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: 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 createHelpDesk 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
