At the beginning of each
month I send out a newsletter to customers,
evaluators and other interested parties. In the
newsletter I summarize what has happened at
kalmstrom.com during the past month, and I also tell
some about our plans for the coming month. If
something interesting has happened that may affect
our products or company I comment on that too.
Welcome to
subscribe to my newsletters. You may unsubscribe
any time by just sending me an e-mail.
Below are newsletters from six months back.
Peter Kalmstrom
CEO, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, September 1, 2010 Subject: August - the good times continue
Dear Members and Evaluators,
In my latest newsletter I told you that we had the best July ever, and the interest for the Community and the kalmstrom.com products continues to grow. We look forward to the autumn and have taken steps to employ more developers to meet the demands from Members and partners.
Here is some news from the latest month. For more information about updates, please refer to the Revisions page for each product and to the kalmstrom.com Blog.
HelpDesk updates
Also in August we released updates of both our helpdesk applications. Public Folder HelpDesk, for Outlook and Exchange, had a new HTML editor in the ticket, with new buttons added for font color and background color. A context menu was also added and is shown when you right click the in editor.
The latest HelpDesk OSP, for Outlook and SharePoint, has no new features but some enhancements that make it work smoother. Under the HelpDesk OSP homepage we have also published the first of our Ideas pages. We will have one for each product, telling you about current development and plans for each product. Very welcome to contribute with your own suggestions on the product(s) you use! Under development right now is a possibility to merge tickets in HelpDesk OSP, and we hope to release the new version with this feature in a month or so.
NameDays V4 released
The new name days files I told you about in the July newsletter has now been released. Note that the new NameDays is not only for the Outlook calendar but also for other platforms. On our website there are now video demonstrations on how to import or subscribe to NameDays. The iPhone demo is still missing, but it will soon be finished. NameDays is a new and modern product that takes advantage of new technologies, so it works best on fairly new platforms and applications. For Outlook that means versions 2007 and 2010, but if you have Outlook 2003 you may still import the name days to your default calendar.
TimeCard optimized for Office 2010
Both the Workgroup and the Single versions of TimeCard were optimized for Outlook 2010 in the beginning of August. If you earlier have used Outlook 2007, the difference is not so big, but Outlook 2010 has something called Contextual Tabs. This means that you while still in an e-mail folder can select an appointment in the To-Do bar, and the Calendar Tools will be visible ‒ with the TimeCard dropdowns and the Expenses button.
kalmstrom.com Community
You can find Members of kalmstrom.com
around the globe, even if North America
and Europe dominate. To show this we
have a new map at the
Community homepage, and we of course
hope to update it with more and
more countries. We give a very warm
welcome to these organizations, who
joined kalmstrom.com Community as full
Members in August.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Monday, August 2, 2010 Subject: July - best July ever!
Dear customers and evaluators,
July
and August are normally quiet months,
but this year we have noticed a
remarkable change. We have had the best
July ever in revenues, and we have also
received several interesting partnership
proposals and suggestions for
sponsorships in TimeCard and
HelpDesk OSP. I will tell you
more later, when we see what becomes
reality, but it looks like the second
part of 2010 will be just as exciting as
the first, if not even more.
HelpDesks optimized for 2010
In June both the kalmstrom.com helpdesk
applications were optimized for Outlook
2010 32-bit, with the buttons under the
Ribbon Home tab. For
HelpDesk OSP
we could use the possibility to have two
buttons in one in the ribbon, so with
Outlook 2010 you will never have more
than four buttons even if you have
several lists. Click the button if you
only have one list or wish to use the
default list; click the arrow in the
button if you wish to select list.
Public Folder
HelpDesk only has some
of the buttons shown in the homepage.
The rest will be visible when you open
the ticket. After suggestions from users
we also made some changes in the ticket.
We added some more buttons – for Save
and Close Window, Print and High and Low
Importance.
TimeCardWorkgroup
Our QA Engineer, Dina Romanova, has been
on vacation in July, so the release of
the new
TimeCard Workgroup
has been a bit delayed. It will be
published very soon, now when she is
back. The new version will
be optimized for Outlook 2010 32-bit and
also have the possibility to set a
default TimeCard value for an
e-mail address or e-mail domain.
