelpDesk

Today came another minor update of one of our products. This time our incident management application PF HelpDesk had some bugs fixed. The bugs did not affect all users, so if PF HelpDesk works well for you there is no need to upgrade this time. Please refer to the PF HelpDesk Revisions page for more info.

This time we have not added a new feature or enhancement, but we have published our development plans on the website so that Community Members may follow them. As version 11 of PF HelpDesk is stable and well functioning we have no big changes in mind at the moment, but we have a list of improvements that will make PF HelpDesk even easier to work with for the users. Welcome to contact us with your own suggestions!

Improved HTML Editor in Updated Public Folder HelpDesk

PF HelpDesk V11 has been updated again, this time with some enhancements and a couple of bug fixes. The most important improvement is the new HTML editor, which gives more possibilities than the old one. New buttons are added for font color and background color. A context menu is also added and will be shown when you right click on the editor. With the earlier editor font and color was sometimes changed  when a ticket was opened several times, but that will not happen with the new editor.

Please refer to the Revisions page for a description of all changes. We are grateful to Community Members who have pointed out to us how PF HelpDesk could be an even better application. All suggestions have not been implemented yet, but you can feel sure they are not forgotten! Welcome to upgrade PF HelpDesk, all Members!

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk yet? If you are looking for an application that helps your workgroup cooperate on incident management inside Outlook, this is the perfect tool for you. It can be installed in a public folder or a shared  mailbox, and the full product may be tested for 30 days without any obligations.

PF HelpDesk V11 Optimized for Office 2010

Today kalmstrom.com has released an update of PF HelpDesk V11 that is fully optimized for Office 2010, 32 bit version. The PF HelpDesk buttons are no longer hidden under the Add-Ins tab. When you open Outlook three PF HelpDesk buttons – Manual Conversion of e-mails into tickets, Open Ticket and Shortcut to the PF HelpDesk Outlook folder – are shown under the Home tab of the ribbon, see the first image above. These are the buttons you may need outside PF HelpDesk, when working with e-mails, so it is convenient to always have them at hand. When you open the PF HelpDesk Outlook folder, more buttons are shown in the ribbon, refer to the second image above. These are the buttons you may need when working inside PF HelpDesk, and if you have used PF HelpDesk with earlier Office versions you will recognize them as the buttons of the right hand toolbar. Members of kalmstrom.com Community are very welcome to upgrade their installations! Office 2010 64 bit will have to wait, but note that PF HelpDesk just like our other products works on all 64 bit operating systems. It is just the Office version we don’t support. Next in turn for Office 2010 optimization is TimeCard Workgroup and after that Calendar Browser. I will report back to you about the progress!

Ticket Toolbar With New Functions in PF HelpDesk V11

Today kalmstrom.com has released an update of Public Folder HelpDesk , our issue tracking tool for Outlook that also may be installed in a shared mailbox. Above you see the new ticket toolbar strip. It has been changed after Members have pointed out how it could be enhanced. As always it is the people who use the application each day who best can tell us how to improve it, so we are grateful for all suggestions. Even if we cannot realize them all, and certainly not at once, you can feel sure that we remember them.

The new toolbar has a button for Save and Close Window to the left. Further to the right we have new buttons for High and Low Importance and also a new button for Print Ticket. The old buttons Save, Close Ticket, Create Task, FAQ, Forward and Add to KBase are placed in the same order as before between the new buttons, and Delete Ticket is left on the far right side.

Some bugs were also fixed in this release, and I suggest that you take a look at the Revisions page if you are already using PF HelpDesk V11. All Community Members are welcome to upgrade!

Have you not tried PF HelpDesk V11 yet? Please download the application! I am sure you will like it.

PF HelpDesk V11 With New Technologies For The Future

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 is released! Many users have waited for the new version of this tool for incident management inside Outlook. So have the kalmstrom.com team, as V11 builds on more stable technologies than earlier versions.

It has not been an easy task to change the build and at the same time keep and even improve the benefits of the Outlook integration, but our skillful developers Jayant Rimza and Bahrur Ipham has managed it. QA Engineer Dina Romanova’s scrupulous testing and close cooperation with the developers has also been crucial to the creation of version 11, and our trainee, Niklas Svensson, has given valued input. Thank you all, for your efforts!

As I have written some earlier blogs about PF HelpDesk V11, you probably already know about the two major improvements, the new ticket form and the new installer. Welcome to visit the version 11 page for an overview and the Revisions page for a full list of the enhancements!

Since the ticket form is new, the upgrade was a tough nut to crack. At one stage there were two manual steps to perform, and not very easy ones either! Fortunately these issues were solved too, and now the upgrade is automatic. You may perform it from any client, and you only need to select your PF HelpDesk Outlook folder in the process. Then the installer will do the rest.

