Exchange Resource Calendars Or Calendar Browser for Outlook?

Sometimes people ask us why they should use Calendar Browser for Outlook when they already have the built-in Exchange Resource Calendars. The answer is that Calendar Browser supplies a range of features that cannot be found in Exchange Resource Calendars. These are some things you can only do in Calendar Browser:

Book extra services
With Calendar Browser you may place a supply order with each booking, like catering services, conference material or IT equipment. The admin defines a list of extras that may be booked, and then the user just click
a button in the appointment and fill out the number of items in the dialog that opens.




Search free resources
Calendar Browser has a search function that lets you search for resources that are free on a specific date and time and have a specified number of seats.

Calendar Descriptions
Calendar Browser helps you create elaborate descriptions of each resource. You can describe your calendars with full html, including pictures, links and dynamic content. Use a URL or take advantage of the Calendar Browser HTML editor, where you may either create your description directly or paste existing code.

Structured booking
Many organizations require a Project and/or Cost Center to be filled out when a resource is booked. This may be set to mandatory with Calendar Browser, and the kalmstrom.com add-on can also prevent double bookings or recurring bookings.

Overview of bookings
Even though the ability to view calendars side by side is getting better with each version of Outlook, Calendar Browser´s Overview feature contains many views that Outlook itself cannot yet match, for example the month joined month view and the printable schedule view. There are also dedicated views for showing all extra services booked for a particular day, allowing service staff to print a list of what they are to assemble for the day´s meetings. All of these views are nicely printable.

Statistics
Once your resources are being booked it is only a matter of time before someone asks you for statistics on the usage. Calendar Browser can output all of its data to an SQL or Access database. We also provide a fully featured statistics tool, our own OLAP Reporting Tool, that will allow you to analyze the data in a dynamic way. Once the old appointments are safely in the database you can option to remove them from the Outlook calendars, which improves Exchange performance.

Try it!
Does it sound interesting? If you want to see if Calendar Browser really can help your organization to get a more efficient resource booking system than the Exchange Resource Calendars, you are welcome to download and try the full version of Calendar Browser for 30 days without any obligations. We give support during the evaluation period too, so please contact us if you have questions.

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!

Calendar Browser V7 Updated - Quicker Loading And Easier Client Install

Today kalmstrom.com has released a new version of Calendar Browser. Many have downloaded Calendar Browser since version 7 was released, and we have had some reports about errors. This is normal, because even if we test thoroughly and Alena is a very good QA it is impossible for us to try all different configuration combinations out there.

One of the complaints was slow loading of Outlook when Calendar Browser Client was installed, and that is fixed now. We have also rectified a conflict and a Unicode issue. Some users found it troublesome that the client had to select folder during the client tool installation, so that is done automatically now. I must agree with them ‒ we should have thought about that from the beginning!

This time we will give all evaluators of version 7 a new chance. Just like Community Members you are welcome to upgrade your installation at the upgrade page. The upgrade will give evaluators another 30 days of trial.

Easier Resource Booking With Calendar Browser C7, Released Today

The kalmstrom.com team is happy to announce that we today have released version 7 of Calendar Browser for Outlook. This resource booking tool was one of the first that Peter built, and it has been very popular during its ten years on the market. Calendar Browser has of course been updated many times before, but we always kept the folder homepage design. When Office 2010 was published our developers faced a big problem, since it proved impossible to keep the homepage in Calendar Browser. Peter and Jayant finally found a solution - they always do! - and now we can give you a Calendar Browser that supports Office 2010.

As Calendar Browser V7 takes advantage of the possibilities given by the Fluent Interface/Ribbon it is even easier to use than the old version. The resource calendars are now visible directly in in the Outlook calendar view, and more standard calendar features are used. This also means that version 7 can only be used with Outlook 2007 and 2010. For the future this is the right way to go, but it means that we no longer can give an alternative for resource booking with Outlook 2003, which does not have the Ribbon. Community Members who have not upgraded to Outlook 2007 or 2010 will of course still get support for their Calendar Browser V6, but we no longer offer it to new customers.

Welcome to download and try the new Calendar Browser! If you are already a Calendar Browser Community Member, I recommend you to upgrade to version 7 (first upgrade your Office if needed). The responsible for Calendar Browser at each Calendar Browser Member organization will soon receive an e-mail with more info about version 7 and the upgrade. I hope you all will enjoy our rebuilt  tool!

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 V7 Released Soon

We hear that users of our resource booking tool for Outlook are waiting eagerly for the new version, and I can now tell you that development of Calendar Browser V7 has entered the testing phase. The icons in the Outlook ribbon have been updated too, and you can see the result here above. The buttons are nice and well integrated, aren't they? I think it looks as if Microsoft put the Calendar Browser buttons there from the beginning!

The icon update has of course not been allowed to delay the release. Other issues have taken care of that quite well! Limitations in Outlook 2010 have been a challenge for our Lead Developer Jayant Rimza. As the ingenious developer he is he has found ways around them, so that Calendar Browser still can work as intended and be possible to enhance in the future. We hope to be able to publish version 7 before Christmas, with at least most of the documentation also updated.