Lucky days for kalmstrom.com and its Lead Developer

In February 2009 a young Indian developer called Jayant Rimza joined the kalmstrom.com team. He was chosen for the position from among over 200 applicants, because not only did he have the education and experience we required but also showed a good problem solution capacity in the test we gave him.

You never know how a new employee will turn out until you have worked together for some time, but it soon became clear to us that the day Jayant joined kalmstrom.com was a lucky day.

Jayant once told me that some friends had warned him for joining such a small foreign company as kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. We are glad he did not listen to them but dared to trust us. Since 2009 the company has grown considerably and hired more people, so now we are not that small anymore.

Jayant has of course played an important role in the kalmstrom.com expansion. Now he is our Lead Developer and Director of the Indian office, and he has also become a dear friend and an appreciated associate. In the image to the right kalmstrom.com CEO Peter is discussing the business with Jayant during a visit to India.

Today is also a lucky day, because it is Jayant's 30th birthday. He is still young, of course, but the single guy has become a married man and proud father of Atiksh, three and a half months old.

The Kalmstrom family and the kalmstrom.com team members are all wishing Jayant Rimza a great birthday and many happy returns of lucky days!

Internet freedom proposal from Sweden and USA

The United States Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton, is visiting Sweden this week, and today the Swedish newspaper Dagens Nyheter reveals that Ms. Clinton and her Swedish counterpart Carl Bildt want to join forces in the fight for Internet freedom.

UNHRC discussion
In the end of February I wrote an article about a  panel discussion about Internet freedom held in the United Nations Human Rights Council in Geneva. It was initiated by the Swedish Foreign Minister, and the purpose of it was to point out what the member countries of the Human Rights Council can do to protect and promote freedom of expression on the internet, and to highlight the major threats to this fundamental right.

The result of the discussion was that Human Rights Council officially incorporated the fight for Internet freedom in its work. This was a step in the right direction, and during Hillary Clinton's visit to Stockholm she and Mr. Bildt prepared another step towards internet freedom for all.

Common proposal
According to Dagens Nyheter the U.S. and Sweden will present a draft resolution on Internet freedom to the Human Rights Council in late June. The proposal contains two elements:

• Article 19 on Freedom of Speech in the United Nations Declaration on Human Rights should apply online in the same way as it does offline. Article 19 stipulates the right of everyone to freedom of opinion and expression and the right to disseminate and gather information.
  
• The draft resolution on the Internet and its contents should be respected as a fundamental prerequisite for the information and freedom of expression.

Fight against Internet restrictions
Both the first Human Rights Council panel discussion and  this coming proposal are directed towards the type of actions that the Mubarak regime took during the Arab spring, when virtually the entire Egyptian network was shut down. But it also addresses the censorship on the net that governments in countries such as China and Iran are engaged in.

First top-level speech on Internet freedom
As far as I know Hillary Clinton was the first to raise Internet freedom to the international top-level policy, which she did in a speech at the Newseum in Washington, DC in January 2010. Like the rest of the kalmstrom.com team I hope that she will be successful in this fight.

Excel Reports Used For Outlook Tasks Analysis

The documentation for the new kalmstrom.com Outlook add-on for Task management is coming together, and today I can show the first video demonstration ‒ the Excel reports on Outlook Tasks.

Task management in Outlook
Kanban Task Manager visualizes Outlook Tasks and shows what Project and Phase each Task belong to and who is responsible for it. As soon as something is updated in one of the work group computers, the other team members can also see it in theirs. If you use the SharePoint option for sharing and storage, the team members may even be in different parts of the world!

Task management data
You can however get much more information out of Kanban Task Manager than seeing what Tasks people are working with and what Phase of each Project the Tasks belong to. Kanban Task Manager has an application for reporting and statistics, and by using it managers and administrators will get a lot of information about the Outlook Tasks their staff are working with. That way they can remove blockers and make sure the work is efficient.

Excel Reports
The Task management Excel Reports are very easy to use. The application gives seven predefined reports that show what most managers need to know, like the status of the Outlook Tasks and the time spent on them. All seven reports are shown in a table version as well as a graph version. You may use all the inbuilt features of Excel with the Kanban Task Manager reports, so you can both add more parameters to the reports and make them look nice with the Excel design options.