NameDays My
application that put name days in the
Outlook calendar has been offered for
free during many years, and it has been
very popular. Now we will take it
another step and create a totally new
version build on .ics files. This makes
it possible to use our NameDays
on both Windows and Mac OSX, iPhone and
Andriod phones, and it will also be very
easy to add more name days from new
countries. I will tell you more about
the new NameDays in next
newsletter.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Monday, June 28, 2010 Subject: June - new feature for TimeCard
Dear customers and evaluators,
The newsletter is a bit early this time,
since I am going to California on
Wednesday. I like to be fully online
when the newsletters are sent out,
because even though news are presented
earlier in the blog and on Facebook and
Twitter, many users seem to prefer
reading these e-mails. We always get a
lot of visitors to the website and many
e-mails to sales and support the day
after a newsletter. No wonder – more
than 12 000 e-mails are sent out.
PF HelpDesk V11
In May we released version 11 of our
incident management application
Public
Folder HelpDesk. I think
all Members have upgraded already, and
many of them sent us their comments.
Thanks to you all! This week we will
release an update where some bugs are
fixed and some enhancements that Members
have requested are implemented. Kate
will of course
blog
about it.
TimeCard
Just as last month TimeCard has
received a new feature. This time we
thank
Accounting on Computers Inc.,
who has sponsored a possibility to set a
default TimeCard value for an
e-mail address or e-mail domain, a
useful feature for users who often get
work information by e-mail.
TimeCard
Single has been updated first, but we
will add this possibility to the
Workgroup also. A new demonstration is
added to the
TimeCard
Single
demonstrations, so both
Single and Workgroup users are welcome
to see how it works. Welcome to
upgrade
all TimeCard Single Support
customers!
Office 2010
In June Office 2010 was released for
all. Unfortunately
Calendar Browser does not
support Office 2010, but all the other
kalmstrom.com products work fine.
The Outlook buttons are not in their
usual places, though, but under the last
tab on top, Add-ins. We will of course
optimize all our products for Office
2010 as soon as possible.
Blog subscription
In June we have finished our move to new
servers, and everything has gone very
smoothly except for a minor problem with
the blog. We now use Blogger, but with
the same web address as before. However,
this means that your old subscriptions
do not work. Please subscribe again to
the new
blog!
kalmstrom.com Community
This month we say a special welcome to
the following organizations, who are
among those who joined
kalmstrom.com Community as full
Members in June:
Amerind,
Australia
Ev.
Kliniken Gelsenkirchen,
Germany
SAGA,
France
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, June 2, 2010 Subject: May - release of PF HelpDesk V11
Dear customers and evaluators,
May has been a really good month for
kalmstrom.com. We made a very important
release, and we also saw how our earlier
updates to full Unicode support gave an
increase of downloads and sales to
countries with non-Latin alphabets.
PF HelpDesk V11
It was a happy day when you could
finally release version 11 of
Public
Folder HelpDesk, with a
redesigned ticket form and several other
improvements. We have kept the good
parts of working with incident
management within Outlook but eliminated
the problems caused by using Outlook
forms technology, and this feels very
good for the future of our flagship
product. Both the English and the German
manuals have been updated, and the PF
HelpDesk V11 video demonstrations
are published. Separate e-mails have
been sent out to both Members and other
users, so I will not comment more here.
As usual you are welcome to read the
blog
to learn more.
TimeCard TimeCard Workgroup has been updated with a possibility to use
both your own text and metadata in the
subject of the appointment. And we have
more good news for all TimeCard
users: a sponsorship has made it
possible for us to add a new feature –
default TimeCard value for an
e-mail address. With this feature
enabled you get the Customer (or
whatever you choose to call that
metadata) automatically filled out when
you drag e-mails to the calendar to make
appointments from them.
Office 2010 and 64-bit
In my latest newsletter I asked what you
thought about developing our products
for the 64-bit version. Some sent me
their opinions, but not as many as I had
hoped. Evidently this is not a big
questions for you. Of those who e-mailed
me approximately one third said yes to
64-bit and two thirds said no. When I
then read this in the
Slipstick
newsletter I was even more doubtful
about supporting 64-bit: “Few applications work with the 64-bit version and
unless you need to open large (2 GB)
Excel and Access files, you should not
use the 64-bit version. Wanting to use
the 64-bit version because you use a
64-bit operating system isn't enough
reason to use it - stick with the 32-bit
build this time around. “
kalmstrom.com Community
After six months with kalmstrom.com we
have taken a look at the figures. What
surprises us is that only 13 % of our
full Members use more than one product.
The other findings are more what we had
expected: 94 % of the Members are from
Europe or North America, and 58 % are
earlier customers who have transferred
to the Community system.
This month we
say a special welcome to the following
organizations, who are among those who
joined kalmstrom.com Community in May:
Arrow ECS,
UK
Eduserv,
UK
Geo Networks,
UK
Greystone
Programs, USA
Kerry County Council, Ireland
Masimo,
USA
Migration
We have begun a migration to new servers
and will mostly use the Microsoft hosted
solution
BPOS.
