Outlook Kanban View For Support Tickets In Updated Folder HelpDesk

Next version of the kalmstrom.com issue tracking tool for Outlook, will have three new views. Today I can show you one of these views: the Folder HelpDesk kanban view, where open incident tickets are visualized with color coded cards.

Messages become tickets
With Folder HelpDesk a support team can cooperate in an organized manner in Outlook. E-mails or messages from a web form are converted into tickets manually or automatically and gathered in a list with several different views in Outlook.

New tickets can also be created when information is received in other ways, for example by telephone or sms. All open tickets are shown in Outlook, and they can be displayed in various views.

Move kanban card between phases
On a traditional kanban board, cards with task information are moved between phases as the work proceeds. The kanban board gives a quick overview over the tasks, and bottlenecks are easily discovered.

On the Folder HelpDesk kanban board, each open ticket is represented by a card that shows the most important ticket information. The ticket opens when you left click on the card. When you right click on the card, a reading pane with more of the body text will be displayed at the bottom of the screen.

Kanban Task Manager
kalmstrom.com already has four versions of another solution that uses a kanban view: Kanban Task Manager. Two of these versions are for Outlook, so it is a logical step that we use our experience to enhance Folder HelpDesk with a similar view.

Drag between status phases
In the Folder HelpDesk kanban view we use the status values from the Folder HelpDesk settings as phases, which means that each organization will have the phases they need in the preferred order. The ticket status information is updated automatically when a kanban card is moved to a new phase.

Color codes
The tickets on the Folder HelpDesk kanban board are color coded by either Incident Type or Responsible. In the demo below we are using the Folder HelpDesk example data colors, but you can use any colors you like.

Filter, search and zoom
The Folder HelpDesk kanban view has many of the features you find in Kanban Task Manager. The tickets can be filtered by Incident Type, Responsible, Caller and Priority, and there is an Instant Search feature that searches all text in the tickets. With the zoom bar you can resize the kanban board and show more or less tickets in the view.

Use custom field as lanes
The Folder HelpDesk ticket HTML form can be customized, and organizations who have created custom ticket fields can use one of them to group the tickets in horizontal lanes. The cards can of course be dragged and dropped within and between the lanes too, in the same way as in the status phases.

We hope that the new kanban view will make work with Folder HelpDesk tickets even more efficient and enjoyable. As I mentioned above we plan two more new views, and I will come back and show them when the development process has come a bit further.

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

SharePoint Links, A Crucial Concept

When you write, post or create something in SharePoint, you most likely want to make it easy for the appropriate people to find it. A link is most often the best solution, but a link can be created in various ways. The tutorials about links in our series SharePoint Online from Scratch have now been published, and I hope you will find them useful.

My demos are recorded in Office 365 SharePoint Online, but links work in the same way for SharePoint 2013 on-premise.

The same technique in all links
SharePoint is a web-based application, so links are at the core of everything. Every clickable navigation link, button and image use the same hyperlinking technique, and therefore it is crucially important to understand the concepts behind linking and how to make your own hyperlinks.

URL
Everything on the web has an address, also called a URL (Unique Resource Locator), which at least contains a protocol, most commonly http:// or https://, and a domain, such as kalmstrom.com. The URL can also contain a more exact specification of which file is to be displayed. Additionally the URL may have parameters that indicate what part of a page should be focused or displayed.

Links in text
Inserting a link in a text, like 'here' in “There are lots of more tips articles here!” is easily done from the INSERT tab in the ribbon. When the link has been created you can edit it, for example decide if the link should open in a new tab or not. It is common practice to open a link in a new tab when it points to content outside your main content area.

When editing the link, you can also add a small document type icon next to it. That icon is especially useful if you are linking to a document with a recognizable icon, such a Word document or a PDF file.

Clickable images
Image links are popular, and users often expect to be able to click on images to know more. When you insert an image in SharePoint it will not be clickable by default, so you will have to do the extra work of selecting the image, inserting a hyperlink and deciding what should happen when you click on the image – usually the user is taken to another web page.

Hotspots images
Making parts of an image clickable and linked to different locations is slightly harder to do, since the editor in SharePoint does not yet have this capability. The process involves creating a map of the areas in the image that should be clickable.

You can do this manually by editing the html code but that is a bit tricky and prone to errors. Therefore I show you no-code ways of doing it with Visio, PowerPoint and Excel.

