Release Of Calendar Browser V7 Moves Resource Booking To The Outlook Calendar View

Feb. 6, 2011 - PRLog -- Calendar Browser for Outlook has been on the market for over ten years. It was one of the first creations that developer Peter Kalmstrom made into a standard product, after he had created similar resource booking applications for a municipality and an insurance company. Neither could find anything suitable on the market and therefore asked Peter to develop a booking tool for them. At that time Peter was already an Outlook expert, so of course he used all the advantages of a tool integrated in Outlook.

Since those early days Calendar Browser has been continuously  improved and adapted to new technologies, but all the time Peter kept the folder homepage design. Then came Office 2010 ‒and gave the kalmstrom.com team a big problem. The other kalmstrom.com products were rather easy to update to support Outlook 2010, but Calendar Browser did not work at all with the new Office version!

The kalmstrom.com developers soon understood that important parts of Calendar Browser must be rebuilt. Now they had to decide how to make version 7 a product for the future. "It was important that the new Calendar Browser got a design that could easily be changed to support and take advantage of future technologies which we still can only speculate about", confirms Peter Kalmstrom, now CEO at kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. "We tested and discarded several alternatives before we decided on the design that has now become a reality."

Version 7 of Calendar Browser gives a group of resource calendars in the Outlook Calendar view, and users book the resource by making an appointment in the suitable calendar. In the ribbon there are buttons for resource descriptions and resource search. Another button opens the Overview, which show bookings of all the resources for the near future. Also the extra supplies that can be booked with each resource are shown in the Overview, as well as project and of course who made the booking.

Calendar Browser can be installed in a public folder or a shared mailbox, and the calendars can be of both the public folder and the direct booking mailbox type. "The mailbox calendars created some trouble for us", says kalmstrom.com Lead Developer Jayant Rimza. "If we had not been so intent on supporting also these calendars, we could have released Calendar Browser V7 earlier. However, that would have been to fail current customers who use mailbox calendars and wish to continue doing so."

Welcome to http://www.kalmstrom.com/products/Outlook/CalendarBrowser for more information about Calendar Browser. The fully functional product may be downloaded and evaluated for 30 days, and in addition to the extensive documentation the kalmstrom.com team also give support during the trial period.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fTzYTHd0uXI



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kalmstrom.com Business Solutions is a Swedish brand for well functioning and documented add-ons to Outlook, Excel and SharePoint. The common theme for all the kalmstrom.com products is that they add a bit of functionality on top of Microsoft Office.