A couple of weeks ago we expanded your privacy choices to make it more easy for your account team to discover your projects and templates, which is something that our enterprise users had been asking for.
With the update we did this past weekend, one small change you might notice is on your Home Page: the Templates column on this page will sort all the available templates like this:
Templates you create are shown first; presumably these are the most important ones from your perspective.
Next, we show you templates created by other people where you are part of the project team.
Next, we show you templates that are being made available to you because they are being shared within account teams.
And then, finally, we list all the templates that Kerika itself offers.
When we first built Kerika, we emphasized privacy strongly — too strongly, in retrospect, particularly for our enterprise users: Kerika made it too hard for your colleagues to discover your work, since they could know about a board only if you had added them to the board’s team.
With our newest update to Kerika, we are addressing that concern: you can now make projects viewable by your Account Team.
Setting privacy on a board
If you set a project’s privacy to be “Viewable by the Account Team”, anyone who is part of your account team — i.e. all the folks that are currently working as Team Members on all the projects owned by your account — can discover it.
You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!
Sort By
This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:
Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:
Critical
Is Blocked
Needs Review
Needs Rework
Ready to Pull
Hold
This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.
Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.
And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.
You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.
We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)
You used to be able to sort all the cards in a column by Due Date, now you can also sort them by person and by status!
Sort By
This makes it even easier than before to manage large boards:
Sorting By Status organizes cards as follows:
Critical
Is Blocked
Needs Review
Needs Rework
Ready to Pull
Hold
This makes it easy to organize your day: all the most important stuff, e.g. the cards that are Critical or Blocked, come to the top of the column where they are not likely to be overlooked.
Sort by Person organizes cards so that you can see all the items that are assigned to individuals: all the cards assigned to Arun, for example, will show up together within the column.
And where cards are assigned to several people, a simple alphabetical sort is applied on the names.
You still have Sort by Date: Kerika is smart about showing you only those sorting options that are relevant to your situation, and if a particular column doesn’t have any Due Dates, this sort option is not shown.
We just made it easier for you to manage very large boards :-)
OK, so this has nothing to do with Kerika, Lean, Agile or even software for that matter, but this is a great story that we can’t help but share with the world…
Bill Sowry is a Brigadier with the Australian Army, currently posted as Defense Attache in London.
He is 53 years old. And very fit. (This bit is important.)
Bill Sowry
Many years ago, he had a tour of duty in India: he joined a long tradition of Australian officers who were selected for specialized training at the Indian Army’s Defense Services Staff College, where his local “sponsor” officer was another up-and-coming officer: Major Mohit Whig of the 2/5 Gorkha Rifles.
Here’s what they looked like back then:
Mohit Whig & Bill Sowry
Bill had a great time in India and loved the time he spent with the Whig family — Mohit’s cheerful, amiable personality had survived years of front-line action in Sri Lanka, the Indian North-East, and Kashmir.
And Bill retained a fondness for India long after leaving its shores — as he said, “you can take the man out of India, but you can’t take India out of the man.”
Bill’s family, Mohit’s family, and friends
In 1997, Mohit was killed by an IED in Kashmir: false information was fed to his unit that led to troops being sent into an ambush
Mohit was never one to “lead from behind”. His unarmored Jonga was at the head of the convoy and was blown up by a bomb.
When Mohit died, he left behind a widow and two young sons, one of whom was born with severe spina bifida, which has left him disabled for life.
And there the story might have ended.
OK, so some soldiers go on a mission in insurgent country. They get blown up. Happens all the time. No big deal.
But it didn’t, because Bill is not an ordinary soldier…
A couple of years ago, using Facebook he was able to get back in touch with Mohit’s family (Thanks, Mark Z!) and learned that Mohit’s younger son needed some critical rehab treatment to give him more independence, especially as he grew to maturity.
This treatment was expensive (£25,000) and unavailable in India, so Bill resolved to raise money for sending Mohit’s son to Australia for rehab.
And he is doing this in a truly spectacular way: a minimum of 4 pushups for every Km. of the Tour de France.
Bill has already over 15,300 pushups over 3 weeks — yes, that’s hundreds of pushups each day!
OK, remember that bit about Bill being 53 years old?
Bill is raising money using the JustGiving site: he has 4 days to go, and a final £5,000 to raise in order to meet his goal.
We have been thrilled to help Bill, and invite you to help him get to the goal line!
Beth talked about her experience in moving away from Microsoft Project to online task boards, and Arun talked about the general use of online task boards for distributed teams, Lean teams, and Agile teams, with a special focus on the public sector.
It was a great evening, with dinner served and some great Q&A afterwards!
James Gien Varney-Wong is putting together global brainstorming team to work on creative solutions for fighting Ebola, and Kerika is helping the team share their ideas and content.
You can learn more about this effort at OpenIDEO, where James has embedded a small part of a massive Kerika Whiteboard that people from many countries are using to share their ideas:
Ideas for fighting Ebola
It’s an exciting, large-scale use of Kerika Whiteboards, reminiscent of the work done by Charles Fraser for the Foundation for Common Good; you can see that Whiteboard page — as a regular Web page! — by clicking here.
Foundation for Common Good (Click to see the Whiteboard)
If you use Kerika+Google — the version of Kerika that integrates with Google — you may be experiencing some login problems this morning. In fact, you may have experienced some problems over the past few days.
We are continuing to investigate this, and so far the problems seem to be on Google’s end, and they also seem to be mostly affecting people who have premium Google Apps, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Nonprofits.
Update: it’s not just premium Google Apps; it’s affecting all sorts of users.
Google authentication is burping
Fortunately, we have not seen any problems with Kerika+Box: Box’s authentication service has been running fine so far.
Some users have written in asking if they can switch to Kerika+Box and still preserve their old data. This is possible, but requires some manual work on the user’s part, and if the problem persists we will put up a blog post explaining how users can do this.
In the meantime, please bear with us, while we bear with Google…
Ben Vaught from the Washington State Office of the CIO has come up an interesting use-case for Kerika’s new export feature that we hadn’t considered: use it to write your weekly status reports!
Kerika lets you export cards from a Task Board or Scrum Board in CSV or HTML format: the CSV format is useful for putting data from Kerika into another software tool, like Excel, but the HTML format is designed for human consumption.
Here’s an example of a card that’s been exported as HTML:
Example of HTML export
By using the Workflow button (on the top-right menu bar), you can adjust your display to show just the Done column on a board, and then further use the Tags button to limit the number of cards that are shown in this column.
For example, you could display just the Done column, and filter the cards to show just the ones that were assigned to you.
Do an HTML export of this, and you will be able to easily cut-and-paste the output into a Word document or email, and submit your status report!