So far our intranet is moved without
disturbances, and we hope to finish the
rest in June. We don’t expect any
issues, but please have patience if
there would be some!
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Thursday, May 6, 2010 Subject: April - release of Office 2010 brings new challenges and questions
Dear customers and evaluators,
Welcome to this newsletter about what happened at kalmstrom.com in April and what will happen in the nearest future. Thanks for taking your time to read it. Office 2010 In April Office 2010 it became possible to download Office 2010 through MSDN, so even if it has not reached the retailers yet, Members with a volume license contract have already started to ask for compatible products. We have of course begun studying it and know what we have to change. There are no problems to use OLAP Reporting Tool with Office 2010 today. As this statistics application is integrated in four of our other products it is an important step. Also KBase and NameDaysare compatible.
We will continue working and fix any compatibility issues in the other software as soon as possible.
An interesting feature in Office 2010 is the Social Connector. It looks and works very much like Xobni and gives users a very rich view of past conversations with a person. I find it fascinating that it is also an excellent illustration to a problem we have been discussing within the kalmstrom.com team:
With the introduction of Office 2010, a 64-bit version of Office is available for the first time. However, at release, the Social Connector doesn't work with Office 64 bit versions,
and Microsoft even suggests use of the 32 bit products on their official forums and support. This highlights that even Microsoft is finding it difficult to build add-ons which are 64-bit compatible, and it raises the question if we at kalmstrom.com should make all of our products compatible with the 64-bit version of Office 2010?
I don't know if 64-bit compatibility will be worth the investment, so I would very much value your feedback on this! Is it important to you that our products support the 64-bit Office 2010? Should we try to achieve that – or rather concentrate on other development?
TimeCard Both versions of TimeCard have been updated this month
– and both after customer requests. A Member organization had problems with duplicates in the database. These users report time and expenses as seldom as once a month, and after some troubleshooting it turned out that the issue occurred if the connection was lost during the time it took to report so many entries. Our skillful developers found a solution and changed the reporting process a bit to avoid this problem.
Another user, a Single this time, wanted to see the default values for empty fields when she created a new appointment. Earlier they were added at reporting time, but now it is possible to check a box in Personal Settings and have the default values filled out in the appointment also. The customer says “I’m happy, happy, happy!” over the new version, and that of course makes us happy too.
Testimonials
In April we received a much appreciated Testimonial from Hay Group, a company with hundreds of TimeCard users. If you like your kalmstrom.com product and want to tell others how you use it, we will be very grateful for a few lines from you. It is fine to just answer this e-mail.
PF HelpDesk
The release of PF HelpDesk V11 comes closer. It was a challenge to make the upgrade automatic when both the ticket form and the installer is new, but we wanted to avoid manual steps. It took some time to figure it out, but now this problem is solved and we hope to publish the new version soon. We will send out e-mails to all customers and evaluators when
PF HelpDesk V11 is released, and Members of kalmstrom.com Community that use
PF HelpDesk will also get personal e-mails with the new key for a smooth upgrade. The rest of you will have to ask for it, I’m afraid, but all support customers are also entitled to upgrade without cost. Welcome to take a look at the new PF HelpDesk.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, March 31, 2010 Subject: March - HelpDesk improvements
Dear customers and evaluators,
This past month we have tried to
prioritize the work with version 11 of
Public Folder HelpDesk, our
product for issue tracking inside
Outlook. For this version we have
decided not to use the Outlook form
technique. Instead we have designed a
totally new form, which will be easier
to customize and quicker to load. We
have been making good progress and hope
to release the new version in April or
May, so that old and new users can start
benefitting from the improvements.
HelpDesk OSP
Does your organization use forms based
authentication for the intranet? In that
case we have good news for you. By the
end of the month we released version 2.1
of HelpDesk
OSP, which is built on
SharePoint/Office Live. Now this other
issue tracking application from
kalmstrom.com can connect Outlook to
SharePoint sites with Forms
Authentication.
Minor Updates
Two products have had minor updates in
March. We had to fix a PF
HelpDesk bug that gave
certain users problems when e-mails with
attachments were converted.
Some of the Calendar
Browser setup files
proved to be corrupt and gave blank Add
calendar and License dialogs, so we
published a new setup there also. Please
upgrade your installations if you have
had problems with those two products.
Video demonstrations
During this winter Kate has updated our
video demonstrations and integrated them
better into the website. I am sure many
of you already have seen the MediaRolls
on our website. One product is left, and
that is of course PF HelpDesk.
