Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general.

Paying down technical debt when working with a Scrum team

Agile & Scrum, Kerika, Technology,

Another question answered on LinkedIn’s Scale Agile group: The team is facing a high Technical debt before adopting Scrum. Now, they want to fix this. How could they include this in the Sprint?

If you already have a lot of technical debt, I would recommend that the first few Sprints do nothing but clear the most expensive debt.

The trick is to persuade the Product Owner that this is necessary, because it means deferring any delivery of “real features” while the debt is paid down.

Note that I say “paid down” rather than “paid off”: in my experience, there is rarely an opportunity to completely pay off technical debt and have a clean Product Backlog with nothing in it but nice user stories that deliver tons of end-user functionality.

At Kerika, we have found that we accumulate some debt almost continuously, and that this is unavoidable even though we are using Scrum.

Purists might argue that a true Scrum model eliminates technical debt, but this is unrealistic when you are dealing with a fast moving market and are focused on rapidly improving your product.

Periodically, we devote an entire Sprint to paying down technical debt. We did one fairly recently because we are in the process of adding some substantial new functionality: Kerika will now become the first Scrum/Kanban/Scrumban tool that has full integration with both Google Drive and Box for sharing project files within distributed team 😉

Because this was a major platform enhancement, we took a 3-week Sprint to pay down our technical debt by clearing a bunch of bugs and server exceptions that individually were never going to make it to the top of the Product Backlog.

The Kerika tool makes it really easy to tag items, so it was easy for us to find all the bugs that were in our (rather large) Product Backlog and we cleared nearly 50 items.

Actually, this was our second debt payoff Sprint this year: in April, the Heartbleed scare prompted us to do a full internal review of our security processes, which morphed into a full review/overhaul of our QA and other software development infrastructure/process stuff, and we spent an entire Sprint to significantly clean up a bunch of stuff that had been moldering a while.

For what it’s worth, we generally do an all-hands-on-deck Sprint to pay down debt: we don’t try to sneak in any new product features because I find that it sends a confusing message to the team about the importance of paying down the debt.

I said earlier that often the big challenge is convincing the Product Owner of the need to devote a Sprint or two to pay down debt; in our case that’s relatively easy because I am the founder/CEO and buy into the idea 😉 but I do believe that if you are going to pay down debt, you need to do it with serious intent and get everyone focused on that, which means the Sprint is all about debt, not new goodies.

Is Kanban a better way to manage support/maintenance work than Scrum?

Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Technology, , ,

Hi folks!

I recently offered my thoughts to the Scrum Alliance group on LinkedIn, on the discussion thread on whether
Kanban is a better way to manage support/maintenance work than scrum. I thought you might find it interesting:

Kanban is generally a better model for support/maintenance: these tasks tend to trickle in, so trying to handle them with a conventional Product Backlog is often awkward.

Support/maintenance tasks are also usually unrelated to each other: one bug fix may have nothing to do with another.

This makes for a different metaphor than Scrum/Product Backlog where there is some presumption that user stories and tasks, while perhaps independent, are at least part of a larger product or release theme.

If you did support/maintenance tasks in a Sprint, that Sprint would have no overarching theme which I strongly believe is essential for success with Scrum teams.

And if any team doing support/maintenance with Scrum will quickly realize their Sprints are unlike those of other teams that are doing product development with Scrum.

I would view your questions about swimlanes as arising from a misfitting metaphor: instead of using swimlanes, you would be better off using tags, and then filtering your board as needed to see all support/maintenance tasks related to a particular subsystem or process or person. E.g. “show me all the tasks related to the database schema”.

We use our own product (Kerika) of course, and we do all of our new product development with Scrum Board, and support/maintenance with Kanban boards since Kerika lets you easily have both kinds of boards.

We use multiple tags on each card on both the Kanban and Scrum Boards, so we can filter and search, e.g. “show everything related to our Google Drive integration”.

These filtered views are much more effective and flexible than trying to organize your board with swimlanes, because each card can have multiple tags, whereas with swimlanes a card would be in only one swimlane at any time.

Also, this arrangement gives us flexibility to move from Kanban to Scrum and back: for example, if a support/maintenance card that originally landed on a Kanban board is later deemed to be significant enough to handle as part of product development, we can just cut-and-paste that card from the Kanban board to the Scum Board, and Kerika brings along all the content, history, attachments, chat, etc.

