Outlook Calendar TimeCard With Enhanced Meeting Request Handling

Do your team members use the Outlook calendar for time planning? Do they send meeting requests to each other every now and then? In that case you should take a look at TimeCard, the kalmstrom.com application for time reporting from the Outlook calendar. Today TimeCard has been updated with a new feature for smooth meeting request handling.

Tag Outlook calendar appointments with time reporting data
With TimeCard the team members use normal Outlook calendar appointments to report time and expenses. They just tag their appointments with Customer, Task, Project or other data selected from dropdowns, and that makes the Outlook appointments ready for reporting to the central database – still from within the Outlook calendar. To make it even easier for the team members the administrator can set some values as default, for example internal time.

Meeting request data automatically added
If one team member sends a meeting request with TimeCard data to other members who also use TimeCard, the same data is added automatically in the calendars for all the members who accept the meeting.

Say that Mr. Wachowski requests a meeting with Mr. Anderson and Mr. Smith to discuss a quotation for the ABC company. He tags the meeting request with ABC and Quotation. Mr. Anderson and Mr. Smith both accept the invitation, and that means that they will not only get the time and the place in their own calendars – with the new version of TimeCard they will also get ABC and Quotation without having to add it.

Reporting inside the Outlook calendar
No more work has to be done for the time reporting of this meeting. Everything is already there in the appointment. The reporting dialog is opened with a button that TimeCard adds to the Outlook calendar ribbon/toolbar, and with a click on another button this and all other appointments each team member wishes to report will be sent to the central database with all the data included.

Free upgrades for Members of kalmstrom.com Community
If you are a Community Member and already use TimeCard, you are welcome to upgrade your installation to get the new meeting request feature.

Is your organization a Member, but for another kalmstrom.com application? In that case you may use TimeCard too, without paying anything extra for it. We strive for a long relationship with our customers, and therefore we give free use of our products to Community Members. Just contact the kalmstrom.com sales department, and we will be happy to send you a registration key for TimeCard also.

Try it for two months
To give organizations a chance to try TimeCard with a monthly time report, we offer evaluators a trial period of 60 days with the same extensive support as we give to our Community Members. Welcome to download TimeCard for the Outlook calendar and give it a try. I am sure you will like it!

Use TimeCard And Report Time And Expenses Directly From Your Outlook Calendar

The kalmstrom.com Outlook application TimeCard is available in both a Single and a Workgroup version. Today we have released a minor update to fix a bug that showed when users opened a meeting request in a new window.
Tag appointments with time reporting data
When TimeCard is installed in a PC, the Outlook appointments get dropdowns for Customer, Project, Task or whatever is decided on by the user, and from these dropdowns the correct values for each appointment are selected. Also expenses can be added to the appointment. That way the Outlook calendar appointments are converted into timesheets that can be reported to a database – still from within the Outlook calendar.

TimeCard Single for one person
The Single version of TimeCard is intended for one person only. This user keeps everything in the PC, where TimeCard creates an Access database for the time reports. The settings dialog is reachable directly from Outlook, and it offers many possibilities so that you can easily configure TimeCard for your own personal needs.



TimeCard Workgroup for organizations
The Workgroup version of TimeCard has central reporting, to a Microsoft Access or SQL Server database. Later this year we hope to also add the option to report directly to a SharePoint site. The TimeCard administrator makes a central configuration and decides what properties should be reported on, but each user can also make personal choices and select to only show certain values – to not have so many to choose from.

Extra long trial
Many big companies and organizations have shown an interest in evaluating and using TimeCard Workgroup, but to really get a chance to try how it works for the employee time reporting many have needed more than the usual 30 days trial period. We therefore allow 60 days for TimeCard – for practical reasons also for the Single version.

Welcome to learn more about TimeCard! And if you already use TimeCard and have had a problem when opening meeting requests I recommend you to upgrade. Community Member organizations and Single Support customers have free upgrades, as always with products from kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

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.