If you have had a Kerika account team in place for a long time, we probably don’t know when specific people joined your team because we weren’t always tracking that information in the past.
As a result, your Manage Users tab in your Account page may show a Not Known value for something like the Joined Team value:
A new feature that should help our customers better manage their account teams, particularly in large organizations: the Account Owner can export (in Excel format) a complete list of everyone working on any boards owned by that account.
This feature can be found in the Manage Users tab of your Account page:
Exporting Account Team Members
The exported data also includes the IP address last used by an account team member: this can help IT departments review their security periodically, or investigate any concerns they may have about misuse.
With the implementation of our shiny, new and fully automated billing system, it’s become a little more important for our customers to make sure that all the users within their organization are working in the right accounts — preferably, a single account.
Working in a single account, rather than a bunch of separate accounts, has advantages:
It makes it much easier to pay for subscriptions: if all the Kerika users within a department are working on boards owned by a single account, then only that account needs to purchase subscriptions. This means less invoicing and payment stuff for you to worry about.
It also ensures that all project assets — boards, documents, canvases, etc. — are owned by a single entity. And ideally this single entity would be a service account rather than an individual. Many of our customers are using service accounts, set up using emails like kerika@example.com.
We have done a ton of improvements to the new user sign-up process to help guide people to working with their coworkers, using accounts that the coworkers have already set up, instead of creating new accounts.
But, there are still situations where an organization may find that, across all of its Kerika users, there are too many different accounts. If this is the case for you, we can help: we can consolidate multiple accounts into a single account if you ask us.
This consolidation preserves all the existing boards, content, and project teams: it just changes the ownership of everything to be a single user ID.
We used to have a feature that let you get a task summary email from Kerika everyday at 6AM that summarized all the things that you were responsible for that are overdue, due this week or due next week.
When we introduced the Views feature, we thought perhaps this 6AM email was not needed any more, so we took it out of the user interface for a few months — although people who had previously been using this feature continued to get their daily emails.
It seems like we underestimated the usefulness of this feature: new users started asking for something just like it, so we have brought the feature back. (And thanks for helping us understand we had screwed up in taking it away.)
You can access this feature from your Preferences page:
Daily Task Reminder Preference
“Responsible for” includes not just the items that were assigned to you, but also items on boards where you are a Board Admin (and, presumably, have some responsibility for.)
This email can show your tasks organized in two different ways, and, if you like, you can get both sent to you every day:
6AM Task Summary Options
A typical task summary, where tasks are grouped by date, would look like this:
Example of 6AM Task Summary
The board names and card names are also links that you can use to open the relevant work item.
Our new billing system makes it much easier to manage your Kerika account, and one of the feature we built is easy online access to your Kerika transactions:
Billing History
Please note that we are not showing retroactive data: only transactions entered into after August 2018, when we rolled out this feature, will show up.
All of Microsoft’s browser focus is on their Edge browser, which means that as newer HTML5 features and standards get adopted by the browsers, these are going to show up in Edge, not IE 11.
And since Kerika is a pure Web app, one that requires you to download no software of any kind, including browser add-ons and plug-ins, we really need to make use of the latest HTML5 goodies that the browser vendors provide.
These goodies are going to be available only on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, and that’s where Kerika is gong to work best.
As part of our next release, which will include a new billing system, we will make it easier for you to move boards that you own to another account.
This can help in several scenarios:
If someone is leaving a team, it’s good practice to have their boards transferred to someone who will remain, so that ownership of project assets — the boards and all the content in the boards, including documents — remains with the team.
More importantly, it is good practice to stay away from having individuals own boards, and instead use service accounts to be the single Account Owner in your organization.
A service account is an omnibus account, typically set up with an email address like kerika@example.org, that isn’t associated with a single individual. A service account will never quit, never get fired, or take a vacation because a service account is not a real person — it is simply an account/ID used to be the permanent, omnipresent, owner of project assets so that team turnover doesn’t disrupt anyone.
If you own a board, you can move it to another account, i.e. effective change its ownership, by selecting the board on your Account’s Home, and clicking on the Board Actions button which appears on the top-right corner of the board card:
Board Actions Menu
This will bring up a small menu of actions that are available to us as the board’s current owner:
Board Actions
(Note: this menu can also be accessed using the right mouse button.)
When you select the Move to another Account action from this menu, we will present you with this new dialog box:
Move Board dialog
A list of “known collaborators” is presented to you by Kerika to make it easy to select a coworker with a single mouse click, but you can also move the board to someone else, who isn’t part of your current Kerika collaboration network.
If you type in an email address, Kerika will immediately check to see whether this email address is that of a known Kerika user, before letting you proceed further:
Checking if new owner is a Kerika user
We think these improvements will make it easier for our users to manage their organizations boards, and move towards consolidated ownership for easier asset management.
As you know, Kerika is a Web Application: everything runs inside a browser, without the need for any plug-ins or add-ons.
We achieve all this with a ton of JavaScript code (and a sprinkle of SVG, for our Whiteboards.)
One, significant, disadvantage of JavaScript is that it is “single threaded”: two bits of script cannot run at the same time; they have to run one after another.
So while Kerika is running inside a browser on your laptop, our JavaScript has to share a thread with lots of other stuff that’s going on, such as painting, updating styles, and handling user actions. All of this has the potential to slow down Kerika, while the JavaScript code waits for something else to finish.
To get around this, we used JavaScript’s Promise function: this let Kerika’s code get going with its normal business while waiting for other browser functions to finish. What we didn’t expect, however, was that the Promise function isn’t supported by Internet Explorer 11. (Although it is supported in Microsoft’s Edge browser.)
This caused problems for all of our Internet Explorer 11 users — people using Chrome, Safari, Firefox or Edge were unaffected. We finally figured out what the underlying problem was, and did a workaround using a polyfill, which is a way to provide new functionality in older browsers that don’t support it natively.
The Box Platform has some limitations that you may bump into:
Certain characters are not allowed in file names, e.g. “/”. We noticed people were running into this problem, most probably because they were hitting the wrong keys inadvertently when renaming files.
Kerika is going to take of this silently from now on: if you try to rename a file using a character like “/” that Box can’t handle, Kerika will silently ignore that character in your renaming action.
File names can’t be more than 260 bytes. For people using English and similar languages, this generally means a file name cannot be more than 260 characters (with each character requiring one byte of storage). But for most Asian languages, e.g. Thai or Japanese, one character may require two bytes of storage, because the size of the alphabet is much larger than the Roman alphabet used by English.
This means that in some languages, file names may have to be much shorter, depending upon how many bytes are needed for storing each character, which in turn depends upon the size of their alphabets.
Some folks from Thailand were running into this problem: Kerika will start detecting this better, and provide more useful error messages
We fixed a bug recently that affected the Views feature: when a board was moved from one account (owner) to another, it wasn’t getting included properly in the Views for the new owner.