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 8: Our experience with Box (so far)

Kerika, Technology,

(The eighth in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

We have finished our development work on the Kerika+Box integration, and have started internal testing this week!

Our philosophy all along has been to “eat our own dogfood”: every new feature that we have ever built has been used internally, for real, by the Kerika team for its own product development and team collaboration. Since we are ourselves a distributed team, spread out between Seattle and India, it makes perfect sense for us to use Kerika to build Kerika 😉

Here’s what our Box integration testing board looks like:

Box integration testing board
Box integration testing board

We haven’t run into many problems so far: we did find one small bug in the Java Library for the Box Collaboration API, and we have been extremely impressed with the responsiveness of the Box team.

  • We first logged the bug at Github, where we had assumed (incorrectly, as it turns out) Box would want their bugs reported.
  • Having logged the bug, we pinged Indy Sen at Box, by Twitter and by email.
  • Indy responded within 15 minutes, on both Twitter and email.
  • Indy got us in touch with the API team at Box, and asked us to log the bug on Stack Overflow, where Box does its platform support.
  • We did that later in the evening, at 11:04PM.
  • Within 4 minutes a support engineer confirmed that the bug existed.
  • Later in the evening we asked a follow-up question, to confirm that our workaround was sensible.
  • The next day, before noon, their support engineer confirmed that our workaround was fine.
  • A couple of hours later, Peter Rexer told us they had fixed the bug and merged the code onto Github.

Now, admittedly, the bug was very trivial — a single misplaced character — but the responsiveness of Box as an organization just blew us away!

Contrast this with the experience we have had in the past with Google Drive, when problems would mysteriously appear and then disappear just as mysteriously, either the same day or several weeks later…

The full series:

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 7: Disentangling from Google

Kerika, Technology,

(The seventh in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

Having decided to add a second cloud platform, we had to go about the cumbersome, risky process of disentangling Kerika from its close embrace of the Google stack.

This has taken us several months, if we are honest about counting the entire effort and duration.

The first part of this was to create a more layered architecture: wherever there was a direct interface to a Google service, we had to create an intermediate shim that allow us to substitute the Google service with another.

And to be frank, when we first started work on Kerika in 2010, we hadn’t seriously considered the possibility that we would use any other cloud service so our architecture had become, over the years, more Google-focused than we had realized.

Disentangling from Google Contacts was the easiest step, and in fact we had already taken that break some time ago in response to users being fearful about Kerika accessing their Google Contacts.

In terms of login, however, things got much more complicated: we had originally integrated with Google using OAuth 1.0, and then later upgraded to OAuth 2.0 as OAuth 1.0 started to get deprecated.

In theory this meant that we could easily integrate with any other OAuth provider, e.g. Box, Facebook, Yahoo, etc.

But as we developed our long-term strategy and talked to prospective customers, it became clear that sooner or later Kerika would have to provide direct signup/sign-in, in addition to OAuth: a significant contingent of folks wanted to be able to sign up directly at Kerika.com rather than use existing credentials from Google, Box, etc.

(We are not quite sure why this is really advantageous for anyone, but the sentiment is real nonetheless.)

So, we decided to implement our own OAuth server, which would act as a gateway to OAuth servers from Google or Box.

This had to be implemented such that the entire sign-up and sign-in process remains unchanged: someone coming to Kerika.com would get redirected automatically to the correct authentication service, which could then redirect the user’s browser back to the Kerika application server.

And, obviously, the entire process had to be smooth, fast and completely transparent to the end-user: how we implemented multiple OAuth sign-ins wasn’t the user’s concern! This had to work really well for both free users of Google, e.g. folks with just a regular Gmail account, and premium users who had signed up for Google Apps for Business or any of its variants (for Government, Education, and Nonprofits).

Fortunately, we already gained experience in dealing with the complexities of browser redirects in enterprise environments, where any sloppiness in terms of using HTTPS, for example, can trip up security alarms in large organizations.

And, we had learned the hard way to look for various edge cases, like restricted domains — if someone from within a restricted domain tries to add someone from outside that domain, we need to trap that condition so that the user experience remains excellent, rather than landing anyone on some scary error page from Google!

The other major complexity was to normalize the service we provide, so that the user experience is equivalent for both Google and Box users.