Upgrades are free for Members of kalmstrom.com Community, and the PF HelpDesk admin in each organization will get a personal e-mail with the new registration key. Then you may just upgrade and enjoy! If you are not a Member yet, I recommend you to join us as soon as possible to benefit from the advantages.

Updated PF HelpDesk V11 supports Office 2010

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 was released nearly three weeks ago, and the interest for our incident management tool for Microsoft Outlook has been great! This was expected, and expected was also that some of all who downloaded the new version would have problems.

Our products work in such a complex environment that it is virtually impossible to test every combination of software and ways of using them. Therefore we are always grateful for reports from users.

As always our technicians have done their best to solve the problems as quickly as possible, and today we have published an update where all known bugs are solved. The users who have complained about errors have been very helpful in the troubleshooting, and they have already received files that have solved their problems.


We get more and more questions about Office 2010. PF HelpDesk V11 and our other products already work with the new version of Office, but we have not yet optimized them for Office 2010. For PF HelpDesk this means that you will find the toolbar on top if you use Outlook 2010, in the last tab.

The improvement work continues, so our Members can feel confident about the future of PF HelpDesk.

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 - One Step Closer to ITIL

The release of Public Folder HelpDesk V11 comes closer. In this version of our Outlook issue tracking application we have made an adjustment to ITIL terminology: The earlier terms Problem, Problem Type and Problem Category have been replaced by Incident, Incident Type and Incident Category.

In ITIL backed organizations the term Problem is used for recurring errors which need a long term solution, while Incident is an error that have a relatively quick solution. As most issues reported to a helpdesk is of the Incident kind, we decided to use that term instead.

As the PF HelpDesk V11 ticket form is easy to customize, you may of course use any terms that suits your organization in the tickets. However, from version 11 Incident is the default term for the problems, suggestions and other issues that PF HelpDesk helps workgroups to cooperate on.

First Setup of PF HelpDesk V11

I have received the first setup of version 11 of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk. Our developers still have some problems with the upgrade procedure to solve, but I could make a new installation and record a Presentation demo where you may see the new HTML ticket form

Another improvement in the new version is that we use our own installer, which you can use as many times as you wish. This means that it will be much easier to install and upgrade multiple installations with PF HelpDesk V11. Welcome to watch the demo!

Public Folder HelpDesk V11 with better ticket form

This month the kalmstrom.com team has tried to prioritize work with the new version of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk. The most important improvement in version 11 ‒ and a big one! ‒ is that the ticket form is changed. Because of some bugs in the Outlook forms we have chosen to not use them in most of our solutions, but for PF HelpDesk we earlier judged the benefits greater than the disadvantages. However now our skillful developers have found a way to keep the benefits and get rid of the problems!

The new form has two parts, an upper part built in HTML and a lower built in Visual Basic 6. The HTML part contains the fields that are most interesting for users to customize, and since we use well known HTML code here it will be easier than before to adapt the ticket to the needs of the organization. Another advantage with the new ticket form is that it loads faster than the old one.

Even if the ticket form will be easier to customize we want to give you a good default ticket. Right now we discuss the layout within the team. Many suggestions have been sent back and forth, but now I know that it will be something like in the image above, even if details might change before release. Our QA engineer, Dina Romanova, has started testing version 11, and we all hope that she does not find too many bugs, so that we soon can publish the new version of PF HelpDesk. We know many are waiting for it out there!

Minor Update of Public Folder HelpDesk for Outlook

In his latest newsletter Peter hoped that there would be no more releases of our issue tracking application Public Folder HelpDesk, before version 11, but today we had to make a minor update since several users had problems converting e-mails containing attachments. If you get an error report that talks about attachment, I recommend you to upgrade ‒ if you have a support contract, of course, but nowadays most of our users have that.

The work with PF HelpDesk V11 continues, and we plan to have a prototype ready for testing by the end of this week. I look forward to see what our developers have managed this time, and I promise to keep you informed!

PF HelpDesk fully supports Unicode

As you might have heard we are working on version 11 of Public Folder HelpDesk, (which also can be installed in a shared mailbox). That release will hopefully come this spring, but in the meantime we also make some improvements to the current version of this popular issue tracking application.

We want all our products to fully support Unicode, and today most of them do – also PF HelpDesk after today’s new release. The Unicode support for PF HelpDesk proved to be a real challenge, but as usual our Lead Developer Bahrur Ipham managed to solve the problems.

In version 11 we will try to redesign the templates and notifications settings, because the current design is not optimal. Today it has been a bit better, though, since we have added a template for the alert 'Automatic email to responsible on reply received' and a checkbox under the Others Settings tab for enabling it. The alert is sent to the responsible staff when an email reply from the caller is received by the helpdesk, if the box is checked and some text is added to the default template. The manual is updated with this new information.

As usual Community Members and Support Customers are welcome to upgrade your installations. And if you have not tried PF HelpDesk yet but need a good way to cooperate around support cases within Outlook, you are welcome to download and try PF HepDesk for 30 days.

