Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, gave a presentation on Visual Workflows at the Lean Transformation 2015 Conference in Tacoma, Washington, which was very well received.
Here are the slides from that talk:
Monthly Archives: October 2015
Can you see it now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows
Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, gave a presentation on Visual Workflows at the Lean Transformation 2015 Conference in Tacoma, Washington, which was very well received.
Here are the slides from that talk:
Bug, fixed: sometimes email replies to chat weren’t working
(Thanks to our users in the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board for helping us find this bug.)
We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.
Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:
- If you are assigned a card, on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you will get email pushed to you whenever any other Team Member (or Board Admin) chats on that card. This helps you stay in the loop on the most important items on a project board: the ones you are currently assigned to do.
(Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)
- When chat gets pushed to you as email, it shows up looking just like regular email, and you can reply to it wherever you are dealing with your email: your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
- When you click on the “Reply” button in your email client, Kerika automatically changes the address for that reply to be the URL that points to the specific card (or canvas) that’s being referenced in the chat.
Here’s an example of chat email:
Chat example And what clicking on the Reply button does:
Replying to Chat Email In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
“Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>” - This email is received by a server that listens only to chat replies. When a chat reply is received by the server, it checks to see who the reply came from.
- Since only Team Members and Board Admins are allowed to participate in the chat on a particular board, the Kerika chat server tries to make sure the email is coming from someone who is authorized to comment on that particular card or canvas.
(This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)
The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.
In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.
For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.
Bug, fixed: sometimes email replies to chat weren’t working
(Thanks to our users in the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board for helping us find this bug.)
We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.
Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:
- If you are assigned a card, on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you will get email pushed to you whenever any other Team Member (or Board Admin) chats on that card. This helps you stay in the loop on the most important items on a project board: the ones you are currently assigned to do.
(Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)
- When chat gets pushed to you as email, it shows up looking just like regular email, and you can reply to it wherever you are dealing with your email: your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
- When you click on the “Reply” button in your email client, Kerika automatically changes the address for that reply to be the URL that points to the specific card (or canvas) that’s being referenced in the chat.
Here’s an example of chat email:
Chat example And what clicking on the Reply button does:
Replying to Chat Email In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
“Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>” - This email is received by a server that listens only to chat replies. When a chat reply is received by the server, it checks to see who the reply came from.
- Since only Team Members and Board Admins are allowed to participate in the chat on a particular board, the Kerika chat server tries to make sure the email is coming from someone who is authorized to comment on that particular card or canvas.
(This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)
The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.
In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.
For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.
Timing is everything when you send email
We occasionally email all of our users, when we have released something significant in terms of functionality or usability improvements.
On average, we probably send these emails 2-3 times a year, although we release software updates much more often.
Not every software update is announced in a mass email, although all the improvements and changes are always noted on this blog: unless the changes were big enough to require some additional explanation, we prefer to let users discover the new features on our own.
What we have noticed with the last couple of announcements is that the timing of the email makes a very big difference in terms of how many people actually open and read the emails.
Here are the last two emails we sent:
The “Release 62” announcement was actually far more significant, in our opinion, than the more recent “Release 66” version, at least in terms of UI changes and new features.
But, the Release 62 announcement went out mid-day on a Monday, and it was largely ignored as a result: only 9.7% of people opened that email.
The Release 66 announcement, on the other hand, went out on a Saturday afternoon, and had nearly double the open rate.
We think the simple explanation is that there was less competition for our emails on Saturday afternoon: fewer emails from colleagues and fewer crises to attend to.
We had long suspected this to be the case, but never had such clear proof that timing is everything when you send email :-)
Timing is everything when you send email
We occasionally email all of our users, when we have released something significant in terms of functionality or usability improvements.
On average, we probably send these emails 2-3 times a year, although we release software updates much more often.
Not every software update is announced in a mass email, although all the improvements and changes are always noted on this blog: unless the changes were big enough to require some additional explanation, we prefer to let users discover the new features on our own.
What we have noticed with the last couple of announcements is that the timing of the email makes a very big difference in terms of how many people actually open and read the emails.
Here are the last two emails we sent:
The “Release 62” announcement was actually far more significant, in our opinion, than the more recent “Release 66” version, at least in terms of UI changes and new features.
But, the Release 62 announcement went out mid-day on a Monday, and it was largely ignored as a result: only 9.7% of people opened that email.
The Release 66 announcement, on the other hand, went out on a Saturday afternoon, and had nearly double the open rate.
We think the simple explanation is that there was less competition for our emails on Saturday afternoon: fewer emails from colleagues and fewer crises to attend to.
We had long suspected this to be the case, but never had such clear proof that timing is everything when you send email :-)
Join us at the Lean Transformation Conference
Once again Arun Kumar, Kerika’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at the annual Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington.
This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.
Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.
We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!
Join us at the Lean Transformation Conference
Once again Arun Kumar, Kerika’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at the annual Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington.
This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.
Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.
We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!
Google Apps last Friday
It looks like we were on the bleeding edge of Google’s problems last Friday (Oct 9): fairly early in the day, Pacific Time, we started seeing authentication failures from Google related to our Kerika+Google users.
The exceptions shown in the Kerika server logs were clearly pointing to problems on Google’s end:
What was a little frustrating for us — and our beloved users — was that Google itself didn’t seem to be acknowledging any problems until fairly late in the day:
By this time — almost noon, Pacific Time — dozens of Kerika users had been affected. We tried to let folks know via Twitter that there was a problem, and continued to monitor the situation through the day:
.@Google‘s authentication service for login to @Kerika is throwing a bunch of errors right now, affecting a range of our users. Apologies.
— Kerika (@kerika) October 9, 2015
A range of users who use their #googleapps IDs to login to Kerika are being affected by mysterious, unacknowledged problems on Google’s end.
— Kerika (@kerika) October 9, 2015
Looks like the @Google authentication failures have trailed off; hopefully our Kerika+Google users can login now without trouble.
— Kerika (@kerika) October 9, 2015
Google eventually acknowledged the problem as it became clear that it was widespread.
By mid-afternoon, the issue was largely cleared up, at least as far as Kerika was concerned, although it is possible that other apps, which also use Google for authentication or Google Drive for storage, were affected for much longer.
Once again, our apologies for everyone who was affected.
Google Authentication Errors
We are currently seeing a bunch of errors from Google with respect to their authentication service — which lets you login to your Kerika+Google account using your Google ID, and they seem to be affecting a wide range of users.
Here’s a sample of what we are seeing:
This error normally shows up when a user is logging in with a Google for Work ID, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education.
What’s surprising today is that we have seen at least 1 user with a regular Gmail address have this same problem, which is theoretically impossible.
Right now there’s not much we can do but wait this out. The problem seems to be small enough that Google is not even reporting it on their Google Apps Status Dashboard. :-(