An example of a “normalized user experience”: an existing Kerika, who uses Google Drive, decides to invite someone to join a project. At that time, we need to check whether the invitee is already registered as a Kerika user or not. If the invitee is already a Kerika user, we need to see whether that user is also using Google Drive.

If it turns out that the invitee has been using Box, we need to make sure the invitee is correctly prompted to switch from using a Google-based Kerika account to a Box-based account, so that she has all the proper access to the new project’s files. And this switch between accounts needs to be a single-click, to keep the Kerika user experience excellent!

Other examples: exceptions and error conditions as reported by Google and Box are very different, reflecting the peculiarities of each service. We need to make sure we capture all these and try to keep the end-user experience as smooth as possible. Fortunately, we had developed a great deal of experience managing exceptions generated by Google Apps, so we could bring all this to bear on our Box implementation.

To get all this right, we had to carefully plan a series of milestone releases that were done in parallel with our regular development: although the work was going to take several months to finish, we needed to keep supporting our existing users with critical updates, bug fixes and limited new product enhancements.

Fortunately Kerika lets you have multiple Scrum Backlogs in the same account, and that’s what we did: we created a separate, smaller Product Backlog consisting of just the OAuth work, and let that development run in parallel while we continued to draw down on our Main Product Backlog.

The OAuth work finally got done in four Sprints, each of which was organized as a separate Scrum Board.

As we came to our regular release cycles, we would pick up items that were complete, from either the OAuth Backlog or the Main Backlog, and merge these to create a new release package.

To get this right, we used git to the fullest, putting each feature into a separate branch so that we could retain the maximum flexibility in terms of what made it into a particular release.

Without this use of multiple git branches, our release cadence would have been tough to maintain.

The full series:

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 6: The Box Option

Kerika, Technology, ,

(The sixth in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

And this brings us to Box…

We first heard of Box through cloudPWR, a Kerika partner and long-time Box reseller: Shadrack White, Dennis Brooke, and Cullen Hower suggested to us (a year ago!) that we consider integrating with Box.

Shad and Dennis were both enthusiastic proponents of Box: they had done several implementations of Box, including a very interesting use-case for Washington State’s Liquor Control Board which found itself in the business of regulating medical marijuana this year.

And Dennis in particular has been a great proponent of Kerika: he had introduced it to some of his clients.

As we looked at Dropbox and OneDrive as possible alternatives to Google Drive, Box came up repeatedly in the conversations we were having with enterprises.

It was clear that Box was treated very seriously by some folks that we considered very smart and knowledgeable — a senior director at Amazon, for example, told us (off the record) that he considered Box to be the most enterprise-ready cloud storage platform — and so we decided to take a closer look at the Box platform.

We attended Boxworks in San Francisco last summer, and were immediately struck by the differences in tone and substance between Boxworks and DBX.

While Dropbox is a consumer-oriented company with a newly developed interest in the enterprise, Box is a very enterprise-focused company (with little or no interest in consumers).

We took a close look at the Box API, and were very pleased with what we found: Box’s API was very close to what we were getting from Google Drive, which meant that a Kerika+Box integration could offer a really good user experience:

  • If you add a file to a card or canvas on a Kerika project board, it will automatically get shared with everyone who is part of the project team.
  • People’s access to project files will be automatically controlled (and updated in real-time) based upon their roles: Team Members will get read+write access; Visitors will get read-only access.
  • There will be no need for users to manually adjust or manage permissions on any files: Kerika will provide a great contextual layer on top of the cloud storage platform.

Box has another great advantage: it doesn’t have its own proprietary format for storing Word, Excel, etc.  This is a big issue for many enterprises who would like to use Kerika, but don’t want to move away from Microsoft Office format.

If we can the great Kerika user experience, with an enterprise-class cloud service, and the convenience of Microsoft Office, we think we will have a winner on our hands!

So, from a technology perspective a Kerika+Box integration makes a lot of sense. But what about from a market perspective?

When we polled some of current and prospective customers, however, the reaction was somewhat mixed:

  • Folks who were knowledgeable about Box were very supportive. (Good!)
  • Folks who were already using Box were very enthusiastic. (Excellent!)
  • Unfortunately, too many people still haven’t heard about Box… (Not so good…)

Box’s biggest challenge at the moment is name-recognition: far too many folks we talked to confuse Box with Dropbox.

