In a recent update, we added a minor new feature: you can now copy and paste lines even if they are not used to connect any other objects on a Kerika Whiteboard.
We always let you copy and paste lines that were used to connect other objects, like in this scenario:
Copying objects connected by a line
But now you can also copy and paste freestanding lines (i.e. lines that are not anchored at either end on anything else), like this:
Copying a freestanding line
The fact that copying/pasting freestanding lines was not possible before was actually a conscious design decision on our part, but looking back we can’t figure out why it seemed like a good idea at the time :-/
We have big plans for the next year, and, in fact, have been very busy through the holiday season as well working on our product roadmap.
2016 will involve a major rewrite of our software: first the back-end, to improve scalability and to also use newer technologies like containers that make for easier deployment, and then the front-end, which will make Kerika even easier to use — especially for people new to Kanban and Scrum.
2015 has been a great year for us: our registered users doubled, and so did the number of paying customers.
It has also been a great learning opportunity for us: we met in person or had long telephone conversations with a wide range of users and got an even better understanding of the problems we can address with our software.
What we have heard consistently from folks about why they like Kerika: “it provides really great functionality in a really simple system”.
Our focus on providing a simple, intuitive user interface rather than delivering raw power is winning people over.
As we plan our future roadmap, the key goals we want to achieve are:
Make Kerika easier for new users. “Power users” already love us, but we need to make Kerika even more accessible for people who are completely new to visual task management.
Avoid religion. Too many of our competitors are dogmatic about how to implement Kanban or Scrum; we will continue to remain pragmatic and let people work the way they want, rather than insist that we know the only true path to project success.
Build solutions rather than tools. Some of our competitors focus on building as many buttons, “power-ups” and other bells and whistles. You know, because “if less is more, think how much more more could be…” Our view is different: the smarter the system, the fewer the controls that need to be exposed and manipulated by the user.
First class mobile experience. We have not delivered this in the past. To do this, we need to change our back-end and front-end infrastructure very signfiicantly, and we have made that financial commitment. Look for good stuff in 2016.
First class support, for all users. We get at least one unsolicited email every week from a user who is surprised by the level of support we provide, even to free or trial users. We need to keep this up. (OK, so this has nothing to do with our product roadmap but we feel strongly about it so we thought we would emphasize this point…)
Thanks to all our users who have helped us grow so far. In a reversal of cards and gifts going from vendors to customers, here’s a lovely calendar and card we just got from one of our happy customers:
We have added a keyboard shortcut to make it a little faster to send chat messages — on cards, canvases or the board itself.
After typing in your chat message, use the Ctl-Enter (or Ctl-Return) key combination to send the chat immediately. It will save you having to reach for the mouse to click on the Send button…
Sending Chat with Ctl-Return
(And thanks, as usual, to our users for urging us to add this new feature!)
Our thanks to Larry Smith from EduTone who initially alerted us to a bug in the process of signing up as a Kerika user: the confirmation email sent by Kerika wasn’t working well, particularly if the user used any browser other than Chrome.
For example, clicking on the confirmation email and having Kerika open that link using Firefox or Chrome produced this kind of behavior:
The problem was related to a recent decision we made to use Polymer for parts of our website.
It turns out that Chrome had a different sequence for loading the Polymer components than other browsers.
In Chrome the sequence is
webcomponent-lite.js
element.vulcanized.html
build.min.js
While in browsers like Firefox the sequence is
webcomponent-lite.js
build.min.js
element.vulcanized.html
Our build.min.js file needed components that were loaded only when element.vulcanized.html was loaded, which meant that the sequence in which these files were loaded by the browser was important, and different browsers were loading these files in different sequences.
We fixed this bug: Polymer has a method to ensure that all imports are ready before the page is rendered.
This has been part of the learning process for us as we adopt Polymer more for our website redesign (which is underway, and should be unveiled by Christmas), and also consider using Polymer to rebuild the Kerika app itself!
Arun Kumar, Kerika’s CEO, gave a presentation on Visual Workflows at the Lean Transformation 2015 Conference in Tacoma, Washington, which was very well received.
We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.
Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:
If you are assigned a card, on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you will get email pushed to you whenever any other Team Member (or Board Admin) chats on that card. This helps you stay in the loop on the most important items on a project board: the ones you are currently assigned to do.
(Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)
When chat gets pushed to you as email, it shows up looking just like regular email, and you can reply to it wherever you are dealing with your email: your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
When you click on the “Reply” button in your email client, Kerika automatically changes the address for that reply to be the URL that points to the specific card (or canvas) that’s being referenced in the chat.
Here’s an example of chat email:
Chat example
And what clicking on the Reply button does:
Replying to Chat Email
In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
“Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>”
This email is received by a server that listens only to chat replies. When a chat reply is received by the server, it checks to see who the reply came from.
Since only Team Members and Board Admins are allowed to participate in the chat on a particular board, the Kerika chat server tries to make sure the email is coming from someone who is authorized to comment on that particular card or canvas.
(This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)
The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.
In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.
For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.
We occasionally email all of our users, when we have released something significant in terms of functionality or usability improvements.
On average, we probably send these emails 2-3 times a year, although we release software updates much more often.
Not every software update is announced in a mass email, although all the improvements and changes are always noted on this blog: unless the changes were big enough to require some additional explanation, we prefer to let users discover the new features on our own.
What we have noticed with the last couple of announcements is that the timing of the email makes a very big difference in terms of how many people actually open and read the emails.
Here are the last two emails we sent:
Timing is everything
The “Release 62” announcement was actually far more significant, in our opinion, than the more recent “Release 66” version, at least in terms of UI changes and new features.
But, the Release 62 announcement went out mid-day on a Monday, and it was largely ignored as a result: only 9.7% of people opened that email.
The Release 66 announcement, on the other hand, went out on a Saturday afternoon, and had nearly double the open rate.
We think the simple explanation is that there was less competition for our emails on Saturday afternoon: fewer emails from colleagues and fewer crises to attend to.
We had long suspected this to be the case, but never had such clear proof that timing is everything when you send email :-)
This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.
Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.
We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!
The exceptions shown in the Kerika server logs were clearly pointing to problems on Google’s end:
Google Errors
What was a little frustrating for us — and our beloved users — was that Google itself didn’t seem to be acknowledging any problems until fairly late in the day:
Oct 9 Google Apps status
By this time — almost noon, Pacific Time — dozens of Kerika users had been affected. We tried to let folks know via Twitter that there was a problem, and continued to monitor the situation through the day:
.@Google‘s authentication service for login to @Kerika is throwing a bunch of errors right now, affecting a range of our users. Apologies.
Google eventually acknowledged the problem as it became clear that it was widespread.
By mid-afternoon, the issue was largely cleared up, at least as far as Kerika was concerned, although it is possible that other apps, which also use Google for authentication or Google Drive for storage, were affected for much longer.
Once again, our apologies for everyone who was affected.
We are currently seeing a bunch of errors from Google with respect to their authentication service — which lets you login to your Kerika+Google account using your Google ID, and they seem to be affecting a wide range of users.
Here’s a sample of what we are seeing:
Google Errors
This error normally shows up when a user is logging in with a Google for Work ID, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education.
What’s surprising today is that we have seen at least 1 user with a regular Gmail address have this same problem, which is theoretically impossible.
Right now there’s not much we can do but wait this out. The problem seems to be small enough that Google is not even reporting it on their Google Apps Status Dashboard. :-(