Promoted links
When you first create a SharePoint team site, it has links in the shape of moving tiles on the start page. These links are called promoted links, and in two articles we describe how to create images for promoted links and how to  add promoted links to any SharePoint page.

Wiki linking
If you are linking to content within your site, SharePoint offers a functionality to help you build links to existing pages, views and items within that site. You can also link to non-existing pages, which is way more useful than it sounds. This technique is known as wiki linking.

The hardest part about wiki linking is the syntax – double brackets before [[ and after ]] the text you want to link. When you start typing the two double brackets the SharePoint editor helps you with a little drop-down. I recommend that you use your keyboard to navigate this drop-down. If you want to change the caption of the link but not the destination, use the pipe symbol for that.

In other articles I describe how to use links in SharePoint Newsfeeds and lists and how to link to a shared drive. There is considerable power in using hyperlinks to help your readers find their way through your content, so welcome to have a look at the examples and step by step instructions in the Links articles and demos.

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

SharePoint Categorization With Rates And Keywords

In an earlier blog post I introduced some tools for SharePoint file categorization: folders, document libraries and columns. Now we have published more tutorials about the same subject, in which we take a closer look into what you can do with different kinds of SharePoint library columns.

Rate or like
A categorization method that I find too rarely used is the rating. SharePoint gives two rating options: likes (as in Facebook) and 1-5 stars. This is something people are used to, so no extra training is necessary for this kind of categorization. You can of course filter and sort the rating column by ranking.

                                

By default the SharePoint Search shows the highest ranked hits first. You can take advantage of this by only adding rating to very important document libraries, because then these documents will always show up first in searches.

Required values
SharePoint gives the option to make it mandatory to add a value to any certain column before other users can access the file.  When no column is marked as required, a file that is created directly in a library or uploaded to it will be accessible to all users at once. To categorize it you have to open the file properties, and there is a risk that users will forget or skip this step.

If you really want files to be categorized, you should set at least one column to required. Then each new file has to be "checked in" before other users can access the file. A check in cannot be done until the required value has been filled out or selected.

Default values
In some cases values can be calculated and set as default, something that lessens the burden on users and guarantees a correct categorization. Other default values instead increase the risk of wrong categorization, if uses don't change them when needed. Default values can help users get used to categorization, and maybe it is worth it to have some wrong categorizations in the beginning, compared to no categorization at all.

Enterprise Keywords
An Enterprise Keywords column is a Managed Metadata column where SharePoint automatically sets the connection to the Term Store, where the keywords can be managed. The Term Store serves the whole organization, so once a keyword has been added in one library it will come up as a suggestion when a user starts writing a similar word in the same or another library.

Term sets
You can of course also create your own Managed Metadata columns and connect them to the Term Store. It works in the same way as the Enterprise Keywords column, but by having various term sets in the Term Store you can connect different site collections to different sets of keywords.

In the kalmstrom.com Tips section we have an introduction page with links to all SharePoint categorization articles. I strongly recommend you to use some of these options to tag your documents. They will make it much easier to find the files you need among all you have stored in SharePoint.

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

1 000 000 Views For The kalmstrom.com YouTube Channel

Today we celebrate that the kalmstrom.com YouTube Channel has reached one million views, an impressive figure for a specialized channel like ours.

My colleagues and I are happy that so many people want to watch our demos about SharePoint and Office and about the kalmstrom.com Solutions that build on those platforms.

Authentic views?
How do we know that real people have watched our demos? Of course we cannot be 100 % sure about that, but YouTube claims that the view count shows quality views by actual humans and that robot views are discovered and not taken into account.

5 300 subscribers
Another reason for me to believe that the views are authentic, is that the kalmstrom.com Channel has well over 5 300 subscribers. I imagine they watch a demo or two sometimes! The many comments we get also show that people have actually studied and enjoyed our tutorials.

In an earlier blogpost my mother Kate observed that most of the YouTube subscribers are men, while women seem to prefer Pinterest, where we also present our video demonstrations.

kalmstrom.com Solutions
We have found YouTube demos to be a good way of introducing and explaining our Outlook and SharePoint solutions. The manuals have an abundance of screenshots and give all details, but with video demonstrations we can actually show how to do things. A big part of the view count comes from these demos, and we are glad that our customers find them useful.

Why so popular?.
Another group of demonstrations are tutorials about the Microsoft Office and SharePoint platforms, and in spite of all the product views the most popular of all our videos is actually a basic SharePoint tutorial.