The name confusion vis-a-vis Dropbox is a pretty big issue that we are betting that Box can ameliorate on its own, and Box’s pending IPO should certainly help with gaining greater name recognition and a more distinctive personality in the marketplace.

We are also hoping to build good partnerships with Box resellers, like our friends at cloudPWR, who have long-standing relationships with enterprises that would be great candidates for Kerika’s work management tools.

The full series:

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 5: The OneDrive Option

Kerika, Technology, ,

(The fifth in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

This post is shorter than the others in this series for one simple reason: the OneDrive API has no way for third-party apps to manage permissions on folders, and that’s a show-stopper for us in terms of providing a really good user experience.

This limitation was probably more frustrating for us than the case with Dropbox:

  • We are next door to Microsoft: Issaquah is just 15 minutes away from Redmond, which means its easy for us to find people to talk to at Microsoft.
  • Microsoft has a great history of working with third-party developers and a very robust partner program.
  • Nearly all enterprises who are interested in Kerika are long-standing users of the Microsoft stack (SharePoint/Project/Exchange); a Kerika+OneDrive solution would have been a relatively easy sale in terms of internal IT politics within most enterprises.

We hadn’t taken OneDrive very seriously when it was available only as SkyDrive, i.e., when it was available only as part of the full Microsoft stack, but once Satya Nadella became CEO and (coincidentally?) Microsoft decided to un-bundle their cloud platform and create OneDrive, the platform became much more interesting for us.

(We had seen only lukewarm enthusiasm, at best, for the full SkyDrive package, but OneDrive as a standalone alternative to Google Drive, Dropbox, Box, etc. was more interesting.)

Interestingly, the feedback we got also pointed to why adoption of OneDrive might be slower than Microsoft would like: OneDrive is being marketed as part of the Office 365 solution set, and many of organizations we were talking to seem slow to adopt Office 365.

One big reason for dragging their feet is that few enterprises that we talk to are enthusiastic about the implied upgrade to Windows 8.x.

(Upgrading to Win 8.x isn’t a technical requirement, but the sales push from Microsoft is for the full Win 8.x/O365 deal.)

One cause for this, of course, is that there isn’t any great love out there for the new Win 8.x user interface: few end-users seem enthusiastic, and IT folks are very worried about training and support for a radically different user experience.

Even within Washington State’s government agencies — where one might expect Microsoft to have a home field advantage — we haven’t seen any real enthusiasm for OneDrive; in fact, Box is the only cloud service provider to have a master services contract with Washington!

The full series:

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 4: The Dropbox Option

Kerika, Technology, ,

(The fourth in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

As we noted in our last post, our initial preference was to add Dropbox as our second cloud platform. We had personal experience of using Dropbox ourselves, mostly to synch files across multiple personal computers and devices, and to a much more limited experience we had tried using it for collaborating with partners, mostly to share large graphics and video files.

(Particularly in the early days of Google Drive, there were limits on file sizes we would bump against, and high-resolution video files can easily be very large.)

By itself Dropbox doesn’t really provide any collaboration features: there is no contextual overlay on it, like Kerika provides on top of Google Drive.  The best use-case for Dropbox is still that envisioned by Drew Houston’s original mockup video: if you use multiple computers a regular basis, e.g. a desktop and a laptop, and you need to make sure your working files are always available on all these machines.

(The key phrase here is “working files”: using Dropbox as a “system of record” — for files that have been finalized, frozen or otherwise are in an archived state — seems less useful.  Archived files can very quickly grow in size to hundreds of gigabytes, making Dropbox a prohibitively expensive solution.)

To learn more about Dropbox, we began by attending their DBX conference in San Francisco last summer.

DBX turned out to be a startlingly extravagant affair — it made us feel quite the country bumpkins since we can’t envision any Seattle-area startup spending so lavishly on a single day’s conference!  But, it was also an excellent opportunity to meet some of their engineers particularly from their Platform Team, and to understand better Dropbox’s API and product direction.

We immediately ran into a major hurdle: it appeared that Dropbox’s API offered no way for third-party apps to create and manage nested folders.

We didn’t get discouraged immediately, since we did have an opportunity to talk to folks from their platform team.

We put together a detailed presentation on why it made sense for Dropbox to extend their API; and we supplemented this with a mockup video showing exactly how this could result in a great integration of Kerika+Dropbox, similar to what we had achieved with Kerika+GoogleDrive.

