Did you know that we have made it really easy to download files that you attach to a Kerika card, canvas or board?
Just hover your mouse over an attachment, and you will see these buttons appear on the right:
Downloading attachments
These buttons let you:
Download a file
Rename a file
Delete a file attachment
Couple of other points to note:
Rename a file shows off our integration with Google Drive (for our Kerika+Google users) and with Box’s service (for our Kerika+Box users): renaming the file from inside Kerika will automatically rename it in your Google Drive or Box folder as well.
Deleting a file attachment doesn’t actually delete the file from your Google Drive or Box account: it just means that file is no longer attached to that particular Kerika card, canvas or board.
When you sign up directly with Kerika, we take a look at your email address and try to figure out whether you would be better off with Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box.
This helps ensure that you are going to be able to easily collaborate with other people from your company, who may have signed up already using their Google or Box IDs.
Here’s an example: joe@kerika.com tries to sign up directly, and we suggest automatically that he sign up as a Kerika+Box user since so many of his colleagues already have Kerika+Box accounts:
We found and fixed a problem that a small number of users were experiencing: if you had a lot of boards open at the same time — say around 40 — and you then used the URL of any of these boards in some context, e.g. by including it in a chat message, you could run up into a “502 Bad Gateway” server error.
This really was an unexpected edge case — we had never considered that people might be working on 40 boards at the same time, nor that they would routinely have so many boards open, but it turns out that for professional services firms that use Kerika to manage their different client engagements, this was actually not that unusual…
The underlying problem was obscure: Kerika uses a cookie to keep track of which boards you currently have open.
This helps us restore your session perfectly if you exit Kerika and then return, e.g. by simply closing your browser or actually logging out and logging back in.
In the scenario where a user might have had 40 boards open, the cookie was becoming really, really large (as far as cookies go), and our Web server wasn’t set up to handle such large cookies.
Thanks to one of our users at Washington State’s Employment Security Department, we found and fixed a bug that was causing problems when users tried to add SharePoint URLs as attachments on cards, for Task Boards and Scrum Boards.
The problem turned out to be in some code we have that tries to check whether a user is entering a valid-looking URL. SharePoint’s URLs are somewhat unusual in that they include the “{” and “}” characters, which most other web servers don’t use.
Our old code was treating these characters as invalid, thereby rejecting URLs coming from SharePoint.
We now allow users to sign up for Kerika directly, by using any email address. This version is powered by the Box Platform, which allows us to make good use of Box’s cloud storage technology while presenting a simple user interface for our own users.
Another cool feature from Box that we had integrated, as part of this new service, was to use their browser-based preview functionality — which came to Box as a result of their 2014 purchase of Crocodoc.
We use this preview feature with a simple IFRAME integration, which means we don’t add anything to it ourselves, but one downside of this approach is that if Box removes something from their preview capability, it can disappear from Kerika also.
This happened recently when they took away a button that allowed for a quick download of a file that was being previewed.
We have fixed this by adding our own “Download file” link within the Box Preview:
This gave our users more choices in terms of how they signed up for Kerika, and which cloud service they used to store their project files, but we continued to resist offering a direct sign up mechanism:
We remained convinced that third-party signup and login, using OAuth, would dominate user preferences — under the theory that no one really wanted to remember yet another password for yet another web service.
Our technical architecture also restricted us from offering a direct sign up choice because we had tied together the issues of authentication and file storage: it was how our original integration with Google had been done, and we had simply duplicated that model when we added Kerika+Box.
This changed in 2015, when Box announced the Box Platform as a new service — although originally it was called the “Box Developer Edition” when it was unveiled at the BoxDev conference in April 2015.
Kerika was probably the first task management app to sign up to use the Box Platform; in fact, we were in the very first batch of beta users for the service.
This new integration with Box allowed us to finally offer a direct sign up mechanism for new users:
Signing up directly with Kerika
Now, you can sign up with any email address: it could be a company email, a Yahoo email, a Microsoft Live email… even a Gmail address.
When you sign up directly with Kerika, we use the Box Platform to securely store your project files:
We create an account at Box that’s dedicated to storing your Kerika files.
We do this automatically and behind the scenes: you might never know that your files are actually being stored at Box, rather than on a Kerika-operated server.
While this seamless integration is great from a user experience perspective, it doesn’t mean that we want to hide our Box links: in fact, we would actually like to boast about our use of the Box platform because Box is so well regarded for the robustness, security and privacy of their cloud storage service.
So, now you know where your files are stored when you sign up directly as a Kerika user: inside the Box Platform!
We found a bug that was causing problems for users who wanted to edit/update their board descriptions, using Internet Explorer. We fixed that.
In case you are wondering where the board description is found in the first place, here’s how you can edit it:
Click on the gear icon that appears on the top-right corner of every Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, and then chose the Settings tab:
Editing board descriptions
By default, the board description field will be empty, naturally, but if you are one of the Board Admins (or the Account Owner), when you move your mouse over the Description field you will see a pencil icon appear (highlighted in red, above), and clicking on that will let you add a board description.
Adding a board description
Board descriptions can be up to 180 characters long, and as you type the system will automatically let you know how many characters are left for you to type. (Yes, Twitter-style.)
Board descriptions are going to be very useful in the future as we make some changes to our user interface and search functions.
We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.
Some of the templates we have on offer:
Onboarding New Employees: a template for handling hiring and starting a new employee. (Surprisingly popular!)
Solution Sales: a template for professional services companies to track their sales opportunities; essentially a CRM for small professional services companies.
Implementing an EHR: an example of a complex template, based upon the US Government’s guidelines for implementing an Electronic Health Records system at hospitals.
We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.
Here is a screenshot of how the “Recommended domains” feature of Google Domains works:
Google Recommended Domains
Normally we get a little impatient with Google holding on to the “beta” tag on so many products that seem to be finished. In this case, we would urge Google to not rush out of beta.
