Every card, every canvas, every board in Kerika has a unique URL.
This makes it really easy to link items together, by using the URL in a card’s chat or description. And, with our latest version, Kerika makes this even easier by showing the title of the other card. Check out this quick tutorial video:
Although Kerika is built on top of Google Drive, you can still share files in Microsoft Office format.
Here’s how it works:
Toggle the “Use Google Docs for projects in my account” to OFF, and your Microsoft Office files will remain in their original format even as they get shared using Google Drive.
To make this preference even more useful, we have added a “smart download” feature: if you are storing your files in Microsoft Office format, clicking on a file attached to that card will automatically download that file for you, so that you can open it in Microsoft Office.
For example, if you have added a Microsoft Word file to a card, and are storing it in the original MS Office format, clicking on the attachment will download the file and launch Microsoft Word so that you can immediately start editing the file.
In some cases you might see a “403 Access Denied” message appear: if you do, there is a simple workaround for this problem – just open docs.google.com in a separate browser tab, and try again. It will work this time.
A very important point to note: if you download and edit a file, make sure you attach the modified document as a new attachment to your card (or canvas); otherwise your team members won’t see the latest version!
We have added a couple of new features related to dates:
If a column contains any cards with dates assigned to them, a “Sort by Date” button appears at the top of the column:
Clicking on this button will sort the cards that have dates:
This is a useful feature for date-driven projects, but if you are working in a pure Kanban or Scrum team, you might want to stick with (manually) sorting dates by priority, which the highest priority items at the top of the column.
We are replacing our integration with Google Docs with a “friends of friends” model.
The Background:
For the past 2 years, Kerika has offered an “auto-completion” feature that let you type just a few characters of someone’s name, and then have a list of matching names and emails appear from your Google Docs. It looked like this:
This was actually a very helpful feature, but it was also scaring off too many potential users.
The Problem:
When you sign up as a new Kerika user, Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage your Google Contacts”. This was a ridiculous way to describe our actual integration with Google Contacts, but there wasn’t anything we could do about this authorization screen.
We lost a lot of potential users thanks to this: people who had been burned in the past by unscrupulous app developers who would spam everyone in their address book. So, we concluded that this cool feature was really a liability.
The Solution:
We are abandoning integration with Google Contacts with our latest software update. Existing users are not affected, since they have already authorized Kerika to access their Google Contacts (and are, presumably, comfortable with that decision), but new users will no longer be asked whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage their Google Contacts”.
Instead, we are introducing our own auto-completion of names and email addresses based upon a friends of friends model: if you type in part of a user’s email, Kerika will help you match this against the names of that are part of your extended collaboration network:
We hope this proves to be a more comfortable fit for our users; do let us know what you think!
We are replacing our integration with Google Docs with a “friends of friends” model.
The Background:
For the past 2 years, Kerika has offered an “auto-completion” feature that let you type just a few characters of someone’s name, and then have a list of matching names and emails appear from your Google Docs. It looked like this:
This was actually a very helpful feature, but it was also scaring off too many potential users.
The Problem:
When you sign up as a new Kerika user, Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage your Google Contacts”. This was a ridiculous way to describe our actual integration with Google Contacts, but there wasn’t anything we could do about this authorization screen.
We lost a lot of potential users thanks to this: people who had been burned in the past by unscrupulous app developers who would spam everyone in their address book. So, we concluded that this cool feature was really a liability.
The Solution:
We are abandoning integration with Google Contacts with our latest software update. Existing users are not affected, since they have already authorized Kerika to access their Google Contacts (and are, presumably, comfortable with that decision), but new users will no longer be asked whether it is OK for Kerika to “manage their Google Contacts”.
Instead, we are introducing our own auto-completion of names and email addresses based upon a friends of friends model: if you type in part of a user’s email, Kerika will help you match this against the names of that are part of your extended collaboration network:
We hope this proves to be a more comfortable fit for our users; do let us know what you think!
A month ago we wrote about how Kerika makes it really easy to spot bottlenecks in a development process – far easier, in our opinion – than relying upon burndown carts.
That blog post noted that the Kerika team itself had been struggling with code reviews as our major bottleneck. Well, we are finally starting to catch up: over the past two days we focused heavily on code reviews and just last night nearly 80 cards got moved to Done!
A month ago we wrote about how Kerika makes it really easy to spot bottlenecks in a development process – far easier, in our opinion – than relying upon burndown carts.
That blog post noted that the Kerika team itself had been struggling with code reviews as our major bottleneck. Well, we are finally starting to catch up: over the past two days we focused heavily on code reviews and just last night nearly 80 cards got moved to Done!
A month ago we wrote about how Kerika makes it really easy to spot bottlenecks in a development process – far easier, in our opinion – than relying upon burndown carts.
That blog post noted that the Kerika team itself had been struggling with code reviews as our major bottleneck. Well, we are finally starting to catch up: over the past two days we focused heavily on code reviews and just last night nearly 80 cards got moved to Done!
Jakob Nielsen, of the Nielsen-Norman group, is an old hand at Web usability – a very old hand, indeed, and one whose popularity and influence has waxed and waned over the last two decades.
(Yes, that’s right: Mr. Nielsen has been doing Web usability for 2 decades!)
Kerika founder, Arun Kumar, had the good fortune of meeting Mr. Nielsen in the mid-90s, when he was just embarking upon his career as an independent consultant. The career choice seemed to have come from necessity: Mr. Nielsen has been working in the Advanced Technology Group at Sun Microsystems, and they had recently, with their usual prescience, decided to disband this group entirely leaving Mr. Nielsen unexpected unemployed.
(This was before Sun concluded there was money to be made by re-branding themselves as the “dot in dot com“. As with so many opportunities in their later years, Sun was late to arrive and late to depart that particular party.)
It must have seemed a treacherous time for Mr. Nielsen to embark upon a consulting career in Web usability, back in the mid-90s, when despite Mosaic/Netscape’s success a very large number of big companies still viewed the Internet as a passing fad. And Mr. Nielsen, from the very outset, opposed many of the faddish gimmickry that Web designers, particular Flash designers, indulged in: rotating globes on every page (“we are a global company”, see?) and sliding, flying menus that made for a schizophrenic user experience.
Despite the animus that Flash designers and their ilk have directed towards Mr. Nielsen over the past decade – an animus that is surely ironic given how Flash has been crumbling before HTML5 – his basic research and their accompanying articles have stood the test of time, and are well worth re-reading today.
Here’s one that directly matches our own experience:
Elaborate usability tests are a waste of resources. The best results come from testing no more than 5 users and running as many small tests as you can afford.
And here’s the graph that sums is up:
If you want to get rid of an old Kerika account, the easiest way is to simply de-authorize it from your Google account.
First, some background: when you sign up as a Kerika user, we use Google to figure out who you are, and what your email address is. (And to get permission to put Kerika project files in your Google Drive).
This means that Kerika becomes an authorized app, as far as Google is concerned.
And, it also means that you can de-authorize Kerika any time you want, from your Google account itself. Without authorization, you can’t use your old Kerika account, and neither can anyone else (assuming no one stole your Google password!)
So, here’s how you can disable Kerika, by de-authorizing it from Google: first, go to your Google account’s security settings at https://security.google.com/settings/security/permissions?hl=en
Here, you will all the third-party applications, including Kerika, that are currently authorized to use your Google credentials. Simply Revoke Access to Kerika, and you will disable your Kerika account:
Note: you need to make sure you are logged out of Kerika as well. If you leave yourself logged into Kerika on someone else’s computer, they will be able to continue to view your old projects, although they won’t be able to access any of the files that are stored in your Google Drive, or add any new files.