Microsoft Buys Swedish Minecraft Company?

The big business news here in Sweden today  has been Microsoft's acquisition of the Swedish game company Mojang AB. So far none of the parties have confirmed the purchase, but according to The Wall Street Journal the deal is near.

Mojang and Minecraft
Mojang AB is the company behind the independent game Minecraft, a survival sandbox game that has been sold in 50 million copies. But Minecraft is more than a game, and I think that is the reason for Microsoft's interest in Mojang.

Minecraft is used in schools, and in the Block by Block project Mojang has partnered with The United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat) to let people plan urban public spaces using Minecraft.

"Notch"
The owner of Mojang is a young Swede, Markus Alexej "Notch" Persson. When he founded his company in 2009 he gave it the name "gadget" – "mojäng" in Swedish. The Minecraft success has attracted interest from many important investors, but so far "Notch" has refused all outside investments. Now it sounds as if he has changed his mind.

Third Nordic acquisition
If the Mojang deal is completed, it will be the third Microsoft acquisition of a Nordic company in a few years. Being a Swedish software developer, I cannot help but feeling proud of being part of the Nordic ingenuity. Even if Microsoft has shown no interest in a kalmstrom.com investment – yet!

In May 2011 Microsoft bought Skype, a company I still have strong feelings for as I worked there between 2005 and 2010. I was one of the first 100 people employed, and during my time as Product Manager for Skype Toolbars I experienced the immense growth of the company.

In April this year came the long awaited purchase of Nokia Devices and Services. The affair with Mojang is more of a surprise, and it will be interesting to see what it will lead to.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Adventurous Release Celebration

Creating kalmstrom.com texts is not only about writing. To compose a blog post, for example, you must also know HTML code and photo editing to be able to present the text and images in an appealing way.

Today's post is created by our trainee Rituka Rimza. She wants to become a really good technical writer, and as she learns quickly and works hard I am sure she will reach her goal.


After releasing version 9 of Calendar Browser
(the kalmstrom.com Outlook add-on for resource booking) the Indore team members celebrated with a trip to an adventurous place called Safari Park.

It was a most memorable trip for all of us. The day was full of joy and physical activities. As we are sitting at computers in our daily routine, this was a new experience for all of us. There were lots of physical tasks we had to do within a given time.

When we reached Safari Park we could not imagine how much fun we were going to experience. That small park had lots of activities. There were trained staff members who guided the visitors.

One of them guided us. He started with some words we all had to speak loudly. According to him we would be filled with energy after that, and he was actually right.

Now we were all ready for our first task, which was Rope Pulling. He divided us into two teams, one led by Jayant and the other by Rinku. Eventually Jayant’s team won the contest.

In the second task we had to climb on a net of rope, while we competed in pairs. It may sound simple, but it was risky because one wrong step could throw you to the ground. Jayant and I climbed together, and I won.

We showed our art in Archery also, where we had to target an arrow at the center of a board. The bow was heavy, so it was difficult to hold it, but still we all tried Archery.

In the Image below you can see our third task. It had many stages that we had to complete one by one. It started with walking on a rope without any support. As I mentioned before, it seems simple, but it is difficult when you have to do it yourself.

Stage by stage the team members were expelled from the task. The most difficult part was when we had to cross tires of three colors (see the image below) without touching the blue tires. Only 3 members completed this task Ankit, Sharad and I, and could continue to the last stage.

Now we had to walk on wooden plates hanging in ropes. Here Sharad and I also failed, so only Ankit could finish all the stages and win the task.

That day, Vipul had a leg injury,so at first he said he would not be able to do any of the tasks. But after watching us and seeing how much we enjoyed it, he could not prevent himself from joining us. It was a miracle that he managed all the tasks while he could not even walk properly.

I think this is significant for the kalmstrom.com spirit, "never give up without attempting", that makes our team unique. I sometimes feel that the kalmstrom.com team is like a glorious pearl in the ocean.

After all these efforts we enjoyed a delicious meal together. I believe this kind of trips bring everyone closer together and inspire us in our work with the kalmstrom.com Solutions.

Now we are focusing on our new product TimeCard for SharePoint, which will be published soon. Then we will have cause for another celebration!

Rituka Rimza
Technical Writer Trainee
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

SharePoint Wiki Links Can Do More

With SharePoint wiki links you can create links to pages that don't exist yet, and you can make a list item show up in a new window on top of the page with the wiki link. In a new Tips article about SharePoint wiki links I show how you can create and manipulate such links.

Only for the site
Wiki links can only open pages, libraries, lists or items inside the same SharePoint site. They cannot point to another site in the site collection or to something outside it. This means that you seldom can manage with only wiki links on a site.

Type in the syntax
Wiki links cannot be added to a SharePoint page via the Insert tab, Link button. Instead you have to open the SharePoint page in Edit mode and type in the link. Microsoft has made that easy by showing options, but you still have to know that you must start with double square brackets to get going, and there are no hints to what the use of the tab key can achieve.

Advantages that compensate
So, if wiki links are a bit more complicated to create than other links and only work within the site, why use them at all? The answer is that wiki links can do things that is difficult to accomplish with other methods.