There we will have to make totally new
demonstrations for version 11, so it
will take a while.
kalmstrom.com Community
The Community grows, as expected, and we
feel proud that so many companies and
organizations have already shown their
confidence in us. The kalmstrom.com team
gives a warm welcome to these customers,
who are among those who joined the
kalmstrom.com Community as full Members
in March:
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Tuesday, March 2, 2010 Subject: February - a month of many
updates
Dear customers and evaluators,
February is a short month, but the
kalmstrom.com team managed to squeeze in
a number of updates anyway. Below is the
most important news for the last month.
Welcome to read more about them in the
kalmstrom.com
blog
and on the Revisions page for each
product.
Calendar Browser
In February the kalmstrom.com team
continued the work with the resource
management application Calendar
Browser we started in January. Both
the product and the documentation has
been updated. The product has had some
enhancements, like decimal numbers shown
as in the user's regional settings, and
a bug with direct booking mailbox
calendars was fixed. We have
also created a YouTube demonstration
presenting Calendar Browser.
Welcome to take a look on the
Calendar Browser homepage or on
the
Community Facebook page.
HelpDesk OSP
Also
HelpDesk OSP, the kalmstrom.com
application that connects Outlook to
SharePoint or Office Live, has had some
improvements. Now it is possible to use
an apostrophe in the list column name,
and if a user misspells a path to the
site, he gets a chance to correct
the URL instead of a message that the
site does not exist. The video
demonstrations has also been updated,
and that work will continue with more
demonstrations in March.
PF HelpDesk
Unicode support for our other issue
tracking software,
PF HelpDesk, proved to be a real
challenge, but as usual our Lead
Developer Bahrur Ipham managed to solve
the problems. In February we could
finally release an update that fully
supports all characters. Now we hope
that we can concentrate work on PF
HelpDesk 11
instead of making more updates of the
current version, but if critical
problems should occur we will of course
correct them.
TimeCard Both versions of TimeCard
had new features this month. Now users
can include the appointments body when
they export to Excel. Just check the new
box in Personal Settings, and the first
255 characters will be added in a new
column in the spread sheet. Companies
who wish that their
TimeCard users to have all
metadata, and not select only the ones
they work with in Personal Settings, can
now have as many as they like, as the
kalmstrom.com team has found a
workaround to the limitation of 1000
items in Outlook 2007 ribbon drop downs.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, February 3, 2010 Subject: January - a good start of 2010
for kalmstrom.com
Dear customers and evaluators,
The world has entered a new
decennium, and as you might have seen in
the blog it is a new decennium for me
personally also. I have great
expectations for it on all levels, and
it has started well so I have some good
news to tell you.
Unicode work continues
Both our resource management application
Calendar Browser and the
time reporting add-on
TimeCard has been updated
for full Unicode support this month. Now
all characters can be used everywhere in
those products. At the same time our
developers Bahrur Ipham and Jayant Rimza
made certain enhancements and fixed a
few bugs. Full lists of the improvements
can be found under the Revisions page
for each product
New
documentation
We always strive to document our
products as best as we can, to make the
learning process as easy as possible for
our customers. This is a continuing
process, not only because the products
are changed but also because questions
from users make us understand what we
can improve Always feel welcome with
suggestions and comments on our
documentation.
In January we have published new
video demonstrations for Calendar
Browser, updated to version 6.1.
Please have a look if you want to know
more about Calendar Browser in an
easy way!
HelpDesk OSP , our issue
tracking software for Outlook and
SharePoint/Office Live, has a new
manual. We chose to make a new manual on
how to use SharePoint workflows to
enhance
HelpDesk OSP instead of
adding this information to the user
manual. The new manual is more advanced
and intended only for the administrator,
but the software for creating these
workflows is free so anyone can have a
try.
February plans
We will soon release a new update of
PF HelpDesk, maybe even this
week, and of course the work on PF
HelpDesk 11 continues. Also
TimeCard
will be updated this month. I will
come back with more news about these
releases in my next newsletter, and as
usual Kate will
blog
about any news as soon as possible.
kalmstrom.com Community
The interest for kalmstrom.com
Community continues to grow. The
kalmstrom.com team gives a warm welcome
to these organizations, who are among
those who joined the kalmstrom.com
Community as full Members in January:
We are of course happy that
Swedish organizations seek the kind of
long time relationship that a Community
Membership means. After all, this is a
Swedish company! But the Swedes would
have heard if we did something bad.
Therefore it makes us even more proud
that people from other parts of the
world, like the ones from USA above, put
their trust in kalmstrom.com. We will do
our outmost to live up to your
confidence.