(This video hasn’t been released publicly.)

Some folks in the Dropbox platform team were clearly interested in what we presented, and felt that it presented an interesting direction for the platform to take, in order to be more competitive in the enterprise space. However, it was clear that the Dropbox API product roadmap was full up for the foreseeable future, and we were unlikely to find the platform capabilities in Dropbox that we were looking for.

It was disappointing, but not a show-stopper for us: while considering the technical strategy for a Kerika+Dropbox integration, we had also been sounding out some of current and prospective customers to see how enthusiastically they would welcome such a product, and we were getting mixed feedback: on a personal level, most folks liked Dropbox, but at an enterprise level there was much less enthusiasm.

Part of the problem may have been simply perception: Dropbox was viewed very much as a consumer product, and enterprise IT may have reflexively dismissed it as lacking in security, enterprise management, etc.

We did, however, find that some of these folks were suggesting we consider a different platform as an alternative to Google Drive: Box…

The full series:

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 3: Considering Alternatives

Kerika, Technology, , ,

(The third in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

Adding an alternative to Google Drive was never going to be easy; Kerika has a deep integration with Google:

  • Our registration and sign-in process was built entirely to work with Google IDs.; originally implemented using OAuth 1.0, and then upgraded to OAuth 2.0.
  • The product is available on the Chrome Web Store and the Google Apps Marketplace, so enterprise users can sign up and manage users using their Google Dashboard.
  • When users add desktop files to their cards and canvases on Kerika project boards, these get shared using their own Google Drives.
  • Originally, we had an integration with Google Contacts as well, although we dropped that some months ago since it added to the privacy baggage of working with Google.
  • And, until Google killed this service, we used Google Checkout to handle online payment.

Adding another platform would be a ton of work, and it would delay an exciting product roadmap of new features.

Ultimately, the strategic decision for Kerika came down to: should we add more features to our product, while staying within the Google space, or broaden the appeal of the existing product by adding another platform?

We concluded that the core Kerika product, as it exists today, was already very usable: we could see how it had helped users in a variety of industries and organizations, of all sizes, across sectors, and around the world. And, we could reach even more users if we added a cloud storage platform that didn’t have the privacy baggage that was hampering Google Drive.

Having decided on a broad strategy for the company, the next critical question became: which cloud platform would make more sense for our users?

We considered three alternatives:

  • Dropbox
  • OneDrive/SkyDrive
  • Box

We were initially attracted to Dropbox because of its wide popularity, which far outstrips that of Box or OneDrive.  We figured that if we were going to go through all the trouble of adding another cloud platform, we might as well go for the one with the largest user base.

But, first, we needed a plan of attack…

We started our process by first documenting all the functions of Google Drive that Kerika’s user experience relies upon.

These turned out to be a fairly large set, so we whittled it down to a core must-have set, and a larger nice-to-have set.  This gave us rational technical requirements that we could use to evaluate Dropbox, OneDrive and Box.

The most essential requirement we had was that the Kerika application should be able to manage permissions on folders, not just individual files.  Here’s why it’s essential for the Kerika user experience:

A bunch of our competitors offer a superficial level of integration with cloud platforms, generally at the “file picker” level only.

This means they have a button on their UI somewhere that allows users to pick a file from their Dropbox, Google Drive, etc. and add it to a card on a project board.

But this superficial integration offers no real benefit in a team environment: if you add a file to a card using just a file picker, other folks on the project team don’t automatically get access to that file.

Instead, when they try to open files attached to cards, on a board where they are part of the team, they must ask the file owner for permission — each and every time!

Kerika’s user experience is much better: when you add a file to a card or canvas, the software makes sure that every member of the project team gets instant access to that file, and that access is automatically adjusted to reflect their current role: Team Members get read+write access; Visitors get read-only access.

And the critical requirement was that the Kerika app could manage permissions on entire folders, not just individual files.

A typical Kerika board can easily include a hundred or more cards; in fact, some of our users have boards that run to over a thousand cards. Each of these cards could have several files attached to them.

So, if we are going to manage thousands of files for a single project, we really need to be able to create folders — and ideally sub-folders as well — so that we didn’t just spray these thousands of files all over each users’ cloud storage.

