We found a bug that was causing problems for users who wanted to edit/update their board descriptions, using Internet Explorer. We fixed that.
In case you are wondering where the board description is found in the first place, here’s how you can edit it:
Click on the gear icon that appears on the top-right corner of every Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, and then chose the Settings tab:
Editing board descriptions
By default, the board description field will be empty, naturally, but if you are one of the Board Admins (or the Account Owner), when you move your mouse over the Description field you will see a pencil icon appear (highlighted in red, above), and clicking on that will let you add a board description.
Adding a board description
Board descriptions can be up to 180 characters long, and as you type the system will automatically let you know how many characters are left for you to type. (Yes, Twitter-style.)
Board descriptions are going to be very useful in the future as we make some changes to our user interface and search functions.
We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.
Some of the templates we have on offer:
Onboarding New Employees: a template for handling hiring and starting a new employee. (Surprisingly popular!)
Solution Sales: a template for professional services companies to track their sales opportunities; essentially a CRM for small professional services companies.
Implementing an EHR: an example of a complex template, based upon the US Government’s guidelines for implementing an Electronic Health Records system at hospitals.
We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.
We don’t offer this as a regular service — because it involves some special back-end work that can be a little time-consuming — but we recently helped a bunch of users migrate their accounts over from Kerika+Google to the new version of Kerika that lets you sign up directly with us, and have Kerika store your files instead of linking Kerika to a Box or Google account.
This is the version that you sign up for when you click on the left side of our Sign Up page:
Signing up directly with Kerika
With this option, Kerika stores your files for you using our new integration with the Box Platform.
Migrating away from Kerika+Google to this new platform helps our users save money: they could discontinue their use of premium (paid) Google Apps which they had adopted only to use as a sign-up mechanism for Kerika.
Handling this migration isn’t something we do for everyone, but this is one of our oldest customers. :-)
This is kind of annoying and embarrassing, but a while back a bug crept back into our code that made non-English characters appear as question marks.
Embarrassing because we have fixed this bug before. More than once.
This time around the bug crept back in while we were taking care of some other feature, and unfortunately it was one of our (Chinese-speaking) users who spotted it before we did.
Our own team is multilingual (3 languages) but we work almost exclusively using English, so this was one of those rare scenarios where we didn’t use a particular feature of Kerika and so developed a blind spot.
Sorry about that. The good news is that the fix is retroactive: any non-English characters that you had previously entered will not appear correctly, without any work on your end.
Here is a screenshot of how the “Recommended domains” feature of Google Domains works:
Google Recommended Domains
Normally we get a little impatient with Google holding on to the “beta” tag on so many products that seem to be finished. In this case, we would urge Google to not rush out of beta.
Thanks to one of our long-standing Kerika users (over in Gdansk, Poland) for spotting a bug that we have fixed: if you held down the Enter key for “too long” (which is kind of a vague description, we know) while editing a card’s description, some junky HTML text would appear:
Card description bug
It was an odd timing issue that we hadn’t noticed before. Thanks for helping us find this bug!
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!)
