We have mentioned below the problems we had with GoDaddy’s SSL certificates; we have fixed this by switching to the open-source certificate authority called Let’s Encrypt.
Let’s Encrypt is a free, automated, and open certificate authority brought to you by the non-profit Internet Security Research Group (ISRG). It lets us host our own certificates, so we don’t have to rely upon third parties and can have better control over the quality of our service.
With our latest update, launched over the weekend, we have made some significant changes to how users access multiple Kerika accounts.
The motivation for all this is simple: our old billing mechanism was manual and error-prone. It was difficult to track which accounts had paid for subscriptions and to ensure that subscriptions were renewed in a timely manner.
So we are moving to an completely automated system that will allow our customers to manage their subscriptions more easily, make online or offline purchases, and manage their account teams.
We are about halfway there: we have done the changes to the account management piece, and have some more work before the billing system is ready.
One consequence of this is the way you view your Home Page has changed: the Home will now always show the boards and templates that related to a single account, rather than across multiple accounts.
(Previously there were three buckets: Favorites, Owned by Me, and Shared With Me.)
Switching between all your open boards, and all your accounts, has been consolidated into a single Account Switcher function that appears on the top-left corner of the Kerika app, where the old Board Switcher used to be:
Clicking on the Account Switcher will let you switch between boards, and between accounts:
Calendar syncing and Preferences are now applied on an account level, so if you are working in multiple accounts, you can choose to have different preferences for each account.
You can access your Calendar and Preferences settings by clicking on your face on the upper-right corner of the Kerika app:
With this change, it becomes more important for organizations to consolidate ownership of all their boards within a single account. You can do this yourself, by selecting boards from your Home Page and using the Move to Another Account function:
You can also let us do this for you: just contact us at support@kerika.com, and let us know which accounts you would like to consolidate and we can do all the work.
We added a feature recently (or did we actually a bug?) for our direct login users: when you reference a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, canvas or board, from another place in Kerika — e.g. another card’s details or chat — we now show the file’s name instead of just the URL.
This makes it easier to cross-reference file attachments from within different Kerika cards or boards, where different work items or conversations refer to the same shared file.
Here’s an example:
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.
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:
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 recently discovered (and fixed) an annoying bug that was affecting the Shared With Me view of boards and templates that your colleagues shared with you.
If a colleague created a new template that they intended to share with their Account Team, this new template wasn’t appearing correctly in this view. That’s been fixed now.
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.
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:
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…
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.
We have been busy through the holiday season, as usual, but there isn’t a lot of stuff to show you yet since the big new thing we are working on — a more automated and efficient account management and billing system — won’t be ready for a while.
Meanwhile, we have been working through bug fixes on a regular basis; many of them obscure and probably unnoticed by anyone but the Kerika team itself, but we don’t like to have known bugs sitting around so we knock off bugs fairly quickly even if no one has complained (yet).
Here are some of the bug fixes we have done recently (in no particular order):
Happy New Year!