Customize And Share The SharePoint Kanban Board

Our two SharePoint editions of Kanban Task Manager are used by organizations in many countries, and with all these users we of course get valuable input and enhancement suggestions. In the next version, we will implement a few good ideas that were first given to us by customers.

Rename Project and Lane
Kanban Task Manager is a solution for task management. As the work proceeds, the tasks are moved from the first phase, where the task is planned, to the actual work phases and then into the completed phase.

Often the tasks belong to a project, and in all earlier versions we have had a Project column where admins can enter the different projects that the team works with. But even if this is the most common user case, the term "Project" does not suit all organizations. Now it will be possible to change this caption in the Kanban Task Manager tasks list.

The tasks can be arranged in groups, which are shown on the kanban board as horizontal strips. So far these groups have been called "Lanes". With the new versions, organizations can choose the caption that is most suitable for each installation of Kanban Task Manager.

Keep the filter
The kanban board can be filtered by "project", responsible and/or priority. The filtering is done by each user, just like other SharePoint filtering, and currently it disappears when you refresh or restart the browser.

However, many users have a favorite filter, so in the next version of Kanban Task Manager we will make it easier for them and preserve the filter. This way, users no longer need to set the filter again when they have refreshed or restarted the browser.

Filtered view URL
Now when the kanban board filter is kept, you can also bookmark the filtered view and share its URL with other users who have access to the same Kanban Task Manager installation.

Every user can, for example, send a manager the path to a filtered view that shows only his/her own tasks. If this is done regularly, it is easy for the manager to track each team member's progress.

These are the three most important new features in next Kanban Task Manager update, and I hope to come back soon and tell you about the release!

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

SharePoint In The Mobile 2 - Microsoft Tools

Storing and sharing information in SharePoint gives many benefits when it comes to security, flexibility and version control. But how do we best use SharePoint in mobile devices? We want to keep the functionality, but with less complexity and more touch ability and usability.

There are various options when you want to use SharePoint in a smartphone or tablet, more or less advanced and suitable for different needs. When we develop custom SharePoint solutions, we of course discuss the alternatives with the customer and find the best option together.

Here I have instead started a series of blog posts about the options as I see them. In an earlier post I summarized the mobile possibilities given by SharePoint itself. Today I will continue with a list of Microsoft apps and tools that are helpful when you want to use SharePoint in the mobile.

• Flows can be used in several ways.The most important thing you can do with a flow is to connect your information and events to any other service. If the service has a mobile app or interface, you can get your SharePoint information in that mobile context. Furthermore, it is possible to create, trigger and modify flows in the Microsoft Flow app, allowing for true mobile SharePoint automation. We are finding it useful, although not 100% stable yet, to call a REST service from a Flow and then run PowerShell scripts based on that in an Azure Function. Combining mobile usability of Flow with enterprise scalability in Azure opens a lot of interesting possibilities.
  
  
• 2010 and 2013 Workflows may be used from a mobile device. The workflow can either distribute selected information to users via e-mail or be triggered from a mobile device to have interesting things happen on the SharePoint side. A 2013 workflow can interact with web services and a 2010 workflow could be used to set item level security per business rules.
  
  
• Teams is a rather new collaborative app built on top of SharePoint. The mobile app allows sharing of documents, a calendar and also a range of third party apps.
  
  
• The OneDrive App for mobiles allows browsing of documents and folders on SharePoint sites and on the personal OneDrive for Business. With this app you can also upload documents from your mobile, including images from your device camera. The app does not synchronize your files to your device, but you can select individual files that should be available offline.
  
  
• The OneDrive for Business desktop app is not really a mobile app, but it is certainly relevant for being “on the run”. If you find yourself totally offline, most of the other apps in this list will not work. You need something that keeps the files on your computer in sync with the files on SharePoint. I have encountered some major problems with this app, so I am hesitant to recommend it. However, Microsoft has been promising rewrites, performance-improvements and better cache-handling so I will certainly give the new version another chance to prove itself. The desktop app only works with libraries and does not handle metadata at all, just folders.
  
  
• The Delve mobile app is intended for keeping track of the latest changes in personal or shared content stored on SharePoint sites of all types as well as files stored in OneDrive for Business.
  
  
• With PowerApps you can build customized mobile apps that connect to SharePoint, Flow and other services. Such an app can be deployed within the organization or Office 365 tenant and also shows up as a semi-view when using a desktop browser. There is both a Windows app and a browser-based development environment. Unfortunately there is no possibility to code behind PowerApps. Instead all customization is done by selecting options in the development environment. For me as a developer, this PowerApps environment feels limited and constraining, but I hope that I will learn to love it soon ;-)
  
  
• The Office 365 Video App is a very basic little app that allows browsing existing videos and channels as well as uploading videos to a channel from a device.
  