A clarification: In the end of
December we launched a
kalmstrom.com Community page on Facebook.
This page is for all
interested, not only for Community
Members. Anyone may be a fan – and it is
free ;-)
Unfortunately I have to finish with
bad news: The product CA Anti-virus is
wrongly showing a virus warning for a
third party file we use to register most
of our products,
eSellerateControl365.dll. The file is
clean, but for now you have to exclude
it from the scanning to install the
product.
FAQ.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the
kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Tuesday, January 5, 2010 Subject: December - Unicode support for
most products
Dear customers and evaluators,
First of all I wish you all a Happy
New Year. I am sure 2010 will be a
prosperous year for kalmstrom.com,
but now I will look back to
December. It was a quiet month, as
this month usually is for us, so the
team took the opportunity to improve
several products. Kate and Sigge
visited Sweden and enjoyed their
stay here, but now they are back in
Spain again.
Facebook page One of the last
days of December Kate created a
Facebook page for kalmstrom.com
Community, as a service to those of
you who use that social network. You
don’t have to be a Member to be a
fan, as we welcome all who are
interested in following what happens
at kalmstrom.com. Anyone may visit
and read, and fans may comment and
publish their own posts. Therefore
the kalmstrom.com Community Facebook
page will actually very much be
what the fans make of it. It will be
interesting to see the future of
this page!
We will continue blogging and
sending out monthly newsletters,
though, so even if you don’t want to
use Facebook you will still get
important information about our
products.
Unicode support for more products
In the October newsletter I told you
about our work to make our
applications fully compatible with
Unicode.
TimeCard was the first one
out, but the statistics tool was
still not compatible at that time.
To make
OLAP Reporting Tool
support all characters was a big
job, but in December we could
finally release version 3.1. with
full Unicode support. After that we
updated
PF HelpDesk,
Calendar Browser
and
HelpDesk OSP with the new
version of OLAP Reporting Tool.
And very soon it is
TimeCard’s turn to be updated
again, so that also the statistics
part of that application supports
all characters.
Additional improvements
The new versions with full Unicode
support also have some other
improvements. For Calendar
Browser the speed is improved
when loading the Overview and
Supplies dialog, and HelpDesk OSP
can now show embedded e-mail images
in exactly the same way when the
e-mail is converted to a SharePoint
list item. You can see an example in
the
blog
of 18 December. I recommend you to
follow the blog, as it gives more
info that I can enter in a
newsletter and you also get the news
earlier.
As you see the kalmstrom.com
customers are already spread over
the world, and with the new Unicode
support we look forward to welcoming
organizations from new countries
among our Community Members.
PF HelpDesk V11
In December the kalmstrom.com team
has started working on version 11 of
PF HelpDesk, and I hope we
can release it during the first
quarter of 2010. This version of
PF HelpDesk will have part of
the ticket html-based, for easier
customizations and to avoid the
problems with Outlook forms. There
will also be several other
improvements which I will tell you
about later, in blogs and
newsletters and on Facebook.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the
kalmstrom.com team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Tuesday, December 1, 2009 Subject: November - launching
kalmstrom.com Community
Dear customers and evaluators,
November brought a significant
product release for the whole
kalmstrom.com team and an important
step in life for one of
the members. The release was of
course the Beta version of
Microsoft’s Office 2010. Our
developers are already working with
the changes that must be made to our
products to make them compatible. On
the personal level one of them was
happy about something totally
different: Jayant Rimza was engaged
this month, and we wish him and his
fiancé all the best for the future.
TimeCard Our time reporting
application has been updated again.
Evaluators, especially big
organizations, have complained that
one month is too short to evaluate
TimeCard, so now both
versions have a 60 days trial. Some
newly discovered bugs have also been
fixed, so welcome to upgrade if you
have had issues with
TimeCard.
HelpDesk OSP
The kalmstrom.com team has been
using a new version of
HelpDesk OSP for a while,
and this month it was released for
all. Now it is possible to use the
e-mail threading feature for e-mails
sent to or from Outlook Web Access
(OWA), and since our team is spread
over the world this is how we use
it. In the
blog
of 8 November Sigge described more
in detail how SharePoint and
HelpDesk OSP facilitates our
work.
SharePoint and
Exchange Forum 2009
Scandinavia’s biggest conference
about SharePoint and Exchange was
held in Stockholm this month, and I
was invited to talk about the
kalmstrom.com products. It was
stimulating two days with
fascinating and very knowledgeable
people, and as many found my seminar
interesting I was invited to come
back next year again. I already look
forward to it!
PF
HelpDesk
Also our helpdesk application for
Exchange has had a face lift this
month. PF HelpDesk is an
application with many features that
must work together in a smooth way.
In this release we took care of some
non critical bugs and also gave the
application some minor enhancements.
For a full list, refer to the
PF HelpDesk
Revisions page.
kalmstrom.com Community
November has been a hectic month
because of our new payment system,
especially for my parents, Kate and
Sigge. They have answered many
e-mails about the transfer to
kalmstrom.com Community, and Kate
has also rebuilt parts of the
website and documentation to adjust
to the new deal. There are some
technical changes in the products
left, but otherwise kalmstrom.com
Community is launched and sailing
and the old payment method is
history.
This month it has
still been possible to buy our
products in the old way, but from
now on we will only use the
subscription model. However, Support
Customers who want to take advantage
of the 10 % discount on the monthly
fees still have 30 days to transfer
to the Community.
The kalmstrom.com team gives a warm
welcome to the
following organizations, who are
among those who joined kalmstrom.com
Community as full Members in
November:
Agridea. Switzerland
Attachmate, UK, USA
Gävle kommun, Sweden
Micradex, USA
SecIT, Finland
In the pipeline Apart from studying new
Microsoft technologies, our
developers are working with
Calendar Browser (quicker
loading),
HelpDesk OSP
(images in the list items) and
OLAP Reporting Tool
(Unicode). At the moment we cannot
promise any releases in December,
but don't worry, they will come
eventually. We are also planning for
PF HelpDesk
11. In that version we hope to
finally do away with the problems of
Outlook forms, but still maintain
the flexibility and the option to
customize the form.
December will be a month of
festivities for many of us. Kate and
Sigge will leave Spain and come to
Sweden to celebrate the Christmas
holidays with the rest of the
family. We look forward to meet in
person, and not only via Skype! I
wish customers and evaluators a
great time!
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the
kalmstrom.com team
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Monday, November 2, 2009 Subject: October - launching
kalmstrom.com Community
Dear customers and evaluators,
This last month we have started
something we have been talking about for
a while – a transfer to monthly
payments that allow free use of
all our products, instead of one
purchase for each product and maybe also
user licenses. We call the model
kalmstrom.com Community, and in October
we have prepared it by sending out
messages to different groups:
Support Customers were offered
special conditions for the transfer
to the Community. I have a soft spot for
these customers, who loyally pay their
support fees and thereby show their
confidence in kalmstrom.com – but I must
admit it was a bit exaggerated to call
you “Dear Dear” in the e-mail!
Old customers who had not renewed their
support contracts had a last chance
to do it. After 1 January 2010 I will
request full payment for Membership in
the Community for support and upgrades.
Current evaluators were
informed of the new
deal. During a period
they are allowed to
use both the old and
the new payment system.
Since most recipients of this newsletter
belong to one of those three groups, I
will not inform further about the
kalmstrom.com Community here. Welcome to
visit
the new Community pages on the
website, and please contact us if you
have questions! We look forward to a
quick transfer and a situation where
more customers than today use several of
our products. The Community model means
closer contact between team and
customers, so it becomes even more
important that we give good service and
offer useful products.
Windows 7 In October Microsoft released
their new operating system, and of
course all kalmstrom.com products are
compatible. I recommend those of you
who did not like Vista to try this new
system. It is much better!
New employee
I am glad to welcome QA engineer Dina
Romanova to the kalmstrom.com team.
She joined us a month ago and has now
studied and learnt almost all products –
and found bugs in them! That is of
course how it should ideally be – we
should find the bugs before the users
find them. Some products are already
updated, and others are coming soon. To
learn more about Dina, refer to the
blog of 8 October.
TimeCard
If you use
TimeCard with Outlook 2007 you will
notice at once that the application is
updated, since the dropdowns for the
TimeCard properties have been
moved from the right pane to the ribbon.
We have had positive reactions to both
this and other improvements in this
latest release. Read more in the
TimeCard
Revisions
page or in the
blog of 18 October!
HelpDesk OSP
Several customers and evaluators have
asked for a way to send automatic
notifications to the caller when a
ticket is created or changed. This can
be done in two ways: in Outlook, which
would need further development of
HelpDesk
OSP, and in SharePoint/Office Live
by using existing technology. Now we
have documented how to do it in
SharePoint/Office Live, refer to the
manual
or the
faq
with a summary.
Tips section
A way to concentrate more on current
customers is to give them tips on how to
do things that are within our expertise
area but not directly connected to our
products. We have started to build such
a section of the website, and all
Community members are welcome to suggest
what we should inform about. I cannot
promise that we will fulfill every wish,
but we will surely do our best! Welcome
to visit the new
Tips page!
