Resource Booking Tool With Support For The Latest Office

Today kalmstrom.com Business Solutions has published version 8 of its popular resouce booking tool for the Outlook calendar. The new version of Calendar Browser supports both the 32-bit and the 64-bit versions of Office 2010 and 2013, and it has Excel reports for the study of passed resource usage.

Book resources in the Outlook calendar
With Calendar Browser the resources within an organization or a company can be booked via the Outlook calendar, so resource booking is not more difficult than adding an appointment to the calendar. This makes Calendar Browser very easy to use, but it is still a powerful tool with many good features, like resource descriptions, search for free resources, ordering of supplies, a bookings overview and Excel reports for analysis and statistics.

64-bit support
Most Members of the kalmstrom.com Community do very well with the 32-bit versions of Office 2010 and 2013, but we have had some requests for 64-bit support. Therefore we are upgrading all our products to support both versions of Office 2010 and Office 2013.

Maybe you don't know what version you have? Don't worry about that. The kalmstrom.com developers have managed to make everything work even if you don't know the version! Calendar Browser will detect it and act accordingly.

Excel reports
Calendar Browser V8 has a new archive and statistics tool. This tool will first archive old Outlook calendar appointments to a database and then generate Excel reports from the data.

A number of default reports are included, and as all the Excel features may be used with these reports they are very easy to modify. Also custom reports can be created, and all the Excel reports, also the modified and custom ones, will be refreshed with new data at the next archiving. Please see the demo below for an introduction to the tool.



Free upgrades
We urge all Community Members to upgrade their Calendar Browser installations. When the central installation is upgraded each client will be prompted to upgrade the client tool – if that has not already been done centrally with the MSI file included in the download. Please refer to the Calendar Browser Revisions page for a full list of the enhancements.

Try it!
Do you have a good system for resource booking in your organization, or maybe you want to try something new? Maybe you like our idea of resource booking in the Outlook calendar?

You are very welcome to download Calendar Browser V8 from the kalmstrom.com website and try it for 30 days without any obligations. The possiblity to create example data for the test makes it quick and smooth to see how Calendar Browser can imnprove the resource booking process in your organization.

Senior Developer New Head Of The kalmstrom.com Support

The kalmstrom.com Support staff is highly praised for patience and good problem solving capacity, and we intend to continue the good work now when another of the kalmstrom.com developers has taken over the responsibility for the support work.

Senior developer head of support
Jitu Patidar has been with kalmstrom.com for nine months, and as he is a senior developer with good earlier experience he has now learned the kalmstrom.com applications so well that he can take over the responsibility for the support management.

That Jitu would help with support e-mails and remote sessions when he knew the products was intended from the start, so when the earlier responsible had to leave us we already had a great developer ready and able to take over the task. After a short introdution period Jitu is now managing his added responsibility with dedication and skill.

Marriage and move
Kanak Joshi, who earlier made sure that all support cases were taken good care of, has left the kalmstrom.com team to marry and move to another town.  Priyanka Kokne, a junior developer, has also moved with her family and therefore had to resign her promising position at kalmstrom.com. We thank both Kanak and Priyanka for their good work and wish them all the best on their new locations.

Replacements
We have known for a while that Kanak and Priyanka would leave us, so we have taken steps to ensure that results and progress will not suffer. We have already hired two new team members, one of whom has already started and another will start next month, but as kalmstrom.com is an ever growing company we are happy to say that we are on the lookout for more talented people with interviews being conducted on weekly basis.
                          
Current support staff
Now most of the kalmstrom.com support services are taken care of by four people:

Jitu supervises the cases, answers e-mails and chats in English and performs remote sessions.

Jayant, our Lead Developer, mostly helps with difficult cases in the background, but he also takes care of remote sessions.

Vipul answers e-mails in English, and Sigge answers in German and Swedish. Sigge can also answer urgent cases in English outside office hours.
                          
Other team members also join in when necessary, because the support is a priority – not only for the sake of the user with a problem but also because engaging in support cases is a good way of understanding how the kalmstrom.com applications can be enhanced,. The kalmstrom.com QA Engineers study the support cases thoroughly.

Support to users and evaluators
A subscription to one of the kalmstrom.com Solutions includes support and free upgrades, and we also give support to evaluators. When people take the time to try one of the kalmstrom.com products, we feel we should make an effort from our side also, to give the best possible chances for a successful trial period.

You are always welcome to the kalmstrom.com Support. Jitu and the team will take good care of you!

Light Therapy In Northern Bus Stops

Sweden is known as the land of the midnight sun, but this time of the year people in the northern part of the country  hardly see the sun at al. To combat problems due to lack of sunlight, the town of Umeå  has installed phototherapy lights in some of their bus stop shelters.

Winter blues
The short days an the lack of light in Sweden wintertime can result in what we call "winter depression". When this disorder affects people who are otherwise mentally healthy they feel tired, weak and low-spirited without any real cause. When they are exposed to specific wavelengths of artificial light, so called light- or phototherapy, these symptoms are often alleviated.