There are even more alternatives, because you can use Office apps and create custom solutions. Those are the options I will point to in my next blog post about SharePoint in the mobile.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

SharePoint In The Mobile 1 - Inbuilt Options

Keeping your information in SharePoint is generally a good idea. Security, flexibility, version control, workflows and flows all help to build a strong platform for collaboration.

The kalmstrom.com team are getting more and more requests from people who want to use SharePoint from their mobile phone or tablet, or from the computer when they are offline. They still want the same functionality, but less complexity and more touch ability and usability.

There are various options, more or less advanced and suitable for different needs. When we develop custom SharePoint solutions, we of course discuss the alternatives with the customer and find the best one together.

Here I will instead write a few posts about the options as I see them, and I will begin with the possibilities given by SharePoint itself.

• The SharePoint App is available for Windows Phone, Android and iOS. It is confusing that the app sometimes switches over to the regular computer desktop web pages, but this app is evolving fast when Microsoft keeps adding features to it. Therefore it is getting more and more powerful.
• The SharePoint Mobile Experience looks very clean, but so far the features are rather limited. SharePoint, especially SharePoint Online, detects when you browse a site using a mobile browser. You can also test this feature by putting an /m after the URL of your site, such as http://kdemo.sharepoint.com/m
• SharePoint Forms display a cleaner user interface when you open a form in a mobile browser. However, that user interface does not load any web part modifications that you have done to the forms page. You can test this forms behavior by appending mobile=1 to the form URL. (You can also prevent a mobile browser from seeing the mobile form user interface by appending mobile=0 to the URL.)
• SharePoint Mobile View Settings lets you decide how the view should be displayed in a mobile browser, such as how many items should be shown and if the view should be the default mobile view or prevented from showing in a mobile browser. I would recommend only using a few columns and items for a mobile view.

There are many more options, and several of them include using other apps and features supplied by Microsoft. That is what we will look at in the next blog post about SharePoint in the mobile.

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Lead QA Becomes A Father On Father's Day

The kalmstrom.com team is happy to congratulate Lead QA Vijayant Rimza and his wife Monika to their newborn baby girl. The little princess was born right when Father's Day was celebrated in India, and we cannot imagine a better gift.

Reliable team member
I first met Vijayant when I attended his brother's wedding in 2010. At that time Vijayant was still studying for his Master of Computer Application exam, but the following year we could welcome him to the kalmstrom.com team.

Now Vijayant has been with us for six years, and he plays an important role in leading the QA team in the testing of new features and products. Vijayant is also an active member of the support team, as he often assists with the troubleshooting when a user reports a problem.

Finally Vijayant makes sure that the kalmstrom.com solutions are user-friendly and fit well into SharePoint and Outlook, the platforms we build on.

Wedding
In December 2015 I attended the wedding when Vijayant married his Monika. It was a wonderful party with more than 1000 guests, and I told you a bit about it in a blog post.

Next time I visited the kalmstrom.com team in Indore I was told that Vijayant and Monika were expecting a child, so it was no big surprise when they announced the birth of a baby girl this last Sunday.

Happy family
The image to the right was taken at the hospital, and even if is dark I hope you can see Vijayant's happy smile when he for the first time holds his newborn daughter.

The Rimza family has given us two more team members. Now Jayant has become an elder father, or bade papa in Hindi, and Rituka is the baby's paternal aunt, bua. The bua is always a respected person, as she is the one who decides the name of the child.

The whole kalmstrom.com team wishes baby Rimza a bright future!

By Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Enforce A SharePoint List Business Rule

All organizations have rules and guidelines for processes and procedures, and in an ideal world all employees follow them. In reality rules are forgotten, and in such cases it is convenient to have a reminder sent out automatically. When the business rule involves SharePoint, both can be done with a workflow.

In a new kalmstrom.com Tips article, I have described how a SharePoint workflow can reverse a forbidden action and send out a reminder about the correct process to the user who forgot the rule.

Tasks list
I have taken a list in one of our products as an example. The default tasks list in Kanban Task Manager has no "Minutes worked" field, but new fields can be added just like in any other SharePoint list.

If a manager decides to add a "Minutes worked" field, it is probably important to have it filled out also – maybe so important that a task with "Minutes worked" set to 0 should be impossible to mark as completed. That is where the workflow come in.

Two conditions and two actions
The workflow that I create in the demo below has two conditions: the task status must be set to Completed and the "Minutes worked" value should be 0, which is the default value.

Two actions are performed when both conditions are met: the task status is reversed to In Progress and an e-mail with a reminder about the rule and a link to the task is sent to the person who last modified the task.

Even if I have used a tasks list in the demo and the Tips article, the workflow method can be used in many different ways. Regard my demo as an inspiration, an idea that you can adapt so that it suits your organization and its business rules.

Peter Kalmström,
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions