Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general.

Kerika (not) in China

Government, Kerika, Technology

One of our users, normally resident in Poland, is in China right now on vacation, and found to his disappointment that he couldn’t login to his Kerika+Google account.

Actually, he couldn’t login to his Google Account at all.

This is disappointing to hear, but not entirely surprising: Google has had problems making its services available in China for a long time, and so Kerika+Google becomes collateral damage in this larger conflict…

The only long-term solution would be for Kerika to offer its own signup and file storage mechanism, which is something we have considered in the past but is not high on our priority list right now because we have some other stuff we want to build first that’s going to be simply amazing.

Which is good news or bad news, depending upon whether you are in China right now or not…

Archived cards are not included in your 6AM task summary email

Technology,

When you archive a project, it’s possible that some cards still had Due Dates set on them: these dates are preserved along with all the other project data at the time you do the archiving.

But, these dates, which will inevitably become overdue dates over time, are not included in your 6AM task summary email, because there’s nothing you can do about them while the project remains in the Archive.

We have upgraded our SSL Security

Kerika, Technology,

We have upgraded the SSL certificate, used to secure your browser’s connection to kerika.com, from SHA-1 to SHA-2.

Kerika SSL
Kerika SSL

 

(SHA-2 is a cryptographic hashing algorithm developed by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) to replace SHA-1.)

This puts Kerika ahead of moves that Google and Microsoft will soon take, for the Chrome and Internet Explorer browsers, respectively, that will start showing warning signs when you visit a website that uses the older SHA-1 certificates.

If you are not sure whether your favorite secure site has upgraded to SHA-2, Symantec has a helpful tool you can use:

Kerika SSL check
Kerika SSL check

Archiving a Scrum Board doesn’t affect the Backlog

Technology,

If you are working off a long Backlog (like we do at Kerika!), then you will have many Scrum Boards that pull items off this shared Backlog over time, and with our new Archive feature you will want to freeze old Scrum Boards as you get done with Sprints.

(Each Sprint should be done as a separate Scrum Board, that connects to the same Backlog.)

When you archive one particular Scrum Board, you only freeze that board: the Backlog remains available for use — and modification — by other Scrum Boards, now and in the future.

Which means that when you open an Archived Scrum Board, the view you will get of the Backlog will show the Backlog as it exists today, not as it existed when you archived the Scrum Board.

What we did in 2014

Technology

Here’s all the stuff we built in 2014, as far as we can remember…

January

February

  • We made it easier to delete projects you no longer need, and to retrieve them if you change your mind.
  • (We found out that one of our patents is referenced by Microsoft, IBM and Ford!)

March

April

We pondered integrating with Box. Pondered and pondered…

May

June

We got really serious about integrating with Box…

July

  • We reworked our website and this blog to use a responsive design, so it would be easier to read on mobile devices.
  • We were a big part of the IPMA conference in Lacey, Washington.
  • We released Kerika+Box!

August

September

October

October was a really busy month.

November

  • We made it easier for you to share projects with people who are part of your account team.
  • We presented at the Lean Transformation Conference in Tacoma, where we were a bit hit.
  • We presented at the Project Management Institute’s Olympia Chapter meeting.

December

  • We added Archiving as a feature for Projects and Templates.
  • We took Christmas Day off. Well, some of us did.
Verbeug
Verbeug

A small, but hopefully useful, change in how Templates are sorted

Technology

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.

Our latest update: a minor facelift…

Technology, Usability

Our latest update to the Kerika software features a bunch of bug fixes and other improvements that are mostly under the covers, as several user interface tweaks to help improve usability.

One change you will notice right away is that when you open a card, the details dialog box has new tabs for Tags and History: this was done to make it easier for people to find these functions, which were previously tucked away within the tab for the card’s description.

Card Details
Card Details

The History tab is all the way at the bottom now, where it’s easily accessible but not in the way — since History is not a frequently used function.

There are other UI tweaks: icons have been modernized and the overall look is cleaner, and the Trash column of a board now shows you when each card was deleted.

Sorting cards in a column just got easier

Technology, Usability,

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
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 🙂

Kerika at the PMI Olympia Chapter

Agile & Scrum, Government, Team Collaboration, Technology, ,

Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, and Beth Albertson, Solution Architect at Washington State’s Dept of Social and Health Services, gave a joint presentation at the Project Management Institute (PMI)’s Olympia chapter yesterday.

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!

Too bad we forgot to take pictures 🙁

Emails and notifications in Kerika

Technology, Usability,

Kerika always sends emails to users in two scenarios:

  • Someone assigns a card to you. The system waits 2 minutes, to ensure that the person who made the change doesn’t change her mind, and then sends you an email that an item has been assigned to you.

    We figured that if someone expects you to do a piece of work, it would be good to know that sooner rather than later.

  • Someone chats on a card assigned to you. Any Team Member can write a message on any card, regardless of whether they are assigned that card or not.

    If someone chats on a card that you own right now, an email gets pushed to you (again, after a 2-minute wait.) We figured that if someone has something to say about a work item that you are responsible for, you would want to know that sooner or later.

Kerika optionally sends emails to users in a bunch of other scenarios, all of which are determined by your user preferences (which you can set at https://kerika.com/preferences).

  • If someone chats on the board itself (as distinct from chatting on an individual card), you can get this sent to you as email.
  • If there are cards assigned to you that have due dates, at 6AM you can get an email that lists everything that is overdue, due today, or due tomorrow.

    If you are a Project Leader on any board, this email includes all cards on those boards that are overdue, due today, or due tomorrow, regardless of whether they are assigned to you or not. (We figured that as a Project Leader you would care about overdue items even if you weren’t personally responsible for them.)

  • If new cards are added to a board where you are a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of all new work items.
  • If cards are moved to Done on a board where you are a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of completed work.
  • If a card is reassigned from one person to another on a board where you a Project Leader, you can get notification emails if you want to keep track of how work is being handed off from one person to another.

So that’s emailed notifications in Kerika: just two types of emails are always sent, and they relate only to cards that you are personally responsible for; all the other emails are optional and can be turned on/off as you like.

What happens if people make changes to cards while you weren’t looking? (If you were looking at the board, you would see the changes in real-time, but even then, with a very crowded board, you might not notice that a card has changed in some way.)

Kerika uses the orange color as a way to alert you of changes. You can learn more about this on our website, but the basic concept is simple: Kerika highlights, in orange, any card that has changed in any way since you last looked at it, and by “look at it” we mean that you opened up the card and looked at the specific details that changed.

For example, if someone adds new files to a card, the attachments icon (the small paper-clip) appears in orange. After you open the card and look at the list of attachments, the orange highlight disappears.

These orange highlights are very smart about making sure you know exactly what changed on a board; they even let you find changes that are outside your immediate visibility: e.g. changes on cards that are way down below the scrolled view of the board, or changes in columns that you have chosen to hide.