We also started informally polling our current users and future prospects about how they would view a Kerika+Dropbox vs. Kerika+OneDrive vs. Kerika+Box solution.  (The feedback we got was surprising…)

And, finally, we tried to get a sense for how transparent each of these companies would be — how easy it would be build a partnership arrangement, to have a dialog with their platform teams.

The full series:

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 2: Transparency

Kerika, Technology,

(The second in a series of blog posts on why we are adding integration with Box, as an alternative to our old integration with Google Drive.)

In our last post we talked about the privacy overhang that Google Drive faces with many of our prospective customers.

In this post we talk about some frustrations we have experienced as a Google Drive developer, which we would characterize as generally flowing from a lack of transparency on Google’s part.

Sometimes things break within Google Docs or Google Drive, and if the outage is not very widespread, it isn’t acknowledged very well. Google has an App Status Dashboard that is useful when there are major problems, but we have seen minor issues persist for days at a time without being reflected on this Dashboard.

On one occasion there was a problem with Google’s OAuth infrastructure: people trying to sign into their Kerika accounts were getting bounced with mysterious error messages. There was no easy way for us to figure this out because OAuth is simply an underpinning service for Google Apps: it doesn’t have its own status indicator on the App Status Dashboard.

We spent a day sifting through error messages and exceptions logged by our server (in increasing desperation!), before the problem went away as mysteriously as it had appeared.

More recently, our users faced a problem with opening PDFs and image files (PNG, JPG, etc.) that were attached to cards or canvases.

Kerika was correctly getting the thumbnails of these images from Google Docs — so we knew the files were there and were accessible by the user (i.e. it wasn’t a permissions problem), but when users clicked on the thumbnails they got a “503 System Error”.

This particular problem hit close to home for us: we use screenshots and mockups very extensively to communicate between our Seattle and India-based teams.  Not having an easy way to download images that were attached to cards and canvases was a serious inconvenience for us, and we even resorted to using email! (We had given up using email over 18 months ago…)

Being able to seamlessly manage your cloud storage files is a critical element of the Kerika user experience, so from our perspective this was a major problem. Every attempt at debugging failed: old files were opening correctly, but new files weren’t. And while documents and spreadsheets were opening correctly, images and PDFs wouldn’t open…

We even combed through our git branches to see where the bug might be hiding.

There as no bug on our end: our code dealing with thumbnails and Google Drive hadn’t changed in the past 6 weeks.

At this point we knew the problem wasn’t on our end, but that still left us with frustrated users. Our users have very high expectations of Kerika’s product quality and customer service, and we couldn’t explain the problem or manage expectations.

As software professionals ourselves, we are entirely sympathetic to others facing bugs or outages: we suffer these too, all the time, and take no pleasure in casting stones. But we do think Google could have done a better job of notifying people that there was a problem, so we could manage our users’ expectations accordingly.

This is what we try to do ourselves: when we find a bug, we reach out, proactively, to our users to let them know they were affected. We try to provide an honest description of what happened (if it’s a bug in Kerika, we are candid about it), and we provide updates while we work to fix the bug, and then we reach out to them later to make sure our fix works.

Here’s how our users react to our outreach:

“AWESOME! thanks! I’m recommending you to all my friends.” — a church pastor in Florida

“Woo! Yes. Thanks very much!” — marketing manager in Colorado

“WOW!  So impressed with your response time and thoughtfulness.” — small business owner in California

We concluded that any alternative cloud platform we chose had to come from a company that was more transparent and accessible: we wanted to be able to able to report problems and get them fixed, and most importantly, we wanted reliable channels of communication. If we know what’s going on with the cloud platform, it becomes much easier to manage our user’s expectations and keep them happy.

The full series:

 

 

Why we are integrating with Box; Part 1: Privacy Overhang

Kerika, Technology,

(The first in a series of blog posts explaining why, and how, we are adding Box as a cloud service in addition to our long-standing integration with Google Drive.)

When we first started working on Kerika, back in 2010, Google Docs was an obvious choice for us to integrate with: it was pretty much the only browser-based office suite available (Microsoft Office 365 wasn’t around and Zoho was, and remains, somewhat obscure), and we were quite sure we didn’t want to get in the business of storing people’s desktop files in the cloud.

