Life in a startup isn’t easy: long hours, little pay, tons of risk, way too many challenges…
But every once in a while, our day brightens, like when we got this email from a user in Germany a few minutes ago:
Hello Team,
I almost can’t believe how fast you work… Great and Fast… My congratulations and a deep bow…
best wishes and regards
Karl-Heinz Kristen
Karl-Heinz, a Photographer and Artist, expressed his thanks with a great painting as well:
We did a hotfix to solve the problems many of our Kerika+Googleusers were experiencing earlier today; people should be able to login fine now.
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.
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:
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!
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!
We did a quick refresh to Kerika today, and we will be quiet for a while our development team — which is based in India — takes a well-earned Diwali break for about 2 weeks.
Today’s new refresh includes the following:
We will be back after the break with more great stuff rolling off the presses 🙂
Kerika is welcoming and friendly for people who are already familiar with online project boards, but what about people who have never used anything like Kerika before?
To make Kerika more welcoming for new users, we have created a new Welcome Experience: a series of simple callouts that can orient new users to the Kerika user interface, within 30 seconds.
We understand only too well that these kinds of callouts have been misused by many apps and websites, and that — when badly implemented — they can be annoying and ineffective, so we have take a good deal of care to design the Kerika Welcome Experience:
If you are a new user, let us know whether it worked!
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.