Link to nothing
One of the wiki links advantages is the possibility to create a link to a page that has not yet been created. Such a link gets a dotted line under it, and when you click on this link you are asked if you want to create the page that the link points to. Such wiki links work as placeholders for future pages, so that you can show what will come without having to create all pages a once.

Open list item on top
Wiki links can open a list item in a new window on top of the page where you have clicked on the link. To achieve this, a wiki link is absolutely the best and easiest method. But you must be aware of how you select the list:

Go to the list you want to link to and use the TAB key when you select the list and then the item. When you just select the list with a mouse click, the link will be finished and you cannot select an item.

In the demo below I show more wiki links and describe how to manipulate what anchor text is displayed on the SharePoint page. This demo belongs to a series on SharePoint links, and you can find them all in the kalmstrom.com Tips section.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

HelpDesk For Outlook Folders Updated

Today we have released a minor update of the kalmstrom.com incident management add-on for Outlook. It is often used by helpdesk staff, and as it is installed in an Outlook folder we call it Folder HelpDesk.

New design
I call this update a minor one, as most of the changes are made to remove non-crucial bugs. Standard Subscribers will however see the difference at once as we have replaced the old Folder HelpDesk logotype with a new and more modern one. (Premium Subscribers will not see this, as they have
their own logotype in Folder HelpDesk.)

As I told you in an earlier blog post, also the Folder HelpDesk statistics reports are updated with new design. I hope you have looked at the demo and like what you have seen!

Search closed tickets
A new feature has also been added – or two, actually. Both are enhancements of the search closed tickets application.

Folder HelpDesk shows the open cases as tickets in Outlook, where you can work with them without leaving Outlook. When they are closed, they are still stored in an Access or SQL Server database, and you just have to press a button to search and re-open them.

Big organizations with many incidents or support cases will have a large number of closed tickets when they have used Folder HelpDesk for a while. To speed up the search they can now avoid to include the ticket body when searching closed tickets. For many hits there is also a new possibility to decide how many of them should be shown.You can select any number, from 1 to 999.

Public folder or shared mailbox
Folder HelpDesk can be installed in any Outlook folder, but for sharing support cases it should be installed in a public folder or a shared mailbox. The earlier versions were called Public Folder HelpDesk, but from version 12 we changed the name to just Folder HelpDesk.

We no longer wanted to point to a public folder installation, as installation in a shared mailbox also works well. In the kalmstrom.com Tips section, under the Outlook heading in the table of contents, we have instructions on how to create a shared mailbox on the Exchange server or in Office 365 and on how to add a shared mailbox to a local Outlook installation.

SharePoint
Another reason for the name change from version 12 was that we already saw the need for SharePoint as a third sharing and storage option for Folder HelpDesk. When that is implemented, there will be no need for an Exchange server at all.

Folder HelpDesk will no longer rely on a shared network folder and an Outlook public folder/shared mailbox. Instead we will use the three options for sharing and storage of data already present in Kanban Task Manager for Outlook and KBase for Outlook: an Access database, an SQL Server database or a SharePoint site.

I hope this vision for Folder HelpDesk will become reality in 2015. While enhancing the solution the kalmstrom.com developers are always aware of the direction we have agreed on. Today's update was one step of many.

Upgrade or try
Subscribers who are using an earlier version of Folder HelpDesk for Outlook are welcome to upgrade their installations.

Have you not tried Folder HelpDesk yet? Please download the solution and evaluate it for 30 days. The manual and the various video demonstrations will help you get started, and you are always welcome to contact us if you have questions.

Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Tag SharePoint Events With Time Reporting Data

The TimeCard for SharePoint documentation is almost finished, and today I can show one of the new demos: how to tag SharePoint events with TimeCard values.

Dropdowns
TimeCard for SharePoint adds one, two or three dropdowns to each event in the TimeCard calendar. Here users may select tag values for each event, values that transforms the SharePoint event into a timesheet. The values only need to be defined once for all who have their TimeCard calendars in the same SharePoint site.

Report the events
As the events are transformed into timesheets, they can be used for time reporting directly from the calendar. Just click a button, review the data and make changes if needed before you report the time with another button click. Given permissions, users can also help each other to report time.

Expenses
If the Expenses feature is enabled in TimeCard, the user's expenses for each event may be filled out in the event and reported with the hours. The default captions of the expenses form can be edited, so the TimeCard administrator may enter any suitable captions in the Global Settings for the site. Then these captions will be shown to all users and in the various Excel reports that TimeCard can generate, instead of the default ones.

TimeCard Demos
The demo above is intended for new TimeCard users. As you see it is very easy to tag the events, and the dropdowns minimize the risk for errors. The TimeCard for SharePoint Demonstrations page have three more demos for users. Personal Settings, Reporting and Statistics .

We have already sent the Beta version of TimeCard for SharePoint to some TimeCard Workgroup for Outlook subscribers, who were eager to test how TimeCard works on the new platform, and now we are looking forward to hearing their comments. Hopefully the next setup will be the release version!
Peter Kalmstrom
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions