2015 Challenges Successfully Passed!

It is time to look back on yet another prosperous year. 2015 has given us many new subscribers, and new challenges have given us valuable opportunities to hone our skills.

We have been digging deeper into our core competence areas by enhancing our main Outlook and SharePoint products as well as releasing new ones. We also took on some new challenges by releasing a mobile app and successfully managing sponsored product development.

Study Manager
In March we released a new SharePoint solution for online training. Study Manager was a sponsored kalmstrom.com Solution, requested by teachers who wanted to add self-correcting exercises and tasks to SharePoint and supervise their students' work with them.

These teachers took a more active part in the testing than sponsors usually do. They were by no means SharePoint experts, so their participation in the development process made us catch several points where we had taken things for granted.

Even if this early user input took some extra time, I was convinced that it was beneficial and would make Study Manager easier to manage for teachers and students. Later this was confirmed in a testimonial: "Also those students who are not used to computers can work with the exercises, as Study Manager is so easy to use."

Templates Manager
Every organization wants their documents to have a consistent look and content, and the best way to achieve this is of course to use templates for different kinds of documents.

However, Microsoft has not given a good solution for templates management in SharePoint. In the second half of 2015 the kalmstrom.com team did something about that: we released Templates Manager.

With Templates Manager administrators and other template creators can publish and update templates to the whole SharePoint farm or tenancy by just pressing a button. We have also made the template search quick and smooth, so that everyone can find the right template to use at each occasion.

TimeCard for SharePoint Mobile
In the beginning of the year we hired our own Mobile App Developer, Madhur Trivedi, and his first release was an app that takes the information from the TimeCard for SharePoint calendar and displays it in a mobile friendly user interface. That way, users can tag events with time reporting information in smart devices that synchronize with the TimeCard for SharePoint calendar.

Now Madhur is working on an app that connects to SharePoint tasks lists. The rest of the team is busy with enhancements of existing products, and next to be released are new Outlook versions for Kanban Task Manager and TimeCard.

Team efforts and celebrations
It is fascinating to work with talented colleagues who find solutions when many others would have given up. As our 2015 product challenges has been managed in triumph, it felt wonderful to finish the year with joyful celebrations at a big wedding partyin Indore.

I have written about the marriage between Monika and Vijayant Rimza earlier this month, so here I will just give you one of the official wedding photos.

Now we are looking forward to a new year, and I will soon come back with my thoughts on the future.

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Use SharePoint Search To Navigate Between Site Collections

In a new SharePoint Online tutorial in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I show how you can use SharePoint Search to navigate among site collections.

Multiple site collections instead of big ones
I usually advise customers to create several site collections, for example one for each department, instead of having everything in the same site collection. It will be easier to manage, and you can set different permissions on each site collection.

But for this to work well it is important that the navigation between the site collections is quick and easy to understand.

Scalable navigation
When you start building a SharePoint tenancy you will only have a few site collections, and you might want to put links to them in the global or top navigation of each root site. This works in the beginning, but it is difficult to scale up such a navigation. That is one of the reasons I recommend the Search navigation instead.

Search vertical
People are used to searching, so if you add a search vertical for site collections to the Search Center, users will understand what to do with it. I wrote about search verticals in an earlier blog post, and the kalmstrom.com Tips section has several articles on search verticals. A Search link in the top navigation can open the Search Center with the site collection vertical active.

Promoted links or hotspots image
Direct links to the most important site collections in the Search Results web part are especially useful to new employees who don't know the organization so well and might not know what to search for. You can also add links in the form of promoted link tiles or a hotspots image.

I show more tips on how to enhance the Search navigation in the Tips articles, so welcome to have some inspiration!

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Christmas With Hope Of Light

Yesterday was the shortest day of the year on the northern hemisphere, when the sun at noon is at its lowest altitude above the horizon. In Sweden this time is filled with festivities intended to ease the darkness and bring light into our lives despite the cold and long winter nights.

The country with the polar night
In the northern part of Sweden, above the polar circle, the sun does not raise above the horizon for several weeks in December and January, and also the rest of Sweden is very dark. The kalmstrom.com office is situated in the southern part of the country, and here we have more daylight. But as the globe angles away from the sun, the rays do not give any warmth and the light is weak.



Winter solstice celebrations
Nowadays the winter solstice occurs on December 21 or 22 each year, but with earlier calendars it has been on both 12 December and 24 December. These days have been celebrated in Sweden since ancient times.

Midwinter festival The holiday we now call Christmas has its origin in the Yule festival on the darkest day of the year and was celebrated long before the Nordic countries were Christianized. It was a festival intended to disperse darkness and evil forces and celebrate the light that was to come.

As you all know, we still need to get rid of darkness in many forms. Together with my colleagues in the kalmstrom.com team I wish all blog readers  light in all its senses and a happy Christmas time!

Kate Kalmström
CCO
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

Show SharePoint Files From Multiple Site Collections

Even if you have multiple site collections, each one with its own content, some files are important to many users. Those files should be possible to reach from within several site collections, so that users don't have to navigate to another site collection to read or edit them.

In a new tutorial in the kalmstrom.com Tips section I show two ways to display files from other site collections. I also discuss how these methods look for users who don't have access to certain files.

Keep files in one place

Common for both methods is that you should keep each document in only one library, even if you share it on many sites. That way you only have to edit in one place. Imagine how many versions there will be after a while, if you copy and paste documents between site collections!

Enterprise Keywords
It is always a good habit to tag files with metadata and keywords, and Enterprise Keywords are centrally stored and easy to add and use. I give a certain keyword to all documents that should be shared between site collections, to make them easy to find in a search – because search is what I recommend you to use when you share files between site collections.

Content Search
If you gather all documents that are tagged with a certain Enterprise Keyword in a Content Search web part, you can easily add more files to the page by just tagging them, no matter what site collections they are stored in. In the demo below I show how to add such a web part to a page.

Embed files
The tutorial about file sharing among SharePoint site collection has two more demos. In one of them I show how to embed a Word file. This looks good on the page for users who have access to the file, but it takes a lot of space and it only works for Word, PDF and PowerPoint files.

See what you are allowed to see
SharePoint always trim searches after permissions, so users only see what they are allowed to see. In my third demo about documents from multiple site collections I show how the two options, search and embed, look to a user who don't have access to the shared files.

The Content Search web part looks good, because where some users see links this user sees nothing at all. The embed option, on the other hand, looks bad, with a no access message occupying space on the page. Therefore you should only use the embed option for Word files that all users have permission to read.

This was the third blog post about my Search articles in the SharePoint Online from Scratch series, but there is a lot you can do with SharePoint Search so you can look forward to at least one more!

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions

The kalmstrom.com Custom SharePoint Support

The basis of our company is of course the kalmstrom.com Outlook add-ins and SharePoint Solutions, but another part of the business is growing to become more important: our customized SharePoint Support.

kalmstrom.com Custom Solutions
For several years already we have offered custom solutions and services to companies, and various organizations have taken advantage of it. We have for example created a SharePoint Quality Assurance Solution for an investment project where the quality control had to be rigorous and around 34 000 approvals had to be handled and documented in an efficient way.

This was a big project that spanned over long time, but we have also assisted with smaller tasks, down to only four hours of work. The custom solutions are interesting to work with, as each one of them offers a special kind of challenge that is stimulating and expands our knowledge and experience.

SharePoint implementation support
This last year another part of the services has grown considerably: the SharePoint implementation support. Both big and small companies have requested our assistance when they want to begin using SharePoint. So far I have taken care of most of this support myself.

We can assist from start, from the first discussions on which SharePoint edition to use. I learn what the company needs and give advice on how to configure SharePoint to make it as useful and easy to manage as possible.

Support contracts
These organizations often need ongoing support on their SharePoint expansion. Once you start getting into SharePoint you discover how much you can do with the platform!

To give best possible assistance, we therefore offer a support contract with a fixed number of hours per month. This way the support customers know that I will not walk out on them but be available when they need me. Furthermore the hourly fee for a contract is lower than my standard fee.

In the kalmstrom.com team we are always keen on taking on new challenges, and we have worked with SharePoint for many years and have a solid knowledge and experience. Welcome to contact us!

Peter Kalmström
CEO and Systems Designer
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions