kalmstrom.com Tips And Ads

The Tips section of the kalmstrom.com website is becoming increasingly popular, but it also requires some work from our side.  To  avoid  burdening the kalmstrom.com applications with the costs of maintaining the tips section, we have decided to add advertisements to the Tips pages and tutorial videos. I will also have ads in the blog posts introducing these tips and tutorials.

Special knowledge
I have certified expert knowledge of Microsoft's products, and the Tips section was created to share some of it to Members of the kalmstrom.com Community.

After a while more people discovered the kalmstrom.com Tips pages, and nowadays this section of our website has as many visitors as the product pages. The kalmstrom.com channel on YouTube is also popular and gains more followers each week.

SharePoint, Outlook and Excel
Many of my most recent tips are about Microsoft SharePoint 2013, and earlier we published tutorials on SharePoint 2010. I think most organizations will use SharePoint in the future, so I want to spread knowledge about this platform and also adapt the kalmstrom.com products to it.

Outlook and Excel will also come with us into the future, so we have a number of tips on these products too. Several other tips are gathered under the heading "Miscellaneous". You are welcome to have a look!

Google ads
The kalmstrom.com products are of course my first priority, but as so many people find my tips and tutorials useful I would like to expand that side of the business too. One way of doing this is to allow advertisments, and we are now trying a Google ads placement on the Tips pages and in the general video tutorials.

I hope the ads will not be too disturbing. Quite the contrary, I hope visitors will find them interesting and click on them – because that is when we get paid!

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

Kanban Style Task Management in SharePoint – New version Released

I have many plans for the kalmstrom.com solution for project and task management in SharePoint, and today   I am happy to announce that some of them have been implemented as version 1.7 of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint has been released. The slideshow below shows the new version.

SharePoint 2013 support
The most important of the enhancements is that  Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint is now compatible with the 2013 version of SharePoint and Office 365 SharePoint.

Hide what you don't want to see
In version 1.7 of  Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint you can hide phases, projects and responsibles from the kanban board, if you don't want to see them but still want to keep them in the SharePoint lists that store all Kanban Task Manager data.

Among the phases I think many want to hide the last one. In the kalmstrom.com team site installation we call it "Published", but "Finished" is probably the most common name.  The Hide feature is also useful for finished projects and responsibles that are no longer active in the workgroup. Such projects and responsibles will just clutter the filter dropdowns in the kanban board.

Delete or Close?
In the earlier versions of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint tasks were deleted when users clicked the X icon in the visualized task on the kanban board. They were still kept in the SharePoint recycling basket for a while – normally 30 days – but some users thought it was too easy to delete tasks.

Now we have done something about this issue. The SharePoint admin can let the "delete" icon move the tasks to one of the hidden phases instead of really deleting them. We have also changed the icon so that it no longer shows the delete symbol.

Two task sizes for the kanban board
Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint visualizes tasks on a kanban board in SharePoint, and in the new version the SharePoint administrator can opt to show smaller tasks than the default ones.  With the smaller size more tasks can be seen on the screen without scrolling. The smaller tasks has no "card pin", for better visibility.

Custom Kanban Task Manager SharePoint list
Maybe some other task parameter than project, responsible and priority is important to your organization? In that case you can make use of the "Extra field".

When this field in the configuration page is given a name,  Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint creates a list where you can add the different values. Then this parameter can be added to all tasks, and you can also filter the tasks by it.

Upgrade or try
Community Members who are already using Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint are welcome to upgrade their installations to get the new features and the 2013 support.

Have you not tried Kanban Task Manager yet? Please download the solution and evaluate it for 30 days. I am looking forward to hearing your comments!

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

Milestone For The kalmstrom.com Blog

The kalmstrom.com Blog has now reached more than 100 000 pageviews, which we consider a good result for a specialised blog like this one.

Lazy beginning
We started the kalmstrom.com Blog in 2009, but during the first years we only posted a few rather short blog articles.

It was not until 2011 we begun posting more often, and I think those articles also had better content than the earlier ones. After a while we saw the result of this improvement in the number of pageviews, and the figures are still increasing for each month – which encourages us to continue posting.

Long shelf life
When a blog post is new we are of course eager to study the statistics to see how many pageviews it gets, but it is even more interesting to look at the statistics of all blog posts and not only of the latest ones, because the kalmstrom.com blog posts are read long after they were published. We take that as a proof of quality, and it makes us even more motivated to generate good content.

Tecnical blog with some variety
The major aim for the blog is to inform about the kalmstrom.com solutions that enhance Outlook and SharePoint and the blog is a good marketing channel. The most read blog post ever in this category is the presentation of Kanban Task Manager for SharePoint from October 2012.

We are happy that the great interest for the article has been followed by downloads and then Community Memberships when organizations have decided to use this solution for kanban style task and project management in SharePoint. Also an earlier blog post about the Outlook version of Kanban Task Manager are among the ten most read during all times.


Business news
We want to give blog readers more than marketing, so we often comment technical news and other events in the business. In this group the most read blog post so far has been about the initiative by Microsoft Sweden to proclaim a "Work From Home Day". This event took place in Februari last year and was later followed by a "Telework Day" in Estonia.

The kalmstrom.com Tips section
Our website does not only contain a lot of information about the kalmstom.com applications for Outlook and SharePoint. As the team has profound knowledge about these platforms we also give tips and pointers that are not directly related to our products.

Each new tip is introduced in the kalmstrom.com Blog, and these posts are often popular. The article about adding JavaScript in SharePoint from December 2011 is actually the most read blog post of all.

Had I waited a while with writing this blog post I think another article would have taken the lead, though, because "SharePoint 2013 Document Library Templates" is high on the list even though it was published as late as the end of March this year.

Personal news
Another kind of blog posts describe important events in the life of the kalmstrom.com team members. Here I must admit I am a bit disappointed that the most read blog post is from 2009 - a short article about Swedish Christmas celebrations.

I think we have published better blog posts in this category after that. Maybe it is the photo of a red cottage in a snowy landscape that attracts visitors?

Who are the visitors?
The statistics can also show us where the blog readers come from, and we see that the biggest group is the Americans. After the U.S. comes U.K. and then India, China, Sweden and Germany. China is the only surprise here, as we do not yet have any Community Members in China. But it surely looks promising for the future!

While I have been writing this the figures have changed, so that we are a bit more over 100 000 now. Thank you all blog visitors! We are happy that you take your time to read and share the kalmstrom.com Blog.

By Kate Kalmström
Marketing and Documentation
kalmstrom.com Business Solutions