We have added Grŵp Llandrillo Menai to the list of institutions that automatically qualify for free Academic Accounts: anyone signing up with a gllm.ac.uk email can have a project team of up to 10 people.
Grŵp Llandrillo Menai is an umbrella organisation to oversee the operation of the three member colleges: Coleg Llandrillo, Coleg Menai and Coleg Meirion-Dwyfor, all in Wales (United Kingdom).
A Kerika Account can own an unlimited number of boards, of any type, and each board can have it’s own team consisting of Board Admins, Team Members, and Visitors.
Users with a Professional Account have a defined size to their Account Teams, directly related to the number of subscriptions they have purchased so far.
Some users prefer to buy a few more subscriptions than they currently need to provide an extra buffer to make it easier to quickly their project teams. Others try to buy just as much as they need, and no more.
If your Account has unused subscriptions, then it’s easy for any Board Admin to add someone to their board, simply by inviting them to join a particular board.
This uses up one of the free subscriptions in that Account, and the Account Owner is notified.
If there are no free subscriptions, Kerika doesn’t immediately block the Board Admin from adding someone to their team. Kerika allows for the new person to join immediately as a new Team Member, but the Account Owner is immediately alerted that they need to buy an additional subscription. This alert comes as email, and as an in-app message:
This starts a 30-day grace period to give the Account Owner time to process the purchase; some organizations have complex approval processes even for something as inexpensive as Kerika!
If the Account Owner doesn’t complete the purchase within 30 days, the newly added Team Member is demoted to Visitor: this means they can still have real-time access to their board, but they can’t make any changes or be assigned any work items.
Clicking on the BUY SUBSCRIPTION button will bring up this dialog:
If the Account Owner is expecting a bunch of these notifications in the future, they can buy more than the one subscription they have been prompted for; they can also decide whether they want to automatically renew their subscriptions when they expire.
A confirmation screen is shown, with tax calculated based upon whether the buyer is located in Washington State or not, and the Account Owner is given the option of either completing the purchase online, using a credit card that is processed by Stripe, or paying offline.
(Not: Kerika never sees any credit card details. All of the online payment processing is handled by Stripe.)
In larger companies there may be restrictions on who can make online purchases (or even who has access to a corporate credit card), and to accommodate these customers we offer the option of requesting an invoice.
If you choose an invoice, you get a confirmation like this:
And within seconds the invoice will land in your email Inbox, and those of anyone else who has been specified as a Billing Contact on your account. Kerika invoices look like this:
We spent months, earlier this year, designing and building this system trying to make sure we offer all the flexibility that our customers may need. Since we have users around the world, that was an interestingly tough challenge!
If you have any suggestions on how we could improve this, let us know.
We have made some improvements to the process that guides new users when they sign up, so they can join the accounts of coworkers they might need to work with.
The new process works like this:
When a user signs in (with a Google ID, Box ID, or their email), Kerika examines the email address associated with that user and compares it against other users who are already registered.
If it finds that other users from the same domain are already active Kerika users, it offers the new user the option of joining a colleague’s account or starting an entirely new account.
In most cases, people are better off joining accounts that have already been established by their coworkers, so they can find the most relevant Kerika boards.
Kerika tries to be smart about this in a couple of ways:
First, it rules out free domains, like Gmail, Yahoo, and Outlook. (There’s a long list of free domains that we check against.) With free domains, there could be thousands of other users who have similar emails but no connection with you.
So if you sign up with a free email, you won’t be offered the possibility of joining an existing account. (Of course, an existing Gmail user could invite you to join their teams; it’s just that Kerika doesn’t suggest these connections.)
Having winnowed out the free domains, Kerika then considers whether the older accounts from the same domain as the new user can actually accommodate new people: do they have free subscriptions available that could be used by the new user?
If the older accounts are still in the Free Trial phase, then the answer will be Yes: trial users can have unlimited Team Members .
If the older accounts are tagged as Academic/Nonprofit, there’s a good chance they can accommodate new users.
If the older accounts are Professional Accounts, the chances are much lower — unless the older account had bought a few extra subscriptions in advance to accommodate this scenario.
Having further narrowed down the list of potential accounts, Kerika considers whether your potential coworkers are, in fact, active users of Kerika. This is important in universities, for example, that have been whitelisted so that everyone joining up from a particular university automatically gets a free Academic Account.
From University of Washington, for example, there are thousands of registered free accounts, set up over the past several years. Not all are still active because the students involved may have graduated already. So even though an account may have free/unused subscriptions, it doesn’t make sense to suggest that to a new user if that account has been dormant for more than a month.
After all this we could still end up with a large set of potential list of collaborators, particularly in large organizations.
So, as the final step, we check the “last active time” of our candidate accounts and then present the 8 most recently active accounts. Our rationale is that a new user may want to join the most recently active account, which perhaps belongs to a fellow user who had suggested the new user sign up for Kerika.
All of this takes place in a fraction of a second, of course, so users don’t experience any wait times. But it helps new users orient themselves within Kerika by trying to connect them to the most likely coworkers.
It’s possible to copy-paste text into a Kerika Chat message, and there are legitimate use-cases for this: for example, a developer may ask a question to a coworker who replies with a code snippet.
Kerika handles code in chat messages by storing two versions of the message: as plain-text, and as the original format. When a chat message is displayed, the original format is used but not executed, which means the embedded code is visible, but doesn’t run in the browser. This makes it easy and safe to share code snippets through chat messages.
While making this improvement, we went through all the places where a user can type in text, Card Title and Description, Board Name and Description, Tag, Attachment Name, etc. to make sure we are guarding against malicious code injection.
We have added Prisma SO schools in the Netherlands to our community of Academic & Nonprofit users: anyone signing up with a scopeshoelen.nl or youscope.nl email address will automatically get set up with a Kerika Academic Account, allowing for up to 10 people to work on boards owned by their account.
Prisma is a school for pupils who have difficulty learning for a variety of reasons, such as an autistic spectrum disorder, ADHD, intellectual disability, attachment disorder, or Down syndrome.
Along with the recent improvements we made to the Auto-Number Cards feature for Task Boards and Scrum Boards, we have also made it easier for you to search for cards by their number.
It’s simple to use: just type in a number in the Search box on the top of the Kerika app and Kerika will assume you are looking for a card with that number. It will also search for anything else with that number, but will prioritize a card matching that number as the first result it shows.
With our latest release we have introduced a new way to have your Task Board and Scrum Board cards numbered automatically.
Our original implementation was rather rudimentary: if you turned on Auto-Numbering (which you can access from the Board Settings dialog, by clicking on the gear icon/button on the top-right of the Kerika app), Kerika would automatically insert a card number as part of each new card’s title.
The card numbers inserted by Kerika were pure text that was prefixed to whatever you typed in as a card title. This meant that they could easily be changed by any Team Member (or Board Admin), and this, in turn, meant that what you saw as a card number couldn’t be completely relied upon as the real/original number of that card. A coworker could have easily edited that number to something quite different.
To make these numbers more reliable and trustworthy, Kerika now keeps the card number as a separate attribute (field) of each card: it is shown, when Auto-Numbering has been turned on for a board by it’s Board Admin, but it cannot be edited by anyone.
With card numbers being stored as a separate attribute of each card, we are also adding an improved way to search for cards by their numbers: if you type in a number in the Search box inside Kerika, the system will first look for a card with that number before showing any other results.
Card numbers are always unique to each board: a card with number 100 on Board A will have no relation with a card numbered 100 on Board B. Each board will keep track of its own numbering, starting with “1”.
So what happens with Scrum Boards? Scrum Boards are different from regular Task Boards in that they let you share a backlog across multiple Scrum Boards. This lets you run several Sprints one after another, with each Sprint drawing from the same shared Backlog.
(And, of course, this also makes it possible to run several projects at the same time that draw from the same shared backlog.)
Since each board keeps track of its own sequence of card numbers, if you move a card from a Scrum Board back to the Backlog column it will lose the number it previously had.
That’s because once a card goes back into a shared backlog, we can’t be sure which board it will get pulled into the future: the card may return to the same board where it was originally located, or it may get pulled into a different Scrum Board.
The smart approach in this situation is to reset card numbers when cards go back to a backlog.
At this year’s Lean Transformation Conference in Tacoma, Washington, Arun Kumar spoke on the subject of “Virtual Teams: How to Make Them Succeed”.
A synopsis of the presentation:
Virtual teams can be as successful, even more so, than traditional (collocated) teams – but you need to understand how the project dynamics change when everyone can’t be in the same room at the same time. In this session we will cover the key success factors to building a high-performing virtual teams: how you can plan your work, run your daily standups, communicate, and share content. We will discuss the different roles and expectations of Project Leaders, Team Members and Visitors, and how people can juggle multiple projects at the same time.
The presentation was an hour-long, including Q&A; here’s an edited version of the talk (about 45 minutes long.)
We are adding The Harbour School, Hong Kong, to the list of organizations that qualify for free Kerika Academic Accounts. Anyone signing up with @theharbourschool.edu.hk email will automatically can have up to 10 people working on their boards, free.
We have a daily report of accounts that seem defunct because emails to these users are being marked as “user not available”, which generally means that email account no longer exists on that particular email server.
The most common scenario, of course, is that someone has left their organization, but Kerika doesn’t know so that emails that are automatically generated are still being sent. An example would a user who used to get a 6AM Daily Summary email, and is no longer working at their organization: because she may have never explicitly asked for her account to be closed, or even turned off the 6AM Daily Summary emails, Kerika would have continued sending these to her.
We use our daily report of “bounced” accounts to determine whether we should delete them altogether as Kerika users or not. Each bounced account is examined individually to see if the user had logged in recently, or was working on boards owned by other (active) users. We err on the side of caution: if there’s any doubt we don’t delete the Kerika account.