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 had previously been using SSL certificates for our website (kerika.com) and this blog (which is on a subdomain: blog.kerika.com) that we got from GoDaddy, but we have moved away from them.
What pushed us away was their aggressive approach to billing customers: they automatically renewed our SSL certificates after just 9 months into a 12-month contract, which we found unacceptable. Talking to their customer service people was an unhappy experience as well, so we decided to not do any more business with GoDaddy.
Now we are using a SSL from Amazon for our website and app (kerika.com): Amazon actually provides free SSL certificates to sites hosted on Amazon Web Services, and it was easy and simple to set up.
However, AWS doesn’t provide wildcard SSL certificates so we couldn’t handle our blog as well — particularly as our blog isn’t hosted at AWS. Instead we got a SSL certificate for the blog from RapidSSL which is reasonably priced.
So far, so good.
Hope you like it — we finally got around to customizing the WordPress TwentyThirteen theme we have been using for this blog.
Nothing fancy; just making sure the colors and font (especially the fonts!) are consistent with our website and app. We use Roboto everywhere now: we find this to be a really easy to read font for most screens, and think that Google did a great job in coming up to an alternative to the traditional Arial/Helvetica.
We are also trying to clean up the Categories and Tags we use to help you find older blogs: there were too many overlapping categories/tags that had accumulated over the years so we got rid of a bunch of them.
Let us know what you think…
We used to offer monthly and annual subscriptions, and in the last 5 years we had just two customers ever request the monthly option.
Everyone else found the annual subscriptions far more convenient so they wouldn’t have to process invoices or receipts, or get internal purchase approvals, every month.
The monthly purchase offer wasn’t very good for Kerika either: there’s a certain amount of bookkeeping and overhead for processing every invoice and given the already low $7 price per user, this offer was essentially a money-losing proposition.
So, we are now discontinuing the monthly subscription purchases altogether. We are asking all our customers to purchase annual subscriptions: the amounts involved are still very reasonable, and if you do change your mind in the middle of the year, you can still request a refund for the unused portion of your annual subscription.
This means you don’t have an risk of overbuying: if you change your mind about using Kerika, you can get a refund for the remaining portion of your subscription.
For the past few years Stéphane Vassort from College La Grange Du Bois in Savigny-le-Temple in France has been using Kerika with his middle-school students who have been building 3-wheel trikes as part of their science curriculum.
He recently shared this heartwarming video of his students — surely among the youngest Kerika users in the world! — with the trikes they have built:
We are so happy to be supporting this kind of work! If you are interested in getting a free Academic & Nonprofit Account like Stéphane, please let us know.
We have a complete (one-hour long) video of the tutorial presented by Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, at the recent Lean Transformation Conference on the subject of Kanban vs Scrum: what’s the difference, and which should you use?
(The slides for this talk, and more, can be found on Slideshare.)
Topics covered:
Forming a team 00:01:32
The Product Owner 00:02:01
The Scrum Master 00:02:55
The Scrum Team 00:03:55
Pulling Work 00:04:04
The Product Backlog 00:05:45
Scrum Stories 00:06:25
Writing a good Story 00:07:35
From Epics to Stories 00:10:25
From Stories to Tasks 00:11:13
Estimating with Story Points 00:13:04
Organizing a Sprint 00:15:00
How long is a Sprint? 00:19:15
Sprints in theory 00:20:32
Sprints in real-life 00:20:53
Daily Standups 00:23:25
Burndown Charts 00:24:13
Team Velocity 00:25:35
Best Practices for Getting Scrum Right 00:28:00
The Nuclear Option 00:30:57
Where does Scrum work best? 00:32:02
Scrum in Government 00:33:25
Where does Kanban work best? 00:35:43
Collaboration Networks 00:37:25
Paper doesn’t scale 00:38:30
Using Kerika for Personal Kanban 00:39:50
Using Kerika for Team Kanban 00:40:24
Using Kerika in the Public Sector 00:40:37
Using Kerika for Scrum Projects 00:40:54
Capturing stories as “virtual sticky notes” 00:41:20
Summary 00:42:57
Question: how do you deal with poor performers on the team? 00:49:15
Question: in Scrum, are units of measure like lines of code still applicable? 00:50:08
Question: how do you measure individual performance? 00:51:03
Question: how do you handle poor performers within a team? 00:52:25
Question: when do you use the Nuclear Option? 00:54:20
Question: how do you estimate stories? 00:55:54
Photo credits: Abdul-Rasul Kassamali, Jama Abdirahman.
We have made a bunch of improvements to the Contact Us feature in Kerika, which — as before — can be accessed by clicking on the help button (“?”) in the top-right corner of the Kerika app:
Previously this simply opened up your local email client to send us a message; now the feature is built into Kerika itself, and is smarter about how it works.
When we analyzed our old trouble tickets, and emails to support@kerika.com in general, we found there were very few instances of actual bugs being found, but more commonly there was some confusion about how Kerika was working for the users.
And very frequently when people got in touch with us, they didn’t include important information in their original emails that would help us understand what problem they were currently facing.
This meant we had to reply back to ask them some common questions, like “have you already invited this person to join your board?”, and this led to unwelcome delays in resolving the problem for our users, especially when they were located many time-zones away and there was a 24-hour delay before they replied, and then we replied, and so on.
Our new Contact Us dialog, while very simple in appearance, acts as a smart collector of key information that can help us understand the context of the user’s query:
And, finally, the Contact Us process reminds our users that any intermittent problem they are facing can often be resolved simply by refreshing their browser: if they had experienced any fleeting network problem or latency that interfered with their Kerika view, a simple browser refresh will fix that quickly.
What would your company look like if working mothers were a central feature of your organizational design, not a bug to be patched?
How great is Kerika’s integration with the Box Platform (that powers our direct signups?)