Outlook Kanban Board for Single Users Updated

Do you often need to enter information from e-mails into Outlook tasks? In that case today's update of Kanban Task Manager Single will be useful, because we have made it very easy to convert e-mails into tasks. Just click on a button to copy data from the e-mail to the task.

The workgroup version of Kanban Task Manager was updated a few weeks ago, and now the turn has come to the version for single users, like one-man businesses or consultants.

Visualize your work process
A physical kanban board is a board where cards are moved between different phases of a project as work proceeds. Kanban Task Manager uses the kanban board idea with Outlook tasks, so that you can see your tasks in Outlook and group them in various ways. You can:

• Drag and drop tasks between or within different phases of a project. You may also use lanes to categorize your tasks.
• Display tasks for multiple projects in one kanban board. Filter the tasks to see only one project.
• Search tasks.
• Zoom in and out on the kanban board, to see more details or more tasks.
• Generate Statistics Excel reports. Study and show your data with all the features of Excel.

And now also:

• Convert e-mails into task with a button click. Select or open the the e-mail and click on the 'Convert' button. This button is displayed both in the Outlook mail view and in open e-mails.

Support for inline images
The new version of Kanban Task Manager supports inline images and bold and italic text in the task body. This is especially useful together with the 'Convert' button, because e-mails often have images and formatting.

You can also drag e-mails to the Kanban Task Manager folder to convert them into tasks, but with this method e-mail images will not be transferred to the task.

Conversion settings
In the Kanban Task Manager settings you can decide what to do when an e-mail has been converted into a task: always open the task, never open it or ask. When you open each task after conversion, you can directly select Project and Phase (and Lane and your custom tag if you are using those options).

If you choose to not open the tasks, they will be placed in the first phase on the kanban board, where you can easily find them and tag them with your Kanban Task Manager parameters. You may even call that phase "Not Assigned" and use that phase exclusively for tasks that are converted from e-mails and not yet have been tagged.

Open button
An 'Open' button will be displayed when you select an already converted e-mail in the e-mail view, or when you open a converted e-mail. Click on the button, and the corresponding task will open in a new window.

Upgrade
If you are a subscriber and often get work orders or other task information by e-mail, I recommend you to upgrade your installation. We give kalmstrom.com Subscribers free upgrades, and the upgrade is quick. Download the .msi file and run it. Then the installer will find your earlier installation and upgrade it automatically. Refer to the Revisions page for a full list of enhancements and bug fixes.

Try it
Do you need to get an overview over your Outlook tasks and want to use the kanban  method to visualize the work process? In that case you are welcome to try Kanban Task Manager Single. There is plenty of documentation on our website, and should you still have questions I hope you will contact us.

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

SharePoint Views and Metadata Columns

The possibility to create different views is a powerful and popular SharePoint feature. Combine meaningful views with the use of columns for relevant metadata, and your SharePoint lists and libraries will be very informative.

In a series of Tips articles in the SharePoint Online from Scratch series, I show how to create columns and show their metadata in calendar and Gantt views and views with filters, grouping and totals. I use a library in the demonstrations, but what I show is also applicable to other SharePoint lists. The tutorials are suitable for SharePoint 2013 on-premise too, as most functions work in the same way as in Office 365 SharePoint.

The folders limitation
When moving files from a file server to SharePoint, it is possible – but not recommended! – to put all the files in a big document library with lots of folders within folders. The main argument for folders is that users will feel at home and the move to SharePoint will be very fast.

However, you will quickly experience that folders have some major drawbacks. Imagine if a site such as hotels.com was organized in 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? As you see at a certain level of complexity the folder way of storing information breaks down, and most likely your information is that complex too.

Use columns and views instead
A bit more complicated but a lot better when it comes to 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 metadata or lookup column type and then I would create two yes/no fields for the breakfast and the wifi.

If I filled in 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. To make such a filtering permanent I could create a permanent public or personal view that includes the filter values looked for.

23 categorization articles
My colleagues and I have so far created no less than 23 articles about categorization in the kalmstrom.com Tips section, and I have already introduced some of them in two earlier blog posts: about folders, columns and libraries and about rates and keywords.

Now we have released more articles, and this time we focus on the use of views. At first we discuss views more generally and describe how to make a filtered and grouped view, how to create a views landing page and how to calculate the values in a numbered column.

Then we take a Quotes library as example and show how it can be enhanced with new metadata columns and a calendar view and a Gantt view. I also give a workflow that sets titles to documents, because I have found that the Gantt view works best with titles.

I hope you will find the categorization articles useful. Most of them include a step by step instruction and a short demo, so it will not take too long to go through them all.

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

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