In the demo below Peter Kalmstrom. CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, shows the different Excel reports that can be used for Task management and gives suggestions on how to add more information to them. Welcome to have a look. And if you have not done it already, welcome to learn how your project work flows can be improved by using Outlook Tasks and Kanban Task Manager!

The kalmstrom.com Board At Work

Siret Toots is a team member I care much about, not only because she is a good sales and relations officer but also because she is a lovely girl who will soon be my daughter-in-law when she marries Peter, the CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions.

I am delighted that Siret loves the island where Sigge and I live and where kalmstrom.com has its head quarters as much as we do. Here she will tell you about an unusual board meeting that took place the other day:

Öland is an island off the south-east coast of Sweden. It is one of those naturally amazing places that at least should make you forget about your daily toils and seduce you to soak up the wonders of Mother Earth ‒ or at least so I thought.

Last Saturday was one of those gorgeous spring days when you can already feel the hint of summer and smell the warmth in the breeze. kalmstrom.com CEO Peter Kalmström and I were out for a walk on an amazing nature trail in the north-western part of Öland, watching the birds and the bees and even a snake slithering happily by.

After the walk we sat down with our laptops to do a bit of work, when suddenly the other two members of the kalmstrom.com board, Kate and Sigge Kalmström, came strolling along the same trail with their dog Lisa. The chance encounter swiftly turned into an executive board meeting in one of nature’s most beautiful conference rooms.

Of course one cannot argue that there was not a lot to discuss: kalmstrom.com is shortly to release an exciting Outlook product: the totally new Kanban TaskManager.

I know Kate has told you about this task management tool earlier in this blog, and she will no doubt come back and announce the publication here also. I just wanted to let you know that the kalmstrom.com team is hard at work even when we are at our leisure!

Outlook HelpDesk Becomes Folder HelpDesk - Incident Management 12 Years Later

Outlook HelpDesk was the start. Now kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has released version 12 of its Outlook add-on for issue tracking, incident management and user support with another name.

Twelve year old Outlook helpdesk
In the year 2000 Peter Kalmstrom created the first version of an incident management add-on that converts e-mails into tickets that can be shared and managed inside Outlook. He called it Outlook HelpDesk, but later he changed the name into Public Folder HelpDesk. At that time most organizations used a public folder for sharing the tickets inside Outlook, but today a shared mailbox has become an increasingly popular alternative. Therefore the kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool has been renamed again, now into Folder HelpDesk.

New features that users wished for
As the kalmstrom.com incident management application has been on the market for so long a lot of useful features have been added to it, many of them suggested by users. We are grateful for such input from support staff and administrators and try to realize as many of the ideas as possible.

Sponsorships
In recent years the kalmstrom.com helpdesk for Outlook has received several sponsorships, where user organizations pay part of the cost for developing one or several new features. So also this time, and here we would like to extend our gratitude to Swiss Post for their investment in version 12 of the kalmstrom.com issue tracking application. Their contribution has made it possible for us to improve Folder HelpDesk beyond the enhancements of the incident management process that we had already planned.

Keeping the good old idea
At the same time as Peter and his team have developed and improved our Outlook helpdesk for continuously better incident management and user support, they have always maintained the focus: to offer support groups and others a simple but efficient way of co-operating on support cases and other incidents in a platform already well know to them.

Using Outlook makes it easy to convert incoming e-mails into incident tickets, both manually and automatically, and to transfer sender information, formatting, attachments and images to the ticket. It is also easy to send e-mails from the ticket.

Notification e-mails and templates
The possibility to send automatic notification e-mails is important in an issue tracking or user support application , and in Folder HelpDesk V12 this functionality has been further improved. By adding an HTML editor to the templates list we have made it easier to customize the templates for these automatic notifications, and we have also added new check boxes for triggering Folder HelpDesk to send and stop sending auto-emails.

This is only one example on the many enhancements that make Folder HelpDesk V12 an even more efficient user support application. For a full list of the new features, please refer to the Folder HelpDesk Revisions page. I have also written several articles about the improvements in this blog earlier Please make a search for "Folder HelpDesk" in the Search field here under my photo, and you will find them.

Try Folder HelpDesk for free
Does your organization need a better tool for issue tracking and user support? I welcome you to try the full version of Folder HelpDesk for 30 days!