kalmstrom.com Execs Travel South

Peter Kalmström, CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, and his wife Siret who is our Sales Manager, certainly know how to enjoy life. They don't request much on a material level, but they choose their places of living carefully.


Now Peter and Siret have left Sweden, and during a long weekend they drove from Sweden through Europe to the family apartment at Costa del Sol in southern Spain.

Summer together on Öland
We have had a wonderful summer together, the four leaders of kalmstrom.com. Sigge and I live on the island Öland permanently and manage the Swedish office, and Peter and Siret have a summer cottage near us.

As the business is a common interest there has been a lot of working, planning and discussing, but we have also eaten fabulous meals together. Siret loves to cook, and the rest of us love eating her creations! Last winter, when she visited the team members in Indore, she was inspired by the Indian cuisine , and that has given us some delicious dinners.

Peter likes to sit outside with his computer whenever possible, and in the image below we see Peter in the Öland landscape. He uses a quality screen, so it works well.


Towards warmer weather
Now autumn has come to Sweden, and as both Siret and Peter like warm climates they have decided to spend the coldest part of the year at the southernmost end of Europe, in a village near Marbella in Spain.

This is a friendly, cosmopolitan area,  so I am sure they will enjoy their stay. The photo below shows the roof terrace of the apartment, which has a fantastic view over the Mediterranean.


Education
In Spain Peter will work with the kalmstrom.com applications as usual, but he will also continue his lecturing on advanced IT-courses. He is a Microsoft certified Trainer, and he enjoys the contact with his students. As these courses are often held in Sweden they will mean some flights back and forth - and an opportunity for us to meet.

Visit to India
In December there will be more travelling for Siret and Peter, when they go to Indore to meet with the Indian members of the kalmstrom.com team. They will also attend the wedding of our developer Kanak Joshi, so they are really looking forward to the trip. Siret has already promised to guest blog about this adventure, so I know there will be some interesting posts and good photos also!

Using Kanban Task Manager In Big Teams

We are sometimes asked if Kanban Task Manager for Outlook can be used by big teams. The answer is Yes. In next version the kalmstrom.com developers have made sure our new project management application will work well even if you have many tasks, projects and responsibles.

Demos with few tasks
The Kanban Task Manager documentation on the kalmstrom.com website shows a software that is used in a small group, but this is only for practical reasons. A few tasks and projects show how the application works just as well as many of them do. The images and video demonstrations have to be rather small, and that makes it difficult to show Kanban Task Manager with many tasks in Outlook.

Outlook tasks with dropdowns
Kanban Task Manager uses standard Outlook tasks, but dropdowns for selection of project, phase and responsible has been added to each task. In the Kanban Task Manager homepage – which is the Kanban board where the tasks are visualized and synchonised within the team – the tasks may be filtered by project and responsible. These values are selected from dropdowns too.

Buttons for more than 100 values
Using dropdowns is a good way of minimizing errors and making selection quick and easy, but if you have too many alternatives the dropdown will be difficult to handle even when the values are shown in alphabetic order. Therefore our technicians have decided to convert the dropdowns into buttons to show phases, projects or responsibles when the number of alternative is more than 100. In the image above both the Project and the Responsible dropdowns have been transformed into buttons.

When a user clicks on one of these buttons a new dialog will be shown. It has a listbox with all the values and a text box of the autocomplete type, so that selection of the desired value is easy and fast.

Support for up to 1000 items
Kanban Task Manager supports as many as 1000 alternatives each for project, phase and responsible, and it is highly unlikely that an organization will need more than that.

We have also tested the application with 1000 tasks in the Kanban board, and it works fine with all three sharing options: a SharePoint site or an Access or SQL Server database. With even more tasks Kanban Task Manager will be a bit slow and difficult to navigate, so if you need to have more than 1000 tasks we suggest that you break down the team using the same Kanban board into two or three.

One Year Of Testing The kalmstrom.com Outlook Add-ons

In September 2011 kalmstrom.com Business Solutions hired a new QA Engineer, Neha Gupta. Neha has now been with us for a year, and during this time all users of the kalmstrom.com products have benefitted from her work.

Support team
Some members of the kalmstrom.com support team answer e-mails and chats and have a direct contact with users of our products. Others in the same group also play an important role when giving support services to users and evaluators, but their contribution is not as noticed and praised as they work more in the background. Neha is one of those team members.
Reproduce errors
When a user reports a problem that we have not heard of before, Neha is often the first one to work with it. She gets all the information gathered about the issue and about the environment our product is installed in. Then she creates the same environment, often using virtual machines, and tries to reproduce the error.

When Neha succeeds, she documents exactly what she did, and with this info the developers can give the caller a solution to the issue. This is normally a rather quick process, and the team member who sends the solution gets a grateful answer ‒ a credit which should actually go to Neha and the developer.

Test of updates and new products
Neha is also engaged in the testing of product updates and of new products, and in that process she also suggests changes and enhancements. Recently she has done a great job with Kanban Task Manager, a new application for task management inside Outlook that soon will come in its third version.

Team spirit
We are happy about the good spirit in the kalmstrom.com team, and Neha has helped cultivating it by remembering birthdays with heartfelt and joyful videos. The first one was for Peter's birthday in January 2012 ‒ a big surprise. Neha is well liked by all, and she is also dedicated in her work and always willing to give that little extra. We are happy to have her in the team and hope she will stay on for a long time.

Kanban Task Manager V1.1 Slides Ready For Release

kalmstrom.com Business Solutions will very soon release a new version of Kanban Task Manager, the add-on for project and task management inside Outlook. I have a version that works just fine for me, so I have been able to finish the documentation update. Today I will introduce the new slideshow.

Visualize work processes
Kanban Task Manager uses the Kanban board idea on Outlook Tasks, so that team members can see how work with projects and tasks proceeds inside their Outlooks. Integrating the board in Outlook gives many advantages besides the benefit of using a platform that many people already know and use.

• It is easy to drag and drop tasks between different phases of a project.
• Tasks are synchronized automatically within the workgroup, so everything is up to date and everyone can see what is happening.
• Tasks for multiple projects can be displayed in one Kanban board.
• You can filter tasks by project and by responsible.
• Statistics reports are automatically generated to Excel. Seven different reports are generated, and the data can be studied and shown with all the features of Excel.

V1.1 quicker and more efficient
The enhancements in the version of Kanban Task Manager that we will soon release have mostly come from input from evaluators and from our own staff, as we are also using our product. I have described them in earlier blog posts, so today I will just recommend you to have a look at the slideshow. If you already know Kanban Task Manager you will see the difference, and if our application is new to you I hope you will like what you see!

Overview
None of the kalmstrom.com slideshows are intended to be a full instruction on how this Outlook add-on works - for that we have the manual. Instead the slideshow is meant to be a first presentation of the application, so that the viewer can see if it might be interesting for the company or organization he or she represents. If the answer is yes, it is time to study the rest of the documentation and to try the application.

I hope you will enjoy the show even if the quality when showing it here is not the best. As soon as Kanban Task Manager V1.1 is released we will upload a .pps file to the website, to give you a slideshow with better quality for download.

MetaData Creator Becomes Document Tagger

I have already told you about the new application for tagging documents in SharePoint libraries that is under development at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. In those blog posts I called the software MetaData Creator, but now we have decided to give it another name: Document Tagger. We also have a new icon, and in the demo below Peter describes a new feature: how to tag multiple files in a SharePoint document library with keywords.

Document managing in SharePoint 2010
SharePoint 2007 introduced important document management infrastructures and enabled users to apply structure and management to their document libraries, and in SharePoint 2010 those features are enhanced and reinforced. One of the main principles in the document management of SharePoint 2010 is the use of metadata, but tagging documents with keywords and other metadata is a time consuming task. Therefore it is often skipped because of lack of time. This is a pity, because tagging your SharePoint library documents gives you a lot of benefits.

Better search is just one of the advantages
The most obvious benefit of tagging documents is probably the improved search capability. But there is more! For example you can create SharePoint views and forms using tags.  Document Tagger already comes with a custom form that displays all documents within a site that are tagged.

Do the fun stuff only
The kalmstrom.com Document Tagger does the tedious job and leaves the final decisions about the document tagging to you. The application analyses the document and suggests a number of keywords to be tagged to it. Your job is to review the suggestions and uncheck the ones you don't want and then hit the Save button to save them. Before that you may of course also add your own tags if you want to tag it with some metadata that cannot be extracted from the document itself - or  if you think Document Tagger has missed something (but it seldom does).

Graphics
I hope you like the new Document Tagger graphics! They include small icons for different categories of suggested tags, so that it will be easier to identify them and see if they are relevant or not. In the Document Tagger icon the kalmstrom.com designer has used the hashtag symbol on a document to explain what it is all about.

Tag multiple files
The latest development of Document Tagger has added the features to tag .pptx files as well as .docx and to tag many documents at the same time. This is shown in the demo below by the kalmstrom.com CEO, Peter Kalmström, who is a Microsoft certified SharePoint expert.



Peter still wants to give Document Tagger some additional features before we release it, but if you are are waiting for a possibility to use this helpful application, you should not have to wait too long. Sometimes during the last part of 2012 we plan to release Document Tagger. I will keep you posted, and you are welcome to contact us for any queries you might have about this new kalmstrom.com software. On the Document Tagger homepage new information will be added gradually. Are you interested in reading the earlier blog post about this product? Just make a search for MetaData in the Search field here to the right, and you will find them.