Calendar Browser
While I am writing this newsletter Dina
tells me that the new release of
Calendar Browser is ready for
publishing, so when you read this the
new Calendar Browser
should be out. All bugs reported by
customers and found by Dina are fixed in
this new update, and support customers
are welcome to upgrade.
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, October 5, 2009 Subject: September - improvements thanks
to customer input
Dear customers and evaluators,
kalmstrom.com would not exist without
its customers, so we listen carefully to
all suggestions and carry out as many of
them as we can. Some ideas are small
changes which make the daily use a bit
smoother, others are bigger changes or
additions which are more complicated to
develop. It is important that our
products don’t get too complicated
though, so sometimes we make the change
as a customization only for one customer
instead. It also happens that the
suggestions are not for the products at
all but for the documentation, and also
in this case we are grateful for all
comments.
PF HelpDesk
enhancements
If you use the E-mail history feature in
PF HelpDesk
I am sure you will welcome the new
feature of e-mail notification to
Responsible. We thank
Standard & Poor's
who sponsored this alert to the person
responsible for the ticket when a new
e-mail is added. Another improvement
after a customer suggestion is that the
Open ticket button in the Outlook
toolbar now also works with e-mails to
Responsible. When an alert arrives, just
click the button and the correct ticket
is opened! For a full list of the
enhancements, refer to the PF
HelpDesk
Revisions
page.
Microsoft Certifications
We congratulate Jayant Rimza, who passed
an exam this month and is now a
Microsoft Certified Technology
Specialist (MCTS). He is not resting,
though, but will continue studying to
become a Microsoft Certified Systems
Engineer (MCSE). In the team we have
seen much evidence of his skills, so we
are convinced that he will succeed.
kalmstrom.com has also begun the process
to become a Microsoft Certified Small
Business Specialist. The big
organizations that choose to buy from
kalmstrom.com have competent people who
can value our products. Many small
companies lack such in house expertise,
and for them this certification will be
a proof of qualification.
Ελληνικά and
עברית
I have been told that the words above
mean Greek and Hebrew in these
languages. Since the team has no
knowledge of the non-Latin characters of
those languages it is not always easy to
make our products compatible with them,
but thanks to the Unicode standard it is
quite possible. A
TimeCard
customer with users in many countries
pointed out that the application gave
some errors when used with Greek and
Hebrew Office versions.
The kalmstrom.com technicians could
solve the problem rather quickly and
release a new version. They also
discovered a similar problem in OLAP
Reporting Tool, so our statistics
software will soon be updated too. Our
products can well be used also for
languages with non-Latin characters, but
sometimes we need a reminder before
everything works as it should.
Manual alternatives Some evaluators and customers
have asked for manuals in .pdf format,
so we have decided to add a choice of
format to our website. Both .doc and
.pdf have their advantages, so from now,
when you click on a manual link, you
will first be directed to a page where
you can select format. The manual is
always updated when a new feature is
released, so remember to upgrade your
manual at the same time as your
installation.
For more info about news, refer to
the kalmstrom.com blog. Kate tries
to write a post at least once a week,
and a good way of keeping track of the
progress is to be a blog subscriber.
Before I finish this newsletter I also
want to tell you that we got some new
Testimonials after I asked for them
last time. But there is room for more!
And remember, you must not write in
English. All languages are welcome!
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Wednesday, September 2, 2009 Subject: August - a big step forward for
the kalmstrom.com SharePoint products
Dear customers and evaluators,
SharePoint is an excellent tool for
cooperation and information sharing
within an organization, and I was early
interested in developing software for
this Microsoft product. Maybe I was even
too early when I created SP Attach,
the application that changes Outlook’s
standard behavior for attachments, but
now I see an increased interest in both
SP Attach and our SharePoint
based helpdesk.
HelpDesk OSP V2
released
One year ago, on September 5, a totally
new kalmstrom.com product was released.
This does not happen very often, but
thanks to a generous sponsor
Svenska Bil i Norden AB, we got the
support we needed to create
HelpDesk OSP. The interest was
great for this new helpdesk, and during
the past year our dedicated developers
have improved it step by step.
HelpDesk OSP now also works with
Office Live, so you don’t even need to
have a SharePoint site, and several
enhancements have been made and new
features added. We celebrated the
birthday a bit early by releasing
version 2, which has a much asked for
E-mail Threading function. Now you don’t
have to create a new ticket for every
e-mail. Instead the new parts of every
e-mail concerning the same case can be
added to the first ticket.
