We are adding Monash University to the list of organizations that qualify for free Kerika Academic Accounts. Anyone signing up with @monash.edu email will automatically can have up to 10 people working on their boards, free.
Adding support for California State University, Sacramento
We are adding California State University, Sacramento the list of organizations supported by Kerika’s Academic & Nonprofit plan.
Everyone signing up with a @csus.edu email will automatically get a free Kerika account that can have up to 10 people working on their boards.
Adding support for Grace College & Seminary
We are adding the Grace College & Seminary to the list of organizations supported by Kerika’s Academic & Nonprofit plan.
Everyone signing up with a @grace.edu email will automatically get a free Kerika account that can have up to 10 people working on their boards.
We have started purging defunct accounts
We have started purging defunct accounts: users whose email addresses don’t seem to be valid anymore.
We are not doing this in a hurry, but instead are trying to be methodological about it: if someone’s email bounces, and we see they haven’t logged in during the past 6 months, we are going to assume this user doesn’t exist within that organization anymore, i.e. has probably left the company where they were previously working.
(The 6 months of no-activity helps us avoid temporary email problems, such as when someone’s email server is down for a day.)
Also getting purged are new users with invalid emails: this can happen when an existing user mistypes a coworker’s email address at the time they invite people to join their teams.
An account is created at the time someone initiates the invitation, but if we find the email associated with that account is bouncing, we will delete that account.
A sneak peek at what we are working on…
We will start to do IP blocking
Regrettably, we will start doing IP blocking to stop persistent spammers from setting up Kerika accounts.
We have seen a consistent pattern of misuse that goes like this:
- Someone signs up with a sina.com email address. Sina is one of the largest ISPs in China, but we don’t have any users in China for the simple reason that most of Google’s services are blocked by China’s Great Firewall, and Kerika has a tight integration with Google’s G Suite.
- The spammer isn’t actually located in China; they are in Manila (Philippines) and come from IP addresses like 203.177.13.60
- These spammers send out hundreds, sometimes thousands, of invitations for users from the qq.com domain to join their (spurious) Kerika team.
- These recipients are all users of Tencent’s QQ messaging system, based in China. Again, none of them would be actual or potential Kerika users, since the recipients are all located in China.
The user impact of this spamming was relatively small: almost no one with a qq.com email address would reply to these invitations, but the conduct was a very clear misuse of Kerika and harmful to our reputation, quality and brand.
(Among other things, these spurious invitations would pile up in the thousands.)
We have decided, therefore, to start blocking IP addresses using Amazon’s VPC service (since we use Amazon AWS extensively on our back-end.)
This is a brute force method, and not ideal, but we were starting to get really annoyed with these folks. We hope this doesn’t impact any of our real users in the Philippines; if you are affected, please let us know!
Adding support for Limerick Institute of Technology
We are adding the Limerick Institute of Technology (LIT) to the list of organizations supported by Kerika’s Academic & Nonprofit plan.
Everyone signing up with a @lit.ie email will automatically get a free Kerika account that can have up to 10 people working on their boards.
Adding support for University of Trento
We are adding the University of Trento (Italy) to the list of organizations supported by Kerika’s Academic & Nonprofit plan.
Everyone signing up with a @studenti.unitn.it email will automatically get a free Kerika account that can have up to 10 people working on their boards.
How to install Kerika from the G Suite Marketplace
An updated primer, showing for organizations that are using G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Business) can install and authorize Kerika for their domains:
1. Go to your G Suite Admin Console
The organization’s Google Admins (and there’s usually more than one such person) can view their Google Console at https://admin.google.com: click on the Apps button.
2. This will take you to all your Google-related apps.
Kerika falls into the Marketplace Apps category, so click on that button.
(All the other buttons are for apps from Google itself; Marketplace is where third-party vendors like Kerika show up.)
3. Click on Add Services
This will take you to the G Suite Marketplace
4. Search for Kerika
It would be nice if Kerika showed up right away, but you need to search for it in the box shown below:
5. Select Domain Install
The Domain Install option will allow everyone in your organization to use Kerika:
6. Accept the Terms
7. Success!
Kerika is now installed for your organization’s use:
8. All done
You are all done. Enjoy Kerika.
Shifting to Google Drive for our Direct Signup Users
We are making a significant change to how we store and manage project files for users who sign up directly (using an email), and we are getting close to finishing our internal testing. Here’s what’s coming, and why.
Background:
Previously, when someone signed up directly (with an email address) Kerika would automatically create a new Box account linked to that user, and use this account to store the user’s project files.
This was done by Kerika’s servers: our end-users didn’t have to do anything and, in fact, had no direct access to these Box accounts.
The trouble with this approach is that we ended up with three islands of users: people who had signed up with their Box IDs (Kerika+Box); people who had signed up with their Google IDs (Kerika+Google); and people who had signed up directly.
These islands were isolated: you could collaborate only with users who had signed up the same way as you had. In other words, someone who had signed up using a Google ID could not collaborate with someone who had signed up using their email, because the first user’s project files were getting stored in her Google Drive, while the second user’s files were getting stored in a Box account.
(And over time the ratio of people who preferred Google over Box became increasingly lopsided.)
New Architecture
We are now implementing a new storage model that will deliver four important benefits:
- You will be able to collaborate with any other Kerika user, regardless of how the other person signed up. You can invite anyone using their email, and not worry about whether the other person has a Google or Box ID. If you accept an invitation to join a team, it won’t matter how you sign up. No more isolated islands.
- Previously we would ask for access to your entire Google Drive if you signed up using a Google ID; now, we can limit our access to only those folders that Kerika itself creates and manages.
- Folks coming via the Google Apps Marketplace can try Kerika without first having to get authorization from your Google Apps Admin. Authorization is actually needed only when you want to upload files to your Kerika boards.
- Our direct signup users can benefit from Google Apps (Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.) even if they had previously not used these apps. Direct signup users will be able to create new Google Docs; something that previously was limited to people using Kerika+Google.
How this will work:
Kerika will have a master Google Drive account, and inside this we will create separate, access-controlled folders for each (direct sign up) user. This will bring all the Google Docs functionality to our direct sign up users.
From a security perspective, we believe this will be good: each user’s project files are stored in a separate folder within Kerika’s Google Drive, and each user has access only to their own folders.
We believe this is good in terms of privacy, too: because Kerika has an enterprise Google Drive account, we get the additional privacy protection afforded to paid/business users of Google Apps. (Your files won’t get scanned by Google for any advertising purpose.)
We will do all the work needed to move our direct signup users from Box to Google Drive; no one should be inconvenienced!