New Manual for HelpDesk OSP and Demos for Calendar Browser

Good documentation is essential to give users a chance to understand the software they are working with and avoid problems. Therefore we always do our best to present our information in ways that are appealing and easy to understand. Now we are happy to present our new video demonstrations for Calendar Browser, updated to version 6.1. Some more will be added, but the most important ones are there. Welcome to click any Demonstrations link in the Calendar Browser See also boxes, or go directly to screencast.com, where we host them.

Also HelpDesk OSP has new documentation, a manual for administrators who want to use SharePoint workflows to enhance HelpDesk OSP. In this manual we describe how to use Microsoft Office SharePoint Designer, a free product nowadays, to create workflows for sending automatic notifications and for keeping track of time spent on each ticket. Welcome to download it from the HelpDesk OSP manuals page!

A Prosperous 2010 to All Readers

The first day of 2010 is here, and Sweden still has very cold weather with as much snow as in the Christmas image below.

The image for this post was taken another cold year, in the spring, when you could use ice yachts on the Swedish lakes. I chose it as a symbol of the light and fun that I hope this new year will bring to all of you.


Sigge and I will return to Spain tomorrow and change snow for rain - but hopefully also some sunshine. During our stay in Sweden we have of course had meetings with Peter to discuss kalmstrom.com, beside the family gatherings. I have already told you about the Facebook page, one of the ideas that was born in these talks. More will follow ...

We look forward to the coming year and the challenges it will surely bring. I am now testing the Beta version of Office 2010, like the developers have done for quite a while, and making our products compatible is of course one of our most important tasks.

In the plans for the first quarter of this new year is the release of PF HelpDesk 11. It will have part of the ticket html-based, for easier customizations and to avoid the problems with Outlook forms. We also look forward to welcoming many new Community Members. During 2010 we will hopefully get at confirmation that the new Community and subscription system is such a good idea for both customers and company that we believe it is.  

The kalmstrom.com team and I wish all blog readers a prosperous 2010. We also want to say a warm thank you for the past year to our Community Members and Support Customers. We cannot make your year for you, but if we can make your work smoother, so that you get more time for the really important things in life, we feel happy about that!

Outlook helpdesk supports Unicode

The Unicode work at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions goes on, and today we have released an updated PF HelpDesk that supports all characters. Unicode is a standard that allows computers to represent text expressed in most of the world's writing systems in a consistent way. As this standard is used in the Microsoft products the kalmstrom.com applications are built on, it is possible for kalmstrom.com to make products that can be used all over the world and by users with different kinds of alphabets. PF HelpDesk is already used in countries with non-Latin characters, and for them I hope this new feature will be a great improvement. 

More and more companies decide to invest in a helpdesk system for issue tracking and user support, and for a team that is connected within a LAN PF HelpDesk is a good choice. PF HelpDesk can be installed in an Exchange public folder or in a shared mailbox. (For a more distributed group we recommend HelpDesk OSP for Outlook and SharePoint/Office live.)

Since Outlook only fully supports Unicode from version 2003, this enhancement of PF HelpDesk actually also gives it a limitation. Now the PF HelpDesk administrator installation must be performed from a system with Outlook 2003 or higher. This is not required for the client tool installation, only for the installation on the sever, and users with Outlook 2000 and 2002 can still work with the tickets.

Welcome to try the new PF HelpDesk!

kalmstrom.com Community has new page on Facebook

Welcome back after the holiday! We have had a good time, but yesterday I took some time to create a Community page on Facebook. So far we have not many fans, but you are welcome to be one!

The Facebook page will give the same kind of information as the blog and newsletter, but if you use Facebook, the Community page is a convenient way to check what is new at kalmstrom.com.

However there is one big difference between the Facebook page and our other information channels: you may comment. And I hope you will do that! We in the team get good response from users of our products via the support e-mail and chat, but this is a chance to let other users see your comments - and comment in their turn.

If it turns out well we hope to have several discussions going. It will be very interesting and in line with the closer customer contact we strive for with kalmstrom.com Community.

Teamwork gives new version of Public Folder HelpDesk

Our new QA Engineer does really keep the kalmstrom.com developers busy! Today we have released an update of our issue tracking software PF HelpDesk, an application that can be installed in a shared mailbox as well as in a public folder and that works totally inside Outlook. As much as twelve bugs have been fixed. Of course they were not critical, but they were still annoying for the users who experienced them.

We are happy to have such a good team, with a thorough tester and developers who know how to fix the problems, but we also depend on customers who report issues. Sometimes our technicians cannot replicate an error, and in those cases the cooperation from the user is invaluable.

Have you or your colleagues experienced a problem with PF HelpDesk? Are your organization a Support Customer or a Community Member? (Yes, some have joined the kalmstrom.com Community already.) In that case you are welcome to upgrade your installation. There is a great chance that the
issue will disappear