We have added Alpena Public Schools to our roster of organizations where users will automatically get free Academic Accounts when they sign up, using their @alpenaschools.com email addresses.
Kerika’s free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts let folks have up to 10 people working on boards owned by each account, and each individual within an approved organization can have their own account: that includes students, teachers and staff.
Our roster of whitelisted organizations now runs in the hundreds, and includes users from across the world.
With our most recent update (which was yesterday), we have fixed a problem with thumbnails of attached images not showing correctly. (Not always, but sometimes.)
Here’s what the problem used to look like:
Example of a missing update
As you can see, this card has two images attached. The first one doesn’t show a thumbnail properly (it has a standard “missing image” icon instead) while the second one works fine.
The underlying cause for this was a mismatch in the duration for which Kerika was caching the thumbnail of an attachment after it had first been retrieved from Google Drive, and how long Google Drive was keeping the thumbnail around.
So you never saw the problem when you first attached an image, but if you went back to the card after 30 days you would see the “missing image” icon instead.
We have fixed this. You may still see this if your browser is caching old thumbnails; you can completely eliminate the problem by clearing your browser’s cache, which would force Kerika to request new thumbnails from Google.
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.
Adding a new person to a board team
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:
Account Owner is notified they need to buy another subscription
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:
Account Owner asked how many subscriptions they want to buy
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.
Confirmation for new purchase
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:
Confirmation of invoice
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:
Example of invoice email
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.
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.
Turning on Auto-Numbering of Cards
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.
An example of card numbering.
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 Numbering in Scrum Boards
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 University of Derby to the list of organizations that qualify for free Kerika Academic Accounts. Anyone signing up with @unimail.derby.ac.uk email will automatically can have up to 10 people working on their boards, free.
We are adding the State University of New York at Buffalo to the list of organizations that qualify for free Kerika Academic Accounts. Anyone signing up with @buffalo.edu email will automatically can have up to 10 people working on their boards, free.
We are adding the University of Trento (Italy) to the list of organizations supported by Kerika’s Academic & Nonprofit plan.
Everyone signing up with a @studenti.unitn.it email will automatically get a free Kerika account that can have up to 10 people working on their boards.
The Account Owner can remove, or downgrade, any member of her Account Team: this is a simple, instantaneous action that can be done while logged into Kerika.
While logged in, click on the the user photo (or initials) that appear at the top-right corner of the app:
Manage Account Team Step 1
Then select the Manage My Users option in the dialog that appears:
Manage Account Team Step 2
This will take you to your Account Management page with all the users listed:
Manage Account Team Step 3
When you hover your mouse over any of the people listed, user management actions appear as buttons:
Manage Account Team Step 4
Clicking on the Manage User button offers two actions for someone who is currently a Team Member in your Account Team:
Manage Account Team Step 5
The Remove from Account action will remove this person from every board owned by your Account. This can’t be undone, so take care if you do this!
The Make This User a Visitor action will change this person’s role to a Visitor, across any boards owned by your Account where this person was originally a Board Admin or Team Member.
Use the Remove action when you simply want to exclude someone from everything in your account, e.g. if an employee resigns.
Use the Make Visitor action if you don’t expect this person to have an active role in any of your boards, and you don’t want to pay for this person’s subscription anymore.
Visitors will continue to show up in your Account Team list, but you don’t need a subscription for them.
