Monthly Archives: May 2013

Use Google Drive for sharing files, without having to use Google Docs

From the very beginning Kerika has been built to leverage the Google Apps platform, and today we are one of the most elegant apps in the Google Apps Marketplace! The Google Apps integration, however, has been something of a double-edged sword: folks who are already committed to using Google Docs and Google Drive love Kerika, but there are also folks who like Google Drive but not Google Docs, and these folks haven’t been too happy to lose the advanced formatting and other “power-user” features of Microsoft Office.

This has been particularly true for some of our consulting users who make extensive use of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in dealing with RFPs and client reports.

The fact that we have always converted files to the Google Docs format is really more a historical artifact than an integral part of the Kerika design and product vision, so now we are offering users the choice of using Google Docs or not, while retaining our integration with Google Drive. Here’s how it works:

  • There will be a new user preference that lets you decide whether you want to use Google Docs or not. By default, this will be OFF, which means that you will not be using Google Docs.
  • If the preference is OFF, then files that you add to your Kerika project boards — onto individual cards or canvases — will still be shared using your Google Drive, but the original Microsoft Office format will be preserved. This means, for example, Excel files will remain as Excel files even as they are getting shared across your project team using Google Drive.

This setting is on a per-user basis: it means that you are controlling whether projects in your own account are going to use Google Docs or not. Other Kerika users may have different preference settings, so on some projects you may find that the files have been converted to Google Docs because that account’s owner prefers that way of sharing files.

This is what the new user preference looks like: it can be found at https://kerika.com/preferences

Your new Kerika preferences page
Your new Kerika preferences page

More ways for Project Leaders to get smart email notifications when changes take place on your projects

We are adding a bunch of new ways in which Project Leaders can choose to get email notifications when there are important changes taking place on their project boards; these include the following:

  • Email me when cards are added to my project: if new cards are added to a board where you are one of the Project Leaders, you can get an email notification. By default, this is turned ON: it’s a useful way for Project Leaders to know when the work expected of the team, particularly in Scrum projects, is increasing. (Team Members never get emailed when new cards are added.)
  • Email me when cards on my projects are marked Done: if any cards are moved to the Done column on a Task Board or Scrum Board, the Project Leaders can get notified by email. By default, this is also turned ON. (And Team Members never get emailed.)
  • Email me chat messages on cards in my projects: this is actually a two-part change that we are making. Previously, everyone who was part of a project got an email if there was any chat on a card. Now, this is more targeted:
    • If a card is assigned to one or more people, chat messages are emailed only to the assigned people. This reduces the overall volume of emails sent by Kerika by targeting only those folks who care the most about a particular card.
    • If a card isn’t assigned to anyone, chat messages are sent to everyone who is part of the team. Here, our assumption is that if you are writing a message about an unassigned card, you would like to get everyone’s attention with that message. For example, you might be suggesting a path forward for an unassigned card, or calling attention to an issue that isn’t assigned to anyone to fix.
    • Project Leaders can choose to be part of the chat notifications for all cards, even if they aren’t assigned to these cards, and this is a new preference setting that we have created with a default value of Off. So, if you are a Project Leader that would like to know about each and every chat message on your project boards, you could turn this preference On.
  • Email me general chat messages: this refers to chat that takes place on the board itself, that isn’t tied to any particular card. Chat that takes place on the board itself is usually intended for the entire team, so this preference setting applies to Project Leaders and Team Members. By default, this is turned On.
  • Email me when cards in my projects are reassigned: when a card is reassigned, i.e. an old team member is taken off a card, or a new person added, everyone affected by the change is notified by email: the people who were formerly assigned the card, and the new people. This is an easy way for you to know when someone expects you to handle some new work, or, conversely, if someone else is now expected to do the work that had previously been assigned to you. We have added a new preference setting for Project Leaders to be told, by email, when cards are reassigned: this is an easy way for you to know that your team has self-organized itself to handle its work differently.

All these changes means that your Preferences page, which is always found at https://kerika.com/preferences, now looks like this:

Your new Kerika preferences page
Your new Kerika preferences page

We have been using these new features internally for the past couple of weeks, and have found them to be really useful!

Card history on project boards in Kerika

The next release of Kerika will include a bunch of bug fixes and usability improvements, as usual, but a big new feature that we hope you will find useful is Card History: every card will contain a succinct history of everything that’s happened to it, since it was created.

Here’s an example:

Card history
Card history

Our implementation of this new feature is actually kind of clever, under the covers (of course!): rather than log every action immediately we wait a little to see if the user changes her mind about the action.

So, for example, if a user moves a card to Done, and then moves it back to another column soon afterwards, the Card History doesn’t show the intermediate action since the user clearly changed her mind about whether that work item was actually done or not. In other words, the system is forgiving of user errors: an important design principle that we have tried to adopt elsewhere as well.

Because the Kerika user interface makes it so easy to make changes to your task board, a built-in delay in the history is necessary to avoid creating a “noisy” or “spammy” history.

From a technical perspective, the most interesting aspect of creating this new feature was that we expanded our infrastructure to include Amazon’s DynamoDB.

DynamoDB is a fast, fully managed NoSQL database service that makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. This is our first foray into using NoSQL databases; up to now we had been exclusively using MySQL.

 

Shock, horror: Harvard divests 0.03% of its equity portfolio; Apple must be going out of business?

It isn’t hard to see example of “Apple-bashing” in the press these days: just take a look at Bloomberg’s website where the top headline in its Personal Finance section, for the past three days running, is entitled “Harvard Liquidates Apple Stake After IPhone Sales Lose Steam”.

If you read past the headline, the second paragraph lays it all out in devastating detail: Harvard has sold a grand total of $304,000 in Apple shares (about 571 shares at a price of $573), which represents 0.03% of its equity portfolio (and about 0.1% of its total endowment).

 

The most baffling shortcoming of Apple’s Maps

Of all the many shortcomings of Apple’s Maps program, the one that we find most baffling is that it doesn’t seem to use GPS for its most basic function: looking up an address.

Here’s an example: we make an appointment in our (Apple-made) Calendar program on our (Apple-made) iPhone, that references the local office of one our users.

The original calendar entry

In King County, Washington, every address is based upon a giant coordinate system, so it isn’t really necessary to specify the city of an address. The “NE” in the street name refers to “North East”, not Nebraska, and no one in King County would ever think of looking up a street address by first considering Nebraska as a possibility. And, yet, that’s precisely what Apple’s Maps program suggest: rather than using the GPS that’s built into every Apple iPhone ever made, it assumes that our next appointment is probably 15 states away, rather than 15 minutes away by car:

Apple Maps

Google’s Maps program, on the other hand, is very much GPS-aware, and the suggestions it offers are locations that are closest to where the phone is, not furthest away:

Google Maps

Why on earth (no pun intended) would Apple produce a map program for its phones that doesn’t make use of the phone’s most important feature — it’s ability to know where it is?

Security screening of new employees: a new process template, brought to you by HISPI

We are exploring a collaboration with the Holistic Information Security Practitioner’s Institute (HISPI) to create Kerika process templates focused on best practices in security.

The first of these is now available: how to do a security screening for new employees.

This template is available to all Kerika users, of course, and will be improved in the future as we continue to work with HISPI.

 

Our new version adds Tagging

As Kerika gets adopted by larger teams, working on larger and more complex projects, we have seen an increasing need to create filtered views of projects.

To make this easy, in the usual Kerika style, we are adding Tagging as the main new feature in our next release. This video will give you a quick overview of how tagging works in Kerika:

The concepts behind tagging are simple:

  • Every project board can have its own set of tags, and tags can also be added to templates if you want them to be part of your regular workflow.
  • Every Project Leader and Team Member can add new tags, apply tags, or remove tags.
  • A quick filter capability lets you easily see which items on a board match specific tags.
  • If you are working on a Scrum board, tags are integrated with your Backlogs: bringing a card in from a Backlog will automatically add the tags for that card to your current project board.
  • Tags are always converted to lower-case, and are not case-sensitive: i.e. “Server” becomes “server”. You cannot add duplicate tags to a board, so, for example, you can’t have “Server” and “server” as tags within a board since they are both considered the same.

There are a bunch of other improvements in the new version, of course, but tagging is the one you will see right away! Let us know what you think…