Google Docs (not yet renamed Google Drive) did have various limitations in terms of the file types it would support, and further limitations on the maximum size permitted of different types of files — the largest spreadsheet that they would support, for example, wasn’t the same size as the largest Word document — but the idea of building Kerika as a pure-browser app was a very appealing one.

So we integrated with Google Docs at a low level, fully embracing their API, to provide a seamless experience unlike anything that you might find from competing products:

  • When you add a document to a card or canvas in a Kerika board, it is automatically uploaded to your Google Drive, where it is stored in a set of nested folders.
  • When you add people to a Kerika board, their Google Drives automatically get dynamic links to your Google Drive, giving them just the right access, to just the right files.
  • When people’s roles change on a project team, their Google Docs access is automatically and instantly changed.
  • When a document is renamed in Kerika, the new name is reflected back in Google Drive.

Many of our users who are already using Google Docs loved our integration: one user went so far as to say “Kerika makes Google Docs sing!”

The Google integration was not easy, particularly in the early days when there were wide gaps between the documentation and the reality of the API: we had to frequently resort to the wonderful Seattle Tech Startups mailing list to cast about for help.

But it seemed worth while: our Google integration has definitely helped us get paying customers — organizations moving off the traditional Microsoft Office/Exchange/SharePoint/Project stack were looking for a tool just like Kerika, particularly if they were also grappling with the challenges of becoming a Lean/Agile organization and managing an increasingly distributed workforce.

We even signed up organizations, like the Washington State Auditor’s Office who started using Google Apps for Government just because they wanted to use Kerika!

But, there are other folks we encounter all the time who say to us: “We love everything about Kerika except for the Google integration”

Some folks want to work with Microsoft Office file format all the time (although that’s possible even with our Google Drive integration, by setting a personal preference, and will be even easier in the future with new edit functions announced at Google I/O), but, more commonly, we came up against a more basic concern — people simply distrusted Google on privacy grounds.

It’s debatable as to whether it’s a well-grounded fear or not, but it is certainly a widespread fear, and it is not showing any signs of diminishing as we continue to talk to our users and prospects.

Some of this is due to a lack of understanding: users frequently confuse “security” and “privacy”, and tell us that they don’t want to use Google Apps because it isn’t secure. This is really far off the mark, for anyone who knows how Google operates, and understands the difference between security and privacy.

Google is very secure: more secure than any enterprise is likely to be on its own. They have a lot of software and a lot of people constantly looking for and successfully thwarting attackers. It’s always possible for someone to hack into your Google account, but it will be through carelessness or incompetence on your end, rather than a failure on Google’s part.

Privacy, however, is a different matter altogether, and here Google does itself no favors:

  • It’s Terms of Use are confusing: their general terms of use, for all Google services, contains this gem which drives lawyers crazy: “When you upload, submit, store, send or receive content to or through our Services, you give Google (and those we work with) a worldwide license to use, host, store, reproduce, modify, create derivative works (such as those resulting from translations, adaptations or other changes we make so that your content works better with our Services), communicate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute such content.”
    The Google Apps for Business Terms are much more specific: “this Agreement does not grant either party any rights, implied or otherwise, to the other’s content or any of the other’s intellectual property.”
    But most people derive a first, and lasting, impression from Google general terms, and few get around to investigating the GAB specific terms.
  • Google finds it hard to acknowledge people’s privacy concerns. This is somewhat puzzling, and can perhaps be best explained as a cultural problem. Google genuinely thinks itself of a company that “does no evil”, and therefore finds itself reflexively offended when people question its commitment to privacy. It’s hard to address a problem that challenges your self-identity: the Ego acts to protect the Id.

Entire sectors seem closed to Google Drive: lawyers, who could certainly benefit from Kerika’s workflow management, and healthcare, which is already adopting Lean techniques (pioneered locally by the Virginia Mason hospitals.)

In the small-medium business (SMB) market in particular, there isn’t any meaningful outreach by Google to address the privacy/security concern.  (Google does reach out to large enterprises, but in the SMB market it relies entirely on resellers.)

For our part, we have done a ton of work persuading people that it’s OK to use Google Drive, but we don’t get paid for this (we are not a Google Apps reseller), and this is, at best, a distraction from our core mission of building the very best work management software for distributed, lean and agile teams.

We need an alternative cloud storage platform: one that has robust capabilities, is enterprise-friendly, and doesn’t come with any privacy baggage.

The full series: