A more detailed view of Task History

Kanban & Lean, Kerika, Usability, , , ,

It’s not often you need to look at the detailed history of a task (card) but sometimes you need to know exactly what happened, when, and who did what.

Our latest version has a much improved Task History, as you can see from these examples:

Every change made to a task is logged and the HISTORY tab of the task details dialog shows you not just who made a change and when, but also what the change was.

Where attachments were added, these are shown as links so you can quickly view it by clicking on the link.

Status changes show the old and new values for the status.

Due date changes also show the old and new due dates.

When it comes to sub-tasks (checklist items), the new history view is greatly improved:

You can see every instance of a checklist item changing, including renaming (editing), changing the assignments, and changing the due dates.

Enjoy Kerika!

Two ways of referencing URLs in Kerika

Technology, Usability

When you include a URL in a task’s details tab or chat, Kerika will look up the URL and then display the title of the page.  This is really useful because the URL may be very long and generally unintelligible, and people find the name of the site to be more useful.

Here’s an example, where the URL for the New York Times website is included in a chat message:

After this chat is sent, Kerika will look up the URL and then use the site’s name when the chat is displayed in Kerika, like this:

This is useful most of the time. The original URL, from the Wall Street Journal was long and contained many characters as a suffix  that most people would not find helpful.

But sometimes you want the URL itself to be clearly visible, and that’s possible in Kerika if you use the special escape character called the tilde “`” which appears on the top-left corner of English keyboards.

Here’s how you would use the tilde to “escape” the URL you are referencing:

And this is how it would look in the chat stream:

Because you used the tilde character to bracket the URL, Kerika doesn’t try to show the name; instead it shows the URL exactly as it is.

Another useful improvement from Kerika :-)

Kerika has a free Template for Daily Tasks Planner

Best Practices, Kanban & Lean, Tutorials, ,
The best way to organize your work and stay on top of your tasks.
This powerful template helps you stay organized and on top of your tasks. With its clear overview of daily tasks, you can prioritize your work and track your progress to ensure that you meet your goals effectively.
Whether you’re managing a project or working independently, this template helps you streamline your workflow and achieve your objectives with ease.
How to use this template:
  1. Resources: This column is for listing any resources you need to complete your tasks. You can create new cards for each resource or use existing ones. This helps you keep everything in one place and ensures you have what you need to get your work done.
  2. Daily Personal Plan: Use this column to create cards for your daily personal tasks. Set priority levels and add category tags like “errands” or “meetings” to help you stay organized. This will ensure that you don’t forget anything important and can manage your time effectively.
  3. Daily Work Task: This column is for your daily work-related tasks. Create a card for each task, set priority levels, and add category tags. This will help you prioritize your work and ensure that you focus on the most important tasks.
  4. In Progress: Move tasks to this column when you start working on them. Use TASK STATUS options like “In progress,” “On hold,” “Blocked,” or “Needs Review” to track your progress. This helps you know what tasks are actively being worked on and what their current status is.
  5. Done: Move tasks to this column when they are completed, or mark them as “Done” using the TASK STATUS options. This helps you keep track of what tasks have been completed and what still needs to be done.

We just overhauled the entire back end of Kerika

Kerika, Technology

An effort that took 2 years finally completed yesterday when we updated the Kerika app.

This massive project involved rewriting everything on the back-end of Kerika in order to modernize the architecture and set up us for a more rapid development of end-user functionality, as well as making it easier to release new versions in the future using Docker container.

Our old backend was not well designed: everything ran as a single monolithic server. Over the years we moved slowly away from that, by building new features as microservices, and while that helped a little, it wasn’t enough.

We had reached a point where it was taking exponentially more time to build new features, and we were facing operational risk as well because the old backend was poorly understood and document.

A complete rewrite was necessary, and we bit the bullet on that a couple of years ago. There was significant cost and complexity but our great team powered through all the challenges, particularly when it came to transitioning our main database away from MySQL (hosted as RDS, by Amazon) to a NoSQL model using Google’s Firestore service.

Now that we are done we can start delivering more functionality, starting with support for non-English languages.

Stay tuned for our first non-English language, which will be Hindi, to be offered in a couple of weeks.

6 Project Management Techniques For Work-Life Balance

Kerika

Once again Kerika is featured in an article, this time on the 6 Project Management Techniques For Work-Life Balance at Namaste UI.

The techniques include:

  1. Treating Work-Life Balance as a Cycle
  2. Prioritization and Time Management
  3. Agile Project Management
  4. Delegation and Collaboration
  5. Setting Realistic Goals and Expectations
  6. Regular Evaluation and Reflection

To quote from the article:

Tools like Kerika can help you see and analyze how your projects are going, so you can find patterns, things that slow you down, and ways to get better.

Check it out.

Kerika has been getting rave reviews on Slashdot and Sourceforge

Kerika

It’s been great to see the reviews come in on Sourceforge and Slashdot, where Kerika is listed as a leader in the Task Management category!  Click on the badges below to check out the reviews:

Kerika Reviews


Kerika Reviews


Kerika has a free Template for Remote Team Meetings

Best Practices, Kanban & Lean, Tutorials, , , , ,

Click on the image to view the Template

This template can help organize and schedule your remote team meetings. 

With this template, you can effectively organize and schedule your remote team meetings, ensuring that all the meetings go successfully!

How to use this template:

  1. Use Resources: Use this column to gather useful tools and content that will help you manage your remote team meetings. You can use the existing resources as a starting point, and start adding your resources down the line.
  2. Upcoming Meetings and Agendas: Create a card in this column for all the upcoming meetings and agendas
  3. In Progress/Due Today: Create a card or move the card from the previous column to this column to ensure that everything knows which meetings are currently in progress or due today.
  4. Notes From The Past Meetings: Once the meeting is completed, create a card in this column to keep the notes from those meetings. This will help you and your teammates keep track of everything discussed in the meetings.
  5. On Hold: For meetings that need to be temporarily paused or canceled, you can move their cards to this column. This might be because the team is waiting on additional information or resources, or because the task is a lower priority compared to other meetings
  6. Done: After a card has completed all the stages of your project, simply mark it as ‘Done’ or move the card to this column.

330k Downloads For Kerika Task Management App: How They Did It

Kerika

Website Planet featured an interview with Arun Kumar, CEO of Kerika, where he talks about Kerika journey from concept to getting 330K downloads from the Google Workspace Marketplace.  Topics covered include:

  • Introducing Kerika: What is it and how does it work?“… the fact that our users range from global automobile companies down to young children highlights the biggest advantage of using Task Boards: it is super easy for people to pick up the concept and there’s no training needed.”
  • How did it all start, and what are your achievements to this day?“We were the first to create these incredibly flexible Whiteboards that can not only contain ideas, text, and diagrams, but also files and content from the Web.”

    “Now we have users in every continent and we get 5-star reviews everywhere…”
  • How does your mission differ from the other companies in your niche?“…designing a tool that ordinary folks can use, without training. We are building “task management for the rest of us.”
  • Who are your typical clients and what problems do they have when they come to you?“Describing our “typical clients” is impossible for me, because we have such a wide variety of users.”
  • And what makes them eventually choose you over your competitors?“What we have heard consistently, from users across the board, is that they love the user experience.”
  • Can you share one success story from your customers? What was their pain point, and what results did they get thanks to Kerika? 

    https://youtu.be/U7hQEvhbIPw

  • What do you see in the future of your industry, and how do you plan to cope?“Our focus isn’t going to change. We believe very passionately that everyone else in this space is still neglecting what we call “regular folks”. We love regular folks, and we will continue to make sure we have the best user experience for them!”

The interview was conducted with Bethenny Carl from Website Planet.

We are going to add support for more languages

Global, Tutorials,

We are going to add support for more languages this year, since so many of our users are from non-English speaking countries.

Our first attempt will be with Hindi, in the next couple of weeks.  This will help us test our internal processes for translating the Kerika website and app (but not this blog, sorry!) into different languages.

Once that’s done, we will do another test with Gujarati as our third language, to see if we can further automate the translation process. If that works, we will add a plethora of languages.

As part of this test with Hindi, we are translating some of our tutorial videos as well; here’s one: