Monthly Archives: February 2018

We have added support for Google Team Drive

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , , , ,

We have long had a deep, excellent integration with Google Apps: you can sign up with your Google ID and have all your Kerika-related files stored in your own Google Drive, where you can access them independently of the Kerika app.

We are now taking that one step forward, with seamless integration with Google Team Drive.

Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

Team Drives is available on G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business, or G Suite for Education editions.

You don’t need to do anything different: the integration is built-in with the latest version of Kerika (and, since we are software-as-a-service, everyone always uses the latest version of our product!) and the integration is seamless.

We have added support for Google Team Drive

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Usability, , , , , ,

We have long had a deep, excellent integration with Google Apps: you can sign up with your Google ID and have all your Kerika-related files stored in your own Google Drive, where you can access them independently of the Kerika app.

We are now taking that one step forward, with seamless integration with Google Team Drive.

Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

Team Drives is available on G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business, or G Suite for Education editions.

You don’t need to do anything different: the integration is built-in with the latest version of Kerika (and, since we are software-as-a-service, everyone always uses the latest version of our product!) and the integration is seamless.

Managing multiple versions of files just got a lot easier

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , , ,

With our latest update we have made it much easier to manage different versions of files, across all your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards.

(This was inspired by our recent fix to a bug that didn’t properly download the latest version of a file attached to a card or canvas; while fixing this we started thinking deeper about how to make file management even easier for our users.)

Here’s how file management works now: when you hover your mouse over a file attachment, a new action called +NEW VERSION is available:

Uploading new version of document
Uploading new version of document

Clicking on the +NEW VERSION button will let you pick any file from your computer that’s of the same type, and Kerika will add that and track the file as a new version of your old attachment.

This is possible even if the new file has a different name altogether, as long as the two files are of the same type.

For example, a filed called Budget.xlsx can get a new version that’s called Plans.xlsx — both are tracked as different versions of the same file, even though they had different names.

This makes it even easier to manage all your files using Kerika!

We made it easier to have more complicated tasks inside cards

Agile & Scrum, Usability, , , ,

When we first added the ability for you to add a list of tasks to a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, our expectation was that these tasks would be short and to the point: maybe just a few words long.

And to make the display of tasks neat and tidy inside a card’s details view, we truncated long tasks to show just two lines worth.  We figured this was a reasonable restriction that would make the layout look better, and wouldn’t actually inconvenience anyone since we really didn’t expect people to create very complex tasks, that might take more than one sentence to spell out.

Well, that turned out to be a bad assumption: the tasks feature turned out to be far more popular than we expected, and we soon started getting complaints from people that didn’t like seeing their tasks get truncated to two lines.

We have fixed that with our latest update to Kerika: now, all tasks will show fully, no matter how long they are. Here’s an example:

Example of long task
Example of long task

In the example shown above, the first task is long enough to spill out over three lines, and all three lines are shown.

So, there you go: tasks became a little more flexible!

Bug, fixed: signing up for Kerika from “.software” domains

Bug Fixes,

With the proliferation of top-level domains we have had to update some of our old code that tried to make sure people were signing up with properly-specified emails.

In the old days, of “.com” and “.org” and other short domain extentsions, this was easy to check at the time someone entered an email address: if it wasn’t properly formatted we could alert the user right away so they didn’t go down a dead-end path.

We can’t do that anymore: new top-level domains are being launched on a regular basis by registry companies and the list of potential domain extensions is no longer finite or easily matched by regular expressions.

We thought we had done these updates a while back, but clearly something slipped through the cracks: people from “.software” domains were unable to sign up as new users.

That’s fixed now.

Bug, fixed: signing up for Kerika from “.software” domains

Bug Fixes,

With the proliferation of top-level domains we have had to update some of our old code that tried to make sure people were signing up with properly-specified emails.

In the old days, of “.com” and “.org” and other short domain extentsions, this was easy to check at the time someone entered an email address: if it wasn’t properly formatted we could alert the user right away so they didn’t go down a dead-end path.

We can’t do that anymore: new top-level domains are being launched on a regular basis by registry companies and the list of potential domain extensions is no longer finite or easily matched by regular expressions.

We thought we had done these updates a while back, but clearly something slipped through the cracks: people from “.software” domains were unable to sign up as new users.

That’s fixed now.

Bug, fixed: signing up for Kerika from “.software” domains

Bug Fixes,

With the proliferation of top-level domains we have had to update some of our old code that tried to make sure people were signing up with properly-specified emails.

In the old days, of “.com” and “.org” and other short domain extentsions, this was easy to check at the time someone entered an email address: if it wasn’t properly formatted we could alert the user right away so they didn’t go down a dead-end path.

We can’t do that anymore: new top-level domains are being launched on a regular basis by registry companies and the list of potential domain extensions is no longer finite or easily matched by regular expressions.

We thought we had done these updates a while back, but clearly something slipped through the cracks: people from “.software” domains were unable to sign up as new users.

That’s fixed now.

Bugs, fixed: edge cases where due dates on tasks weren’t being reflected correctly at the card level

Agile & Scrum, Bug Fixes, , , ,

If you create a list of tasks on a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, Kerika does a bunch of stuff in the background to make sure your view of what’s due, at the card level, board level and account level, are always correct.

We found a couple of edge cases where the due dates on tasks wasn’t rolling up correctly to the card level, potentially giving users a misleading view of what was currently due for them:

  1. When the last task with a scheduled due date was removed (deleted) from a card, this wasn’t correctly adjusting the due date for the card itself.
  2. Similarly, when the last task with a scheduled due date was no longer scheduled, this wasn’t correctly adjusting the due date for the card.

Both bugs have been fixed. They were real edge-cases, so it’s likely that most users never noticed them in the first place, but still…

 

Bug, fixed: copy-paste of card details in Internet Explorer

Bug Fixes,

Internet Explorer continues to be slightly offbeat in its behavior, and this trips up our testing since it still has some quirks that are not found in Chrome, Firefox or Safari.

One bug that one of our Norway-based users found was that he couldn’t copy the details of a card using the Ctl-C key combination while using Internet Explorer, without going into the edit mode of the card details.

We fixed that. Ctl-C and Ctl-V should work much better.