Don’t. The system is massively buggy and the company is completely unresponsive to complaints.
The web UI looks like it everything is nice and automated, but in reality you will end up doing a bunch of stuff by hand. Examples of bugs and/or dumb design that have already driven us crazy:
If you have a bunch of outstanding invoices that you want to cancel, the bulk select/action doesn’t work. No error or anything: it just doesn’t do anything, silently.|
They use lazy loading to show just a dozen or so invoices at a time, with the rest showing only after you scroll down (like Facebook, Twitter, etc.) If you try to do a search or filter, that works only on the invoices that are currently being displayed, not the full set: presumably resulting from a design decision to make the filter work within the client rather than the server.
Thanks to a flaky implementation of lazy loading itself, some invoices will appear as duplicates.
It’s pretty clear that Elon Musk has left the building.
A small bug fix we did recently: when you do an Export of data from a Task Board or Scrum Board, you get a notification from Kerika when the export completes: that’s because the export could potentially take a long time, if you had a very large board, i.e. with hundreds of cards on it.
(In practice, most exports take just a few seconds, so the notification comes very quickly after you start the Export.)
The notification comes in two forms:
By email, with a link to open the file containing your exported data.
In your Kerika Inbox, on the top-right of the Kerika application, looking like this:
Export Notification in Kerika Inbox
There was a bug that clicking on the “Dismiss” button on Kerika Inbox didn’t make the notification go away: it would reappear after a page refresh.
Sorry for not having posted in a while; we have been swamped with a new UI design that has consumed all of our time.
The new UI, by the way, is all about making Kerika more accessible, particularly to people who are new to visual collaboration.
Our user feedback had revealed a couple of uncomfortable truths that we needed to address:
Very few users were aware of all the functionality that already exists in Kerika. Which means that we didn’t need to focus so much on building new functions as we did on making sure people understand what Kerika can already do.
Our new users aren’t just new to Kerika; in most cases, they are new to visual collaboration altogether. Even though there has been a proliferation in recent months of all sorts of companies trying to recast old, tired products as exciting new visual collaboration (hello, Smartsheet!), our new users aren’t converting away from our competitors as much as converting away from paper, email, and SharePoint.
This, then, is the goal of our new UI: to make it easier for people to adapt from paper and email to visual collaboration, and to make it easier for all users to exploit all the great functionality that we have already built.
We will have more on this in the coming months, as we get closer to releasing our new user interface, but in the meantime we have queued up a bunch of blog posts to make sure you know about all the other great stuff we have been working.
Yeah, our biggest problem is we don’t tell people what we have already done…
Another great new feature: if you upload a file on any card, canvas or board with the same name as a file that’s already attached to that particular card, canvas or board, Kerika will automatically keep track of these as being different versions of the same file. This makes it even easier to organize all your Kerika project files.
There’s no limit to the number of files you add, nor any limit on the size of these files.
When you add a file, to a card, board or canvas, Kerika automatically uploads that file and shares that with everyone who is part of your board’s team. You don’t have to do anything: Kerika makes sure that all the Team Members have read+write permission, and all the Visitors have read-only permission.
These files are stored in your Google Drive, if you are using Kerika+Google, or in your Box account, if you are using Kerika+Box, or with Kerika if you have signed up directly with an email address.
That’s how Kerika has always worked; what we have added is an automatic versioning feature that checks when you add a new file to see if has the same name, and type, as a file that’s already attached to that particular card, canvas or board.
If the file name and file type match something that you have already added, Kerika automatically treats that new file as a new version of the old file, rather than as a completely different file. This makes it really easy to manage your Kerika project files.
Here’s an example: this card has a file attached to it called “Foo.docx”.
File attached to a card
If a Team Member adds another file to this same card, also called “Foo.docx”, Kerika will treat that new file as a different version of the same Foo.docx, rather than as a completely different file:
Uploading a new version
Accessing these older versions is easy: if your Kerika files are in being stored in your Google Drive, you can get the older versions using the Google Docs File menu:
Google revision history
If your files are being stored in your Box account, you can access the older versions from the menu on the right side of Box’s preview window:
Box version history
If you signed up directly with Kerika, you can access the older versions from within Kerika’s file preview:
File preview
Clicking on the Older versions of this file link on the top right of this preview will give you a list of all the old versions of this file that Kerika has:
Older versions
So, that’s it: simple, easy, automatic tracking of multiple versions of your project files! Brought to you by Kerika, of course.
We quietly released a new feature a couple of weeks ago that we now want to announce to the world: you can have all your Kerika due dates appear automatically on your Mac, Outlook or Google Calendar!
All you have to do is go to https://kerika.com/preferences (or click on the Preferences link that shows up under your photo in the top-right of the Kerika app), and then click on the Start Syncing button on that page:
Calendar syncing
You can sync to your Apple/Mac calendar, your Microsoft Outlook calendar, or your Google Calendar.
Pick your preference, and Kerika will show you detailed instructions on how to start syncing.
Here, for example, are the instructions for syncing to your Apple/Mac calendar:
Apple Mac Calendar syncing instructions
And here are the instructions for syncing to your Microsoft Outlook calendar:
Microsoft Outlook syncing instructions
And, finally, here are the instructions for syncing to your Google calendar:
Google Calendar syncing instructions
You will notice that we have deliberately obfuscated the actual calendar URL for this particular user, in all three images above.
That’s important: your calendar URL is unique and precious — don’t share it with anyone!
As your cards on your Kerika Task Boards and Scrum Boards get new due dates, Kerika will automatically feed these updates to your personal calendar: you don’t need to do anything.
Kerika due dates always appear as “all day” events.
Please note that it’s up to Apple/Microsoft/Google to determine how quickly these updates show up on your calendar.
On your Mac Calendar, for example, you can set the frequency with which these updates appear by doing a right-click with your mouse on the calendar and selecting Get Info:
Mac Calendar Info
And then setting the “Refresh time” for that particular calendar. (On Macs, the fastest that iCloud allows is every 5 minutes.)
For folks who sign up directly with Kerika, we store the user password (in an encrypted form, of course), which means that these users can change their passwords directly from within the Kerika application by going to their My Account page at https://kerika.com/my-account:
Changing password for Google sign up
For people who sign up using their Google or Box IDs, we rely upon Google/Box to manage their passwords: in fact, we never even see anyone’s Google or Box password, even for a second!
So, their My Account page looks a little different, like in this example of a Kerika+Google user:
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:
Thanks to Steven Thompson, a consultant working with some of our users at the City of Kent, for pointing this out to us:
If a card is moved to Done, it preserves all its attachments, of course, but it is a little inconvenient to download these attachments directly from within Kerika itself: you would have to open that file in preview mode, and then download it.
We have simplified that process: now, if you hover over an attachment for a card that’s in Done, a “download” button will appear that will make it easier to download the attachment, without having to preview it first:
