In a long, endless series of UI tweaks that are each small in themselves, but which we hope will collectively add up to a great user experience…
We made it easier for Account Owners to restore archived projects and templates:
This button is shown only to Account Owners, since the power to archive a project or template, or to restore an archived item, is restricted to the Account Owner.
We have enhanced our recently introduced Archive feature, so that you can now copy a current project and paste a copy directly into your Archives:
One possible use-case for this, that some of our users have asked for, is to do quick backups that “capture current state” of important projects.
As with anything else that’s in the Archive, the copies you paste there are frozen, and can’t be changed unless and until you drag them out of the Archive and into your Projects list.
When you archive a project, it’s possible that some cards still had Due Dates set on them: these dates are preserved along with all the other project data at the time you do the archiving.
But, these dates, which will inevitably become overdue dates over time, are not included in your 6AM task summary email, because there’s nothing you can do about them while the project remains in the Archive.
If you work for a government agency in the United States – at the Federal, State, or Local level – you are subject to various public disclosure requirements, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act and various other federal and state “Sunshine” laws.
(And, if you work for a governmental organization anywhere in the European Union, that’s going to be true for you as well.)
Kerika makes it one-click easy for you to meet you disclosure requirements, thanks to the Archive and Export feature:
Archiving freezes a project, presumably in it’s “done” state: everyone who used to have access to the project still does, but all cards, canvases and documents associated with that project are made read-only.
This means that you now have a pretty good record for what a project looked like when it was completed: what work was done, by whom, and which documents were used and what conversations took place.
And the kind of integrated, comprehensive view of a done project is something that you can get only from Kerika: the old mix of SharePoint and Project and regular email just doesn’t work!
Exporting is the other piece of the disclosure puzzle: with just one mouse click, you can export all (or some) of the cards in a board, in CSV or HTML format.
Exporting in HTML is particularly helpful when meeting disclosure requests because the HTML output can be easily edited, using Microsoft Word for example, to take out items that need to be redacted for security or privacy reasons.
That’s the difference with a modern project management and team collaboration software like Kerika: the worst part of your government job just became one-click easy.
If you are working off a long Backlog (like we do at Kerika!), then you will have many Scrum Boards that pull items off this shared Backlog over time, and with our new Archive feature you will want to freeze old Scrum Boards as you get done with Sprints.
(Each Sprint should be done as a separate Scrum Board, that connects to the same Backlog.)
When you archive one particular Scrum Board, you only freeze that board: the Backlog remains available for use — and modification — by other Scrum Boards, now and in the future.
Which means that when you open an Archived Scrum Board, the view you will get of the Backlog will show the Backlog as it exists today, not as it existed when you archived the Scrum Board.
Cards in the Done or Trash column, of a Task Board or Scrum Board, cannot be modified without first moving them out of Done or Trash: this is different from how boards worked before, and we made this change as part of our recent update where we introduced the concept of Archives.
There are a couple of reasons why we did this:
Here’s another new feature with our latest update: when a project is done, you can drag it to the Archive column on your Home page.
Archiving a project freezes it: no one can make any changes to it while it is in the Archive, so if you change your mind and want to make some changes to an archived project, you need to drag it back out of the Archive and into your Projects column.
All the documents attached to an Archived Project are frozen: the goal here is to preserve the final/completed state of a project and all its assets, so that later on if you need to investigate a problem — or deal with a FOIA request or some other legal disclosure requirement — you can do so with confidence.
All dates, status, chat and teams are also frozen: if someone was part of an Archived Project’s team at the time the project was moved to the Archive, they will continue to show up on that project team.
If a task had a due date and hadn’t yet been completed (i.e. the card hadn’t yet been moved to the Done column), that due date stays intact.
If the project was a Scrum Board, it will continue to stay attached to the Backlog it was using at the time the board