And another video in our revamped tutorial series: how you can manage your teams and privacy in Kerika.
https://youtu.be/k6-3f1Nlhh4
We hope these tutorials are useful; let us know what you think.
Category Archives: Agile & Scrum
A tutorial video on using Kerika with Box
OK, another tutorial video done: this time on how to use Kerika with Box.
Kerika works seamlessly with Box for secure storage of all your project files: just sign up as a Kerika user with your Box ID, and all your Kerika files will be stored in your own Box Account, where they will always be under your control.
This tutorial video shows you how.
Intended audience for this video: new Kerika users who want to leverage Box.
An updated set of tutorial videos is coming
We are (finally!) getting around to updating the Kerika tutorial videos; what we have on our YouTube channel has definitely gotten stale.
Here’s the first in the new series:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=McoUZ5vFvcA
This video is intended for new users: people who discover Kerika and sign up to start new accounts.
For people who sign up by clicking on an invitation email sent from a coworker, we have a different video that is more focused around their needs:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NC8FI10PT-Y
And, finally, for people who sign up to use Kerika with Google Apps — and this is the vast majority of Kerika users, worldwide — we have this video:
https://youtu.be/QW7I3IrEfd8
There’s a lot more coming.
Bug, fixed: making sure your Daily Task Summary gets sent at 6AM
We recently found and fixed an odd bug related to the optional 6AM Daily Task Summary email that you can get from Kerika: if you had toggled the preference setting for this email — from ON to OFF, and back to ON again — the email was getting sent at 8AM instead of 6AM.
Essentially a coding mistake on our part, and one we didn’t notice (and none of our users noticed, either) for a long time because no one would try changing this preference setting very often.
The bug’s been fixed.
It’s become easier for Visitors to keep up with changes in your Boards
We have made it easier for Visitors to keep up with changes on the boards they are involved with, by extending our unique “heads-up” notification highlights to include Visitors. (Previously, this feature worked only for Team Members and Board Admins.)
These heads-up notifications are customized for each Board Admin, Team Member and Visitor: they show you exactly what’s new or changed on every card on a Task Board or Scrum Board.
(The term “heads-up” comes from the helmets used by fighter pilots, who need to see critical data all the time, without having to turn their heads.)
What’s New and Updated: a new Kerika View
Views are unique to Kerika: no other work management system provides such an easy way to see what matters, across all the boards you are working on.
These Views make it easy for organizations to really scale up their use of Kerika across multiple projects and many ongoing projects at the same time.
We have now added a very useful new View: What’s New and Updated. As you might guess from the name, this View lets you catch up on everything that’s new and changed, across all the boards you are working on — as a Board Admin, Team Member or Visitor.
This View can work very effectively as a Dashboard for managers who need to keep track of many different boards, all working at the same time: instead of constantly revisiting each board one-by-one, this View is a simple, comprehensive way to see everything that’s changing across all your boards.
The updates are shown in Kerika’s unique “heads-up” notification style: the blue New tags highlight cards that have been newly added to your boards (that you haven’t opened yet), and the orange highlights show you precisely what’s changed on your old cards.
The new and changed cards are sorted into columns, with each column containing all the new and changed items within a particular board. The newest changes appear at the top of a column, and if a board has nothing new to report, the corresponding column is not shown (so your View doesn’t get cluttered up.)
(Cards that are moved to the Done or Trash columns on a board are not included in the View, to help avoid getting the View cluttered.)
As with all Views, it’s easy to operate on all the cards within a column, by selecting the Column Actions button that appears on the top of each column:
The Mark All Cards As Read action is useful if you want to ignore everything that’s going on in a particular board, e.g. when you have just returned from a status meeting where you got fully briefed on what’s happening on a particular board.
Another way to temporarily ignore individual boards is to Hide Column: this collapses the column from the View, and let’s you focus more intently on the handful of boards you care most about.
Selecting a card in this View lets you open the card within the View itself, or to open it on the board where the card actually sits:
(Sometimes it’s easy to deal with cards just by themselves; sometimes the View Board action is more helpful, if you want to be sure you understand the full context in which a card changed.)
Using your mouse’s right-click action will also bring up a bunch of useful actions for that card:
In addition to all the other actions you can perform on cards, you also have the option to get the URL (address) of card using the Get Link action. Every cards, every canvas and every board in Kerika has a unique address, and using these URLs anywhere on a board, e.g. in the board’s details or chat, will automatically set up a link between the two cards.
When you mark a card as “read” on this View, it remains on the View until you click on the Refresh button (shown at the top-right corner of the View).
And, as with all Views in Kerika, the What’s New and Updated View includes the “For Me” toggle button on the top-right corner: clicking this will quickly filter the View to show you just those items that are personally assigned to you.
This feature is available to all our users, just like every other feature in Kerika: it doesn’t matter whether you are still in your 30-day free trial, you are working on the free Individual Plan, or are benefiting from Kerika’s free Academic and Nonprofits Accounts. Everyone always get the same Kerika goodies 🙂
Our Views feature just got even better
We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.
This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:
Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:
All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.
It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach 🙂
This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:
- What’s Due
- What Needs Attention
- What Got Done
You can now hide columns in your Views as well
For some time now we have offered the ability for you to hide entire columns on a Task Board or Scrum Board; we are now extending that to Views as well:
In the example shown above, several columns are hidden in this What Needs Attention view, and Kerika shows a count of how many items are hidden in each column.
This feature is available through the Column Actions button that’s at the top of each column:
This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.
You can’t change the extension on a document
We have made a change to the Card and Board Attachments feature to prevent users from changing the extension of a file they have already added: for example, a “.xlsx” file can’t be renamed as a “.docx” file.
We did this because changing the file type often had unpredictable consequences when a Team Member tried to upload an attachment.
This restriction applies to the most common file types, not all. Here’s how it works:
In the example above, an image has been added as an attachment to this card, and it has the .PNG file type/extension.
When you hover your mouse over any attachment, Kerika will show you the actions that are possible with that attachment, one of them being Rename.
If you select Rename, Kerika will make sure you only change the file name, not the file type/extension (.PNG in this example):
Using Google Drive without Google Docs
If you are using Kerika with Google, you don’t have to convert your documents to the Google Docs format in order to use Google Drive.
You can use this preference setting to ensure that your Microsoft Office documents, for example, are retained in MS Office format even while they they are stored and shared using Google Drive.