Update of
SP Attach With
SP Attach
you can handle e-mail attachments in a
more efficient and secure way within
your organization. Instead of adding the
file to the e-mail, you can let SP
Attach make Outlook publish it to a
SharePoint library and add a link in the
e-mail. A new version of this
application for Outlook and SharePoint
was released in August.
TimeCard improvements
Following the update of both
TimeCard
versions in July and minor updates also
in August, we have redesigned our
TimeCard homepage and given the two
versions separate presentation pages. We
hope that this will make it easier for
new evaluators of this smart product for
reporting both time and expenses from
inside the Outlook Calendar.
Testimonials
I guess most of you have seen our
Testimonial section, but have you
contributed to it? Since we don’t have
anything about our SharePoint based
products we are especially grateful for
testimonials about them, but of course
we welcome new testimonials for all
products. If you have experience from a
kalmstrom.com application, please send
us a few lines about how you use it, in
what way it makes your work easier ‒ or
anything that you think an evaluator
would benefit from.
New sponsorship for
PF HelpDesk
Even if the SharePoint products feel
very interesting for the future, we do
not neglect our Exchange software. Many
customers have been using them for many
years and look forward to doing so for a
long time to come also, and that is a
responsibility we take very seriously.
Those customers often have opinions on
our development plans, and sometimes
they also invest in the products. A much
appreciated sponsor is
Standard & Poor’s, and now they have
ordered some more features for our issue
tracking application
Public Folder HelpDesk, in
addition to the ones they have already
supported. I will tell you more about
that in the next Newsletter.
Exchange 2010 In August Microsoft released
Exchange Server 2010 Release Candidate
to the general public, and the finished
product will come later this year. We
don’t foresee any big problems for our
product portfolio, but we are of course
testing all of them on this latest
Exchange platform.
At last I want to say welcome back to
all vacationers. We have noticed that
you are working again, and we look
forward to a busy and interesting autumn
with a lot of contact with many of you!
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Sent:
Thursday, August 2, 2009 Subject: July - quiet month with time for
"to do"
Dear customers and evaluators,
The European holiday season has
given the kalmstrom.com team a much
needed quiet period. We have taken
advantage of that and been able to
remove some of the entries from our
to-do-list and started the work on
others.
V4.3 also for Single users
The success story for
TimeCard
continues, and now also the Single users
can add expenses to appointments, export
their reports to an Excel datasheet and
use other applicable features of version
4.3. We have sent out a separate e-mail
about this, so here I will only refer to
the
V4.3 page. Another piece of good
news for
TimeCard is that our German
customers and evaluators now have a
TimeCard Single manual in their own
language. We are grateful to our partner
Tom Janocha at
Mailhilfe.de, who translated it.
New view in the Calendar Browser
Overview
Our resource handling
application
Calendar Browser has been
updated again, now with a new view. A
customer suggested this improvement a
while ago, and now we have had time to
develop it. The new view is called
“Orders report”, and it shows all
bookings with supplies for the time
period you choose. This view is not
among the default ones, so to see it in
the Overview you have to first check it
in the Settings configure tab.
E-mail threading in HelpDesk OSP
HelpDesk OSP, our
SharePoint/Office Live based helpdesk,
is still young and does not have all the
features of the more mature
Public Folder HelpDesk. Many
customers have asked for an e-mail
threading feature, but this is not an
easy feature to develop. However, most
of the work is done now, and when we
release the new version it will be a big
step forward for HelpDesk OSP.
Today every e-mail is converted to a new
ticket, but with the new feature it will
be possible to add e-mails for the same
case to the same ticket.
Implementation of better routines
Our to-do-list does not only include
improvements of the products but also
changes that make our work easier and
more efficient. For some time an
implementation of HelpDesk OSP
has been high on the list, and now we
will soon start using it. As we connect
our customer database to the SharePoint
list we use for HelpDesk OSP, our
support service will be very smooth and
quick. No more searching in the database
for customer details – they will all
come up automatically, just like old
e-mail conversations and chat
transcripts.
During this month the team has also
discussed how to improve our testing
routines. The applications from
kalmstrom.com work in an extremely
complex environment, and it is virtually
impossible to test them on all the
systems and combinations that exist out
there. However some bugs could have been
discovered in the testing phase and not
when users reported them, and therefore
we have analyzed our testing routines
and made some important changes that we
hope will benefit you all.
Website improvements
Kate loves working with the website, and
I hope you have seen that she improves
it continuously. This month she has
updated the start page for all four
languages. Do you like it? Comments are
always welcome, also constructive
criticism. That goes for both website,
support service and products, as it
helps us improve!
The best to you all from
Peter Kalmstrom and the kalmstrom.com
team
