We are pleased to announce that our technical collaboration with Box continues, and Kerika has now been named a “Box Pro Partner” reflecting the strong ties we have built between the two companies as we continue to integrate with Box’s cloud services :-)
We use a number of Amazon Web Services, including one called Simple Queue Service which Kerika uses to handle communications between our main project database server and a separate server that handles the Search function.
AWS works very well in our opinion — it has very high reliability across most of its services — but like all software, it isn’t entirely infallible.
Over the weekend we observed a small handful of errors in our services logs where it looked like SQS had a temporary problem.
We cross-checked this time period with other activity on Kerika, and determined that about 7 Kerika boards may have been affected: not in terms of any data loss or corruption on the board itself, but in terms of some changes not being updated in the search index.
Now, 7 boards is a tiny portion of the entire Kerika project database, which numbers in the hundreds of thousands of boards, but we are glad to have spotted the potential for trouble and have re-indexed the data on these particular boards.
If we did our job well, no one will notice.
We are continuing to provide free Academic & Nonprofit Accounts to a wide range of people, across many different countries.
It turned out we had an internal problem with routing requests for such accounts, when they were made from within the Kerika app itself, as a results of which we must have seemed very unresponsive to some folks who never heard back from us. Our apologies for this!
Anyway, if you would like to get a free Academic & Nonprofit Account, which lets you have an account team size of up to 10 people, please let us know by emailing support@kerika.com. That might be the most reliable way of getting in touch with us…
We used to refer to “Projects” and “Boards” somewhat interchangeably on our website, our blog and in the Kerika app itself.
There was no special reason for this: in our mind, a Project was clearly a Board, and vice-versa, and it never occurred to us that this might prove a source of confusion to anyone.
Well, we were wrong about that.
In the real world, people are very cautious about “starting a new project”, because this might involve getting formal administrative approval, budget allocation, staff changes, etc.
In other words, in the real world a “project” is a big deal.
But, in Kerika, starting a new Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard is not a big deal — and that is very much by design.
Unlike so many other collaboration tools that make it difficult for you to create as many boards as you like, Kerika was always designed to make it very easy for you to redesign your work as needed: start new boards, move cards or canvases from one board to another (using Cut, Copy and Paste), and to move ideas and content from one context to another.
Many of our competitors don’t offer this kind of flexibility: either the software makes it hard, or their billing model actively discourages you from creating multiple boards.
That will never be the case with Kerika: we will always support flexibility in how you organize and manage your boards.
Still, our interchangeable use of “projects” and “boards” was definitely causing some confusion, which we have fixed with our latest release by using the term “Board” consistently and avoiding use of the term “Project”.
So, if you were a Project Leader previously, you are now a Board Admin on that board. Your rights and privileges remain the same, it’s just your title that changed.
When you start a new board, what used to be called “New Project” is now labeled “New Board” to make it clear what you are doing:
We hope this makes for better usability: let us know what you think.
We post our tutorial videos on both YouTube and Vimeo, and get far more traffic on YouTube than we do on Vimeo.
But, as we go through a review/refresh of our website, we are switching over to Vimeo for embedding these tutorials, because Vimeo provides a cleaner look that seems to be less intrusive within our own design.
Here’s the same video, embedded from YouTube (on top) and Vimeo (on bottom):
The YouTube video has a weird grey shadow on the top part of the thumbnail, like it was deliberately trying to provide a retro, cathode-ray-tube (CRT) look.
(We are not fans of CRTs; don’t own vinyl any more…)
The same video on Vimeo has a cleaner framing:
If you are the only Project Leader on a Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard, you will know when someone joins a board — after all, you would have approved their invitation in the first place.
But, if there are several Project Leaders for a board, it might be one of the others who added somebody to your board, and they might not have discussed this with you…
So, Kerika makes sure you know whenever the project team on any board has changed in any way:
(After all, someone could have left the team on their own, without telling you!)
Whenever there is a change in the project team, the Board Settings button on the top-right of the board will appear in orange.
Click on the Board Settings button, and you will see the Team tab is highlighted: this is Kerika’s way of drawing your attention to this particular tab within the Board Settings display.
When you go over to the Team tab, you will see that the new person’s name is highlighted in orange, for a few seconds. It’s a discrete yet very effective notification from Kerika, drawing your attention to the presence of someone new on the team.
The same kind of notification is used when someone’s role on the team is changed, e.g. from Team Member to Visitor.
Kerika also tries to let you know when someone has left the team, by highlighting the Project Settings button in orange, and the Team tab within the Project Settings in orange as well.
Smart notifications, from Kerika — the only work management system that’s designed specially for distributed Lean and Agile teams :-)
Less is a CSS pre-processor: it extends CSS by adding variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow easier maintenance of your browser stylesheets.
You can compile Less either on the client side, or on the server. We thought it didn’t matter; but it turns out that Google search engine crawler doesn’t like the client-side compilation:
If you are using Less on your website, you might want to also avoid client-side compilation so that Google doesn’t barf on it…
We have added a new feature that should prove handy for a lot of folks: you can now add content — files from your laptop, images from your mobile or tablet, Web links from your Intranet or the Internet, or canvases — to a Task Board or Scrum Board itself.
If this sounds like something that was always there, maybe we need to say that differently: you used to have the ability to add content to a card, now you can add it to the board itself.
There are many situations we have encountered where we want to share content or a canvas with a team, but there wasn’t any obvious place to still it — no single card on the board that seemed like the right place to attach that content.
And that’s because the content we wanted to add was applicable across the entire board, not just relevant to a single card.
This was getting frustrating, so we decided to scratch our itch: a new button on the top-right area of your Kerika app will let you add files, Web links and canvases to the board itself:
This should make some of you as happy as it has made us!
A new tutorial video on how you can easily draw curved lines and arrows on Kerika’s canvases and Whiteboards:
Did you know that you can embed a Twitter feed on your Kerika Whiteboards? It’s simple: just click on the “Add Web Content” button, and then enter the Twitter handle:
Kerika automatically figures out the “@” refers to a Twitter ID, and then finds and embeds the Twitter feed right on your canvas:
