Our team has had much to celebrate over the past few months, as we achieve milestone after milestone. This is the India-based development team of Kerika:
This is Us
Using Kerika with Microsoft 365
We have made a very big extension to Kerika, by integrating with Microsoft 365: now you can sign up using your Microsoft ID, and have your files stored in your own OneDrive account!
Kerika+Microsoft works the same was as Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box: you can use your existing Microsoft account to sign up and login to Kerika; there’s no need to create and remember a new password:
When you upload files to your board for the first time, you will be asked to choose a preferred cloud storage: if it’s Microsoft, then you will be asked to give Kerika access to a single folder in your Microsoft OneDrive:
After you allow Kerika access to your OneDrive, Kerika will create a single folder in your OneDrive that it will use for all of your Kerika-related files:
That one top-level folder is all that Kerika will ever use: inside there Kerika will automatically manage all the subfolders you need to sort your different Kerika accounts (yes, some folks have more than one Kerika account!) and your board.
Kerika doesn’t go snooping around or altering any other part of your OneDrive!
Files you add to your Kerika boards will be automatically shared with everyone on the board’s team: Board Admins and Team Members will get read+write access, while Visitors will get read-only access.
As folks join or leave your board team, access to all the files on that board will be automatically managed by Kerika, freeing you up from all the admin work that other tools make you do.
You can even create new Office 365 documents from inside Kerika, and have them shared automatically with your board team:
And we have always had the ability to sync your Kerika due dates with your Outlook calendar, so that completes everything you need to get the most of Kerika+Microsoft!
You have even more storage options now
When we started, we made a big strategic decision to integration with the Google Apps platform: letting users sign in with their Google IDs — which meant they didn’t need to remember a password just for Kerika — and, more importantly, letting users store their files in their own Google Drive, where they remained under their own control.
This proved particularly popular with the IT departments of our users, because it meant that any corporate policies the IT folks were implementing on content management worked great on everything the users did with Kerika as well.
The ability to control how files were to be shared (e.g. not with anyone outside the domain), and how long files were to be retained (important for regulated industries) is super important to IT departments who are charged with guarding the corporate assets, and Kerika is the only task management tool that works seamlessly with a user’s existing Google Workspace.
We then implemented the same functionality for users of the Box platform: people could sign up with their Box IDs, and have their files stored in their own Box accounts. Once again, this means that the content management policies that their IT departments were implemented would remain respected thanks to Kerika being the only task management tool that works so well with Box.
To complete the range of options for our users, we now have Kerika+Microsoft as an option: you can sign up with your Microsoft ID and have your files stored in your own OneDrive account.
But we didn’t stop there: we recognize that there are some folks out there who would prefer to use a cloud service that’s different from the one they originally signed up with: for example, someone who signed up using a Google ID, or signed up directly using an email address, might want to switch to using Microsoft OneDrive.
That’s easy, free, and painless: go to your Manage Account page from inside the Kerika app on your desktop, and select the OTHER SETTINGS tab:
Click on the CHANGE button and you will see your storage options:
The above example shows the options available for a Kerika+Microsoft user: she can choose to have her files stored in her own Google Drive, in her own Box account, or use Kerika’s Google Drive.
Once you initiate this process it can take some time to complete, depending upon how many files you have in your account, and how large they are. There’s a file size limit of 200MB that’s imposed by the cloud service providers.
If you need help making a decision, or in making a switch, feel free to schedule a call with us.
We made it easier to add Team Members and Visitors to an Account
A small change in the user interface should make it easier for Account Owners to add Team Members and Visitors to their Account Teams:
We separated out the buttons for adding Team Members and Visitors since there’s no cost to adding Visitors.
Adding people to an Account Team will enable them to view any boards owned by that account that are shared within the account: this is usually the default setting for new boards, since most folks want to make it easier for new account team members to catch up on what’s happening across the organization.
Individual boards can, of course, be made private.
Kerika’s CEO is featured in CEO Today Magazine
CEO Today Magazine featured Kerika’s CEO, Arun Kumar, in the December issue. From the article:
“From the beginning we have believed in the concept of ‘eating your own dog food’ and we used the Kerika app to run our entire business, effectively using Kerika to build Kerika!”
It’s easier now to see how many checklist items remain
We made a small UI improvement that makes it easier now for you to see how many Checklist items (subtasks) remain open on a card:
A number will appear next to the Checklist icon when you are looking at tasks on a board: this is the number of open Checklist items for that task. We don’t show the total number because it’s the remaining ones that are more important, but if you hover over the number a tooltip will show you that as well:
How global teams can get more work done
Kerika was featured in The CEO Magazine. From the article:
Remote work is here to stay, and global teams can offer enormous benefits. But the right tools are essential for improving your team’s ability to collaborate across timezones, explains Kerika’s Arun Kumar.
Using Kerika’s Whiteboards: a new Tutorial Video
We have updated our tutorial video on how to use Kerika’s Whiteboards, to reflect some recent changes to the user interface and functionality.
It’s easier now to leave an Account
This is a problem that affects our student users a lot: as they work with different teams on different boards, they get added to a bunch of accounts. After the school year ends, some of these accounts are no longer relevant, but it wasn’t easy to leave an account that you were no longer interested in.
(It was always easy for an Account Owner to kick you off their account if they wanted you to leave.)
We have made it easy for anyone to leave an account in which they are no longer active: go to your Home, and (on your desktop) hover your mouse over the account that you are no longer interested in. A “leave account” button will appear, like this:
To make sure you don’t do this accidentally, there’s a confirmation step where you are asked to type the word YES in all caps:
It’s now even easier to catch up on changes in attachments and checklists
The orange arrow that appears at the top or bottom of a column when there are unread updates that are out of view has proved to be a very useful and popular feature, so we have extended the concept to work inside of tasks (cards) as well: if there is an unread change to a checklist item, or attachment, that’s out of view for you, an orange arrow will appear to help guide to you it:
The way these orange arrows work is very intuitive: just click on it to have the view scroll up automatically to show the next unread checklist item or attachment.