We were thrilled to be part of the Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington week at the Tacoma Convention Center. Over 2,700 people attended — a sellout crowd!
Arun Kumar, founder & CEO of Kerika, gave a presentation on both days on Distributed Lean and Agile Teams in the Public Sector, drawing upon lessons learned, case studies and best practices from multiple state agencies and private sector firms.
Here’s the presentation:
Google’s Authentication service, which all users of Kerika+Google rely upon to sign up and sign in, has been having intermittent problems all day.
Fortunately, they have been reporting this on their Apps Status Dashboard, which they don’t always do, so perhaps the outages are more widespread than normal?
Here’s the picture as of 12PM Pacific Time:
We saw a ton of authentication errors from Google this morning: some were because domain policy checks were failing (this affects users of premium Google Apps for Business), some because Google’s servers were timing out with a “504” error.
We have tried to identify all the affected users and reach out to them to explain the situation and reassure them their Kerika data are unaffected.
As of this writing the situation seems to be actually improving a little for the Kerika community: we are seeing fewer errors, and clearly people are able to login to Kerika+Google, although the Google Dashboard is contradicting us by reporting a worsening situation…
Stay brave.
A couple of weeks ago we visited a UX team at the Washington State Department of Licensing, and took a photo of the “Post-It Palace” they had built within their cubicles:
2 weeks later, this is what we saw:
Everything is now inside a set of Kanban Boards powered by Kerika+Box!
With our newest release, we have added a new status indicator that you can use to flag particularly important cards on a crowded board: “Critical”.
The reason we added this was simple: no matter how cool and calm we try to be, every so often there’s a mini-crisis and we need to make sure that everyone takes note of some particular cards.
In the past we tried to accomplish this by use of color (e.g. Red), but this wasn’t a satisfactory solution since we want to use colors for other purposes as well.
We also tried marking critical cards as “Is blocked”, because this indicator appears in red text making it very eye-catching, but this too was not a satisfactory solution.
“Critical” works: you can highlight really important cards on a board by marking them with this status, and you can also search for Critical cards as part of Advanced Search.
Here’s another new feature: you can create a new Box Note or Google Doc (depending upon whether you are using Kerika+Box or Kerika+Google) from within a card itself, and have that attached automatically to your card.
A single mouse-click is all that it takes to create a new Box Note or Google Doc, add it to your card (on any Task Board or Scrum Board), and open that Box Note / Google Doc and start using it.
When you are done editing your new Box Note / Google Doc, you can come back to Kerika and you will find it is already attached to the card where you were working!
All in one mouse-click!
One small adjustment you might need to do: many browser will automatically block pop-up windows. When you create a new Box Note or Google Doc, Kerika tries to open it immediately in a new browser tab, so that you can start using it.
If your browser gives a warning about a pop-up window, please allow pop-ups from Kerika — this is the only use of pop-ups by Kerika, and it makes a great feature even better!
Something we really should have done in the last release, but it was an oversight on our part…
Tags are now part of the data that can be exported from a Task Board or Scrum Board.
This is true for exports in CSV format and HTML format.
This should make a useful feature even more useful :-)
You may have heard of the “Poodle” vulnerability in SSL, which allows the plaintext of secure connections to be calculated by a network attacker.
This vulnerability was discovered recently by Google engineers; here’s how it works:
Well, the good folks at Google found that SSL has a very fundamental vulnerability in it, that’s inherent in the protocol and cannot be patched: in an example attack called Padding Oracle On Downgraded Legacy Encryption (POODLE), an attacker can steal “secure” HTTP cookies or other bearer tokens such as HTTP Authorization header contents.
This problem is basically unfixable with SSL 3.0 because it uses RC4 ciphers for encryption, and RC4 is pretty darn old: it dates back to 1987!
(And, yet, according to Microsoft, even last year over 40% of Web connections were using RC4.)
The only way to secure against this vulnerability is to not allow SSL 3.0 as a fallback method for connecting to your Web server.
And that’s what Kerika does: we only support TLS connections.
Doing our bit to keep the Internet safe… :-)
When we first started working on Kerika, it seemed to us that everyone who wanted to use an online project board fell into one of two camps that didn’t overlap:
Folks who wanted to work in Kanban-style – typically business users – seemed to have little use for Scrum, and people who wanted to work in Agile-style – typically IT folks – didn’t show much interest in Kanban.
So, we built Kerika with support for Task Boards, for Lean/Kanban users, and Scrum Boards, for Agile users.
What we are seeing more recently, however, is spectrum of usage patterns and styles within organizations:
This kind of flexibility wasn’t available in Kerika before — and is certainly not available in Trello, Asana, Basecamp or any other tools that compete with Kerika — and that’s exactly the problem that we have fixed with the new release!
Use the Project Info button, on the top-right of the Kerika menu bar, to switch a board from Kanban to Scrum, or vice versa:
If you check the “Use a shared Backlog” box, you can then select the Backlog you want to use for your board: if you had been working in a Kanban board, it automatically switches over to a Scrum Board.
At any time you can switch between any of the Backlogs that exist in the Account, that you have permission to access.
If you want to go back to working in Kanban-style, just uncheck the “Use a shared Backlog” box and the Backlog will disappear from view.
It’s now that simple to choose between Kanban and Scrum!
Did you know that you can add a Prezi presentation to your Kerika canvas, just like any other Web content?
Kerika figures out that you are adding a Prezi item, and shows it beautifully in the canvas…
Kerika’s canvases can handle over 250 sources of online content: pictures and videos and more.
Here’s an example of adding an Instagram photo: just add the URL from Instagram like any other URL…
And Kerika figures out how best to show that picture!
