Thanks to one of our users at Washington State’s Employment Security Department, we found and fixed a bug that was causing problems when users tried to add SharePoint URLs as attachments on cards, for Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
The problem turned out to be in some code we have that tries to check whether a user is entering a valid-looking URL. SharePoint’s URLs are somewhat unusual in that they include the “{” and “}” characters, which most other web servers don’t use.
Our old code was treating these characters as invalid, thereby rejecting URLs coming from SharePoint.
We now allow users to sign up for Kerika directly, by using any email address. This version is powered by the Box Platform, which allows us to make good use of Box’s cloud storage technology while presenting a simple user interface for our own users.
Another cool feature from Box that we had integrated, as part of this new service, was to use their browser-based preview functionality — which came to Box as a result of their 2014 purchase of Crocodoc.
We use this preview feature with a simple IFRAME integration, which means we don’t add anything to it ourselves, but one downside of this approach is that if Box removes something from their preview capability, it can disappear from Kerika also.
This happened recently when they took away a button that allowed for a quick download of a file that was being previewed.
We have fixed this by adding our own “Download file” link within the Box Preview:
This gave our users more choices in terms of how they signed up for Kerika, and which cloud service they used to store their project files, but we continued to resist offering a direct sign up mechanism:
We remained convinced that third-party signup and login, using OAuth, would dominate user preferences — under the theory that no one really wanted to remember yet another password for yet another web service.
Our technical architecture also restricted us from offering a direct sign up choice because we had tied together the issues of authentication and file storage: it was how our original integration with Google had been done, and we had simply duplicated that model when we added Kerika+Box.
This changed in 2015, when Box announced the Box Platform as a new service — although originally it was called the “Box Developer Edition” when it was unveiled at the BoxDev conference in April 2015.
Kerika was probably the first task management app to sign up to use the Box Platform; in fact, we were in the very first batch of beta users for the service.
This new integration with Box allowed us to finally offer a direct sign up mechanism for new users:
Signing up directly with Kerika
Now, you can sign up with any email address: it could be a company email, a Yahoo email, a Microsoft Live email… even a Gmail address.
When you sign up directly with Kerika, we use the Box Platform to securely store your project files:
We create an account at Box that’s dedicated to storing your Kerika files.
We do this automatically and behind the scenes: you might never know that your files are actually being stored at Box, rather than on a Kerika-operated server.
While this seamless integration is great from a user experience perspective, it doesn’t mean that we want to hide our Box links: in fact, we would actually like to boast about our use of the Box platform because Box is so well regarded for the robustness, security and privacy of their cloud storage service.
So, now you know where your files are stored when you sign up directly as a Kerika user: inside the Box Platform!
We found a bug that was causing problems for users who wanted to edit/update their board descriptions, using Internet Explorer. We fixed that.
In case you are wondering where the board description is found in the first place, here’s how you can edit it:
Click on the gear icon that appears on the top-right corner of every Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, and then chose the Settings tab:
Editing board descriptions
By default, the board description field will be empty, naturally, but if you are one of the Board Admins (or the Account Owner), when you move your mouse over the Description field you will see a pencil icon appear (highlighted in red, above), and clicking on that will let you add a board description.
Adding a board description
Board descriptions can be up to 180 characters long, and as you type the system will automatically let you know how many characters are left for you to type. (Yes, Twitter-style.)
Board descriptions are going to be very useful in the future as we make some changes to our user interface and search functions.
We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.
Some of the templates we have on offer:
Onboarding New Employees: a template for handling hiring and starting a new employee. (Surprisingly popular!)
Solution Sales: a template for professional services companies to track their sales opportunities; essentially a CRM for small professional services companies.
Implementing an EHR: an example of a complex template, based upon the US Government’s guidelines for implementing an Electronic Health Records system at hospitals.
We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.
Here is a screenshot of how the “Recommended domains” feature of Google Domains works:
Google Recommended Domains
Normally we get a little impatient with Google holding on to the “beta” tag on so many products that seem to be finished. In this case, we would urge Google to not rush out of beta.
We have added a keyboard shortcut to make it a little faster to send chat messages — on cards, canvases or the board itself.
After typing in your chat message, use the Ctl-Enter (or Ctl-Return) key combination to send the chat immediately. It will save you having to reach for the mouse to click on the Send button…
Sending Chat with Ctl-Return
(And thanks, as usual, to our users for urging us to add this new feature!)
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.
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!
