A history of building on Microsoft products
Kalmstrom Enterprises AB is the company behind the brand kalmstrom.com Business Solutions, a Silver partner of Microsoft since 2011. The common theme for kalmstrom.com solutions is that they add functionality to the Microsoft products on which they are built: SharePoint, Azure, and Outlook.
The kalmstrom.com team was aiming for a solution that could automatically convert emails into SharePoint list items. At the same time, they wanted to make the email conversion a 24/7 process, without any user interaction.
With Microsoft Azure, the pieces come together
“Organizations that get a lot of emails requested a solution for automatic email conversion,” said Jayant Rimza, Lead Developer, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. “Microsoft Azure played an important role in solving this challenge, as Azure made the website deployment smooth and automatic.”
kalmstrom.com’s E-mail Converter is installed on Azure, where it automatically converts emails into SharePoint list items. For the conversion frequency, E-mail Converter uses Azure Scheduler, which works without any user interface and, by default, executes the conversion process every five minutes. If that rate is too fast or too slow, Azure Scheduler makes it easy for administrators to change the frequency.
With E-mail Converter, organizations can monitor multiple email folders and convert emails into list items in different SharePoint lists. The conversion will continue even if all users are logged out from their systems.
E-mail Converter also offers email threading, so users can add all emails for the same case in one SharePoint item; merging of list items, allowing users to combine several SharePoint items, or parts of them, into one; and Excel report functionality so the E-mail Converter administrator can create custom reports for performance analysis.
"It is inspiring to see the continual growth of the Azure platform,” said Peter Kalmstrom, CEO and Systems Designer, kalmstrom.com Business Solutions. “It is so full of services, and new ones appear at an impressive tempo. We are using Azure in many different ways: for custom solutions for customers, mostly based on virtual servers; for in-house testing and development of all of our products; and for E-mail Converter for Azure and SharePoint. It is our first product to run entirely on Azure, but it is certainly not the last."