Bus stop shelters – new engergy resource

In Umeå, 400 kilometers north of Stockholm, the energy company decided to do something about the winter depressions, and in a pilot project they have installed phototherapy lamps at 30 of the town's bus stops. The projects is meant to give people an energy boost when they stand in the brightly lit shelter waiting for a bus.

Clean energy
The light in the bus shelters is said to be harmless, with all of the ultraviolet radiation filtered out, and the electricity that powers the lamps comes from renewable sources.

Blinding
I have not been to Umeå myself this year, but I saw in Swedish television that commuters and passers by were quite happy with the extra light in the bus shelters. Drives have complained that the lights are blinding, though, so some of them have been subdued to avoid accidents.

I have also felt the tug of the winter blues, so I welcome this experiment. Maybe the time spent waiting for the bus is too short to give any real benefits, but I think the sheer knowledge that you are getting some extra light can cheer you up a bit when you are feeling low.

kalmstrom.com Application Development In Focus

Application news dominated the kalmstrom.com Blog in November, and as we also got our Application Development Silver Competency last month this is understandable. Applications are what we do!

SharePoint version of Kanban Task Manager
In November we released Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint Beta, and the two articles about this new kalmstrom.com tool for keeping track of projects and tasks in SharePoint had many readers. So far we have very few reports about problems, so we hope to release the finished version soon.

Resource booking in Outlook
Another product that will be released soon is version 8 of Calendar Browser, our application for resource booking inside the Outlook calendar. This is one of  our most mature and popular Outlook add-ons, and the update will make it compatible with both the 32- and the 64-bit versions of Outlook 2010 and 2013. Calendar Browser V8 will also continue to support Outlook 2007 and Office 365 Outlook, and it will have Excel reports for analysis of resource usage.

Folder HelpDesk for Outlook
The kalmstrom.com helpdesk for Outlook and Exchange will come in a new version in the beginning of 2013, and the development work has already begun. In November I wrote two blog posts about this application, one about our general plans for Folder HelpDesk V13 and 14 and one about how Folder HelpDesk can track time spent on a ticket.

Pay for one, use all
The kalmstrom.com applications are licensed with a subscription. Subscribers become Members of the kalmstrom.com Community, and I know our Community Members are looking forward to these enhanced products.  You see, if a Member organization wants to use another kalmstrom.com product besides the one they frst subscribed to, they can do this without any extra costs at all – with support and upgrades included!

Get Super Performance From An Average Laptop

Today I welcome the CEO of kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, Peter Kalmstrom, who wants to share with you how he is getting really fast and powerful computers for half the normal cost without too much engineering. As I use one of Peter's ehnhanced machines myself, I can confirm that it works very well.

Super performance at low cost
I travel a lot, so regretfully my computers tend to get banged about quite a bit and need to be replaced often. Thus I don't want to invest a lot, but of course I want – and need! – the utmost in performance. Here is my "recipe":

1. Focus on the screen – how large of a laptop do you want?
2. If you plan to run virtual machines, also check that the processor is powerful enough to handle them and has virtualization features that can be enabled.
3. Buy the cheapest possible computer with the right screen (and processor).
   
4. Take out the hard drive and replace it with a solid-state drive (SSD).
   
5. Take out the RAM and replace it with more RAM.
   
6. Done!

I have tried this several times, and the price tag is less than half compared to a laptop pre-configured with (almost) all of the options I now have. My method does not work if you are a hard-core gamer, though. In that case you need a graphics card with higher performance than you will get in a cheap laptop, and they cannot be replaced like the hard drive and RAM.

Taking out the hard drive and RAM
Earlier the hard drive could often be found buried under the keyboard or motherboard, and to remove it included removing not only dozens of screws but also other parts of the computer.

Nowadays the hard drive is often placed directly under an access panel, just like the RAM, and then you will have no problems. If you can do Lego or assemble IKEA furniture, you can do #4 and #5 too. You will probably find information on how to do it in the laptop manual, and there are also a lot of instructions on the net.

Choosing the right replacements
Selecting the right memory and hard drive might be a bit tricky. Look for the cheapest SSD with transfer speeds of over 500 Mb/s.

My choice
I chose a PC with a 17.3 inch screen in full HD, which is what I really want. It only weighs 3 kgs (which I can handle during my travels) and it has space for two 2.5 inch hard drives and a DVD-player. I then added a primary SSD of 240 GB and a secondary 750 GB Hybrid drive.

Reinstall the OS
After changing the hard-drive you need to re-install the operating system which is not so easy, but if you have read this far you probably know how to do it! Windows 8 installs in 10 mins on the SSD.

I hope you have found my tip useful. If you want to see more, please have a look at the Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website. There you can find tips and tricks like this one and tutorials on SharePoint, Outlook, Excel and more.