Create a Small Business SharePoint Intranet has had over 60 000 views during the last year, even though there are many other demos about the same subject out there. A search for SharePoint intranet on YouTube gave 32 300 hits!

So what do the kalmstrom.com demos have that makes them special? I think at least part of the explanation is the way we present them on the kalmstrom.com website.

Team work
Obviously the kalmstrom.com demos cover subjects that many need to know more about, and as SharePoint and Office are my special competencies I am happy to share my knowledge. Being an experienced lecturer, I also know how to organize the information in a good way.

But I am not alone in the creation. My colleagues Kate and Rituka edit my recordings, and their work is very important for the result you see. They also write the Tips articles that give more information and often step by step instructions. The kalmstrom.com Tips section started as an assistance to subscribers but has now grown to an important part of our website.

Education without advertisements
To have some revenues from all our work with the SharePoint and Office tutorials we allow advertisements in the demos, but if you want to use them for education you are welcome to buy advertisement free copies of the demos you need.

Some of my demos have even become a book, Excel 2016 from Scratch, and we plan to do something similar with the SharePoint Online demos.

But first we will publish more demos on YouTube and write more Tips articles for the kalmstrom.com website. So please help yourselves!

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

SharePoint File Categorization With Folders, Columns and Libraries

I very often come into contact with organizations that want to move from a file server to SharePoint. Usually this is something they expect to be a fast and painless process without much work and with immediate benefits.

It can be fast, and there are some benefits right away, but I recommend that you think through how your information should be categorized in SharePoint. That way you will gain much more, and you will use SharePoint the way it was intended to be used.

Tips series on categorization
In a series of articles in the kalmstrom.com SharePoint Online from Scratch series, I give some tips on the categorization of files in document libraries.

It is possible to put all of your files directly into a big document library with lots of folders within folders. Most things will work as they did in the file server, and you will have the additional features of file versions, full text search, workflows, views and alerts. But there are better ways!

What categories?
Categorization is one of these things that everyone has an opinion on but very few companies and individuals actually have any real strategy for.

The only group that really knows categorization well are librarians. You would never walk into a library and find a section of books printed in Stockholm or a section with all the books from the great publishing houses of Ursa Minor, or even a section of the books published in 2014!

However, in most organizations those are exactly the kind of non-standard categorization you will find when exploring their file servers and all the folder hierarchies.

Categorization tools
My Tips articles and video demonstrations will not help you solve the categorization strategy problem, but I try to show you some tools that will allow you to be flexible and use the power of SharePoint.

Folders
Starting from the most popular but least recommended I will begin with the old and tried Folder. I will show that it actually does have some benefits, especially when used with OneDrive for Business or the “Open with Windows Explorer” feature.

The main argument for folders is that your users will feel right at home and you will not have to change the way your information is stored on the file server. However, you will quickly experience that folders have some major drawbacks. SharePoint is really not built for handling folders in a good way, and it has some serious folder-related annoyances.

The folder one dimension drawback
Folders rely on information being categorized in one dimension only. Imagine if a site such as hotels.com were organized into folders. It would start out rather well. I could click my way into the Europe folder and then into the London folder, but then I would quickly realize that once I get into deeper categories it gets complex. Where will I find the hotels that both have both the “Free breakfast” and the “Free wifi”? In one of those folders or both?

Columns
As you see, at a certain level of complexity the folder way of storing information breaks down. Most likely your information is that complex too. A good way of categorization is creating list columns and combining them with views, so that your information can be sliced and diced in many ways.

If we continue to use the hotels example from above, I would create a country column based on the choice, managed meta data or lookup column type, and then I would create two yes/no fields for the breakfast and the wifi.

If I fill out the column values for my hotel description documents correctly, it would be very easy for anyone to find hotels with free wifi and breakfast in London by applying a filter.

Multiple document libraries
Once you start building with views and columns it quickly becomes apparent which files fit into your document library and which don’t. To continue with the travel example I started above, it would be silly to fill out the “Swimming Pool” value on an excursion and the “Mode of transportation” value for a hotel.

Thus instead of trying to fit both excursions and hotels in one document library it makes more sense to create one document library for each of those information types. Using multiple libraries for different kinds of files is generally a good idea.

In a following blog post I will expand the subject of categorization a bit more, and include links to more Tips articles with demos. I hope this will be useful!

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