UNHRC Incorporates Internet Freedom In Human Rights

Last week I wrote a post on the United Nations Human Rights Council panel discussion about Internet freedom, and here is a short follow up. As I said in the earlier blog no immediate changes were to be expected, but the result was still satisfactory as the Human Rights Council now officially has incorporated the fight for internet freedom in its work.

The Swedish Foreign Minister, who initiated the panel discussion, was happy that a majority of the world's governments have the same view on internet freedom as Sweden. However, many speakers expressed their concern about the internet being used for distributing harmful content or commiting crimes. This is undoubtedly a negative side of a free internet, but as many others pointed out it must be fought against with education and social reforms, not with restrictions on the freedom of expression.

There is however a long way to go. Cuba was a strong opponent to the whole meeting, and China got support from several other countries for its statement that control of the internet – not internet freedom – was the most important question. It is not unlikely that these countries will form a stronger alliance to limit the freedom of the internet.

Unfortunately it is also not unlikely that countries who say they support internet freedom still will act as if they do not. We often see examples of such hyphocrisy, also here in Sweden. Still, a step in the right direction has been taken, and that is a positive thing. I urge the UN and the Human Rights Council to keep up the good work!

Six Smart And Reliable kalmstrom.com Women

Today, on the International Women’s Day, I want to pay tribute to six people who are important to me in various ways.

The kalmstrom.com Matriarch
I know Kate has presented her mother in this blog earlier. To me Ingalill is the kind grandmother who has always been listening to my ramblings and tried to understand even my most high flying and technically advanced ideas – while feeding me her home baked cookies.

It has been a joy to help Ingalill take to computers and the internet, and when I brought her an iPad from the US before they were even sold in Sweden she was delighted.

The photo comes from Ingalill’s Facebook account, and with her 94 years she is the oldest fan of kalmstrom. com Community on Facebook. She understands English but nowadays she prefers commenting in Swedish. With the help of Google translate she even gets understandable answers in Swedish!

The kalmstrom.com Author
My mother Kate manages all kalmstrom.com documentation – website, manuals, demonstrations, slideshows – and normally also this blog. Earlier she was a teacher and an author of school books, so she knows how to make a text easy to read and understand.

Kate also handles much of the kalmstrom.com marketing, and it is thanks to her – and the merits of our products, of course – that the kalmstrom.com Office applications are presented at prestigious sites like Microsoft’s Office Marketplace and PinPoint.

It is a bit special to work together with your mother. In theory I am the boss, but as we are both strong-willed people there have been many discussions. Our different opinions have been fruitful, though, and the compromises we eventually have agreed on have been better than the first suggestions.

The kalmstrom.com Relations Expert
Siret is my fiancée, so she is very valuable to me personally. She also play an important role in the kalmstrom.com team, as responsible for relations both within the team and with our customers and Community Members.

I guess you have to be good at relations to be living with me, but I also noticed it when we visited Indore in December and Siret for the first time met with the Indian team members. They got along excellently.

While representing the employer in more serious matters Siret was able to connect to the team members on a personal level during the free time without losing her authority. She is capable of holding a conversation about any subject, while my own conversations have a tendency to turn into development issues whatever we start talking about!

The kalmstrom.com Technicians
At the kalmstrom.com Indian office Kanak and Neha have contributed significantly to the smooth cooperation within the team. They are clever and trustworthy, and I am happy to have them in the team.

Kanak is a developer, and right now she is working with the connection to SharePoint of the new Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. This add-on will have a SharePoint alternative to a common database, which will make the application perfect for cooperation on Tasks in geographically distributed work groups.

Neha is a QA Engineer, and she handles most of the practical, pre-release testing of the kalmstrom.com products. Now she is testing the new features of Folder HelpDesk, which is the same as version 12 of PF HelpDesk. Her bug lists on our Office 365 SharePoint site are much appreciated ‒ even if the developers are most happy when they are short and only contain enhancement suggestions.

The kalmstrom.com New Generation
Finally I want to mention my daughter, Elsa. She is only ten years old and does not take part in kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, so to mention her here is just out of affection.

I hope to be able to bring Elsar with me to India next time, though. That would be exciting for her, and as we are invited to Kanak’s wedding it would give her an opportunity to learn more about a foreign culture. It would also be a joy for Siret and me to travel with Elsa, because her eagerness and curiosity is catching and will enrich the experience for us.

Elsa has many good female role models, and it seems she is taking the best from each one of them - because she is fantastic!
Peter Kalmstrom
CEO, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Skype And Kalmstrom Both Manage Well After Separation

According to VentureBeat, Skype hit a new milestone Monday this week when 35 million people accessed its audio and video conferencing service at the same time. It seems as if Skype manages well without the kalmstrom.com CEO. Peter is glad to see the success of his former employer, and we are happy to have him more active in the team.

Rapid growth after Microsoft take over
When Microsoft bought Skype in June, Microsoft promised to integrate Skype with its existing products. Except for the beta release of Skype for Windows Phone last week we have not seen so much of this yet, but I assume people feel more confident using Skype now when Microsoft is backing the product. The growth has been rapid, because as late as February 23 Skype for the first time had 32 million people signed in simultaneously.

Skype Product Manager
For five years, 2005-2010, Peter Kalmstrom was Product Manager for Skype Toolbars. If you have seen phone numbers on web pages turn into clickable buttons, you have seen an example of the kind of work Peter was responsible for at Skype. The integration of Skype in Outlook was of course also Peter's creation. Actually Peter first developed an add-on he called Outlook Skype, which was a big success for kalmstrom.com Business Solutions in 2004. We had to stop selling it when Skype achieved it and Peter was employed by Skype.

Rapid growth for kalmstrom.com too
After five years Peter felt he wanted to play a more active role in his own business, so he left Skype. At that time kalmstrom.com Business Solutions had only a few employees, but today we have more people involved in both Sweden and India.

The kalmstrom.com Office applications are also used by more people around the globe. We will never be able to brag about as many users as Skype, but that is not our aim. Our primary goal is to keep the solid base of users we have today and continue to give them best possible service. The second goal is to improve the kalmstrom.com products and have more Community Members using them. With Peter at the wheel we will surely reach both goals!

Who Reads The kalmstrom.com Blog?

Last week I looked at the statistics for most read blog posts in February, but it is also interesting to see who those readers are. A study of the figures show some expected result but also some nice surprises.

English speaking countries
Visitors from United States and Great Britain dominate among the blog readers every month. This is to be expected, as the blog is written in English and the kalmstrom.com products are popular in these countries. Of course many users want to keep up with the events of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

India and China
To our delight we also see that the kalmstrom.com Blog has many readers in India and China. Both countries are in rapid development, and we are happy to be on the scene in India. We hope to soon have a partner in China also, to take advantage of this huge market and the evident interest in the kalmstrom.com Business Solutions software there.

Europe
After USA, UK, India and China comes a group of countries with approximately the same number of Blog visitors. Here we find for example Sweden and Germany, both with many Members of kalmstrom.com Community. Russia and Ukraine are also included here.

Mac users
The Blog statistics also show the visitors’ operating system, and since kalmstrom.com builds applications for Microsoft Office I was first surprised when I saw that 20 % of the February readers use Macintosh instead. Then I realized that many of them probably use Office for Windows in a virtual machine inside their Mac.

I read an interesting article in Business Insider about this use of Microsoft Office, where Matt Rosoff suggests that Microsoft should build first-class native versions of Office for all popular platforms. We have no objections to that!

Smart phones
The kalmstrom.com Blog looks nice in a smart phone also, but only a few percent read the blog on their mobiles. I assume this figure will rise in the future, but not that much. I still think most will prefer to read the articles on a computer, even if my aim is to make them so interesting that you want to read them as soon as you get a chance ;)

One Year Behind The kalmstrom.com Scene

Some members of the kalmstrom.com team are highly visible – like me! You look at the work of our designers as soon as you visit the kalmstrom.com website or use our products, and you meet other team members in support and sales chats and e-mails.

But there are others in the team whose contributions are equally important, even if they are not as easy for everyone to see and appreciate. In this post I will let kalmstrom.com developer Vijayant Rimza represent those team members.

Two brothers
Vijayant – or Rinku, as we call him – joined the kalmstrom.com team one year ago. He then had a good education but not much experience, so he was willing to start as a trainee. We soon saw his skills and hired him as developer instead. Rinku is the brother of our Lead Developer, but he fully earns his place in the team on his own merits. On the image above our CEO is thanking Rinku for good cooperation, and it is obvious how proud his brother Jayant is feeling.

Silver Certification Test
Rinku was the developer who tested our products with a special tool that Microsoft provides to Partners. The result of these tests, together with our other achievements, made us Microsoft Silver Partners as both Independent Software Vendor and Business Intelligence specialists.

Premium copies
Premium Members of the kalmstrom.com Community get their own copy of the application they use. This copy does not have to be registered, and it has the logotype of the Premium Member organization. Rinku is the developer who is creating these copies, and he also makes sure they are updated when we release a new version of the corresponding standard product.

HelpDesk OSP development
In August kalmstrom.com released version 3 of HelpDesk OSP, the add-on that connects Outlook to SharePoint. Rinku created a significant part of the new version, that had a new design , several new features and a simplified login to the SharePoint site. HelpDesk OSP works with any SharePoint site, and we use it ourselves with our Office 365 SharePoint.

Getting rid of the OWC dependency
Several of our applications require installation of the Office Web Components on at least the administrator machine. As OWC have not been installed automatically since Office 2003, evaluators with Office 2007 and 2010 have to download and install them separately. During the autumn one of Rinku’s tasks has been to handle this problem, and we will see the effects of his work in coming new product versions.

Kanban Task Manager
Right now Rinku is engaged in an exciting new product – the Kanban Task Manager for Outlook. This software will visualize the work with Outlook Tasks and make it easy for a workgroup to work together on projects. As SharePoint will be one of the options for sharing and storage, the members of the group may very well be geographically dispersed.

Vijayant Rimza is ambitious, and in addition to the studies necessary for all team members, to keep up with the latest technologies, he also takes courses in Business Management. It has been a pleasure working with Rinku this past year, and we look forward to a continued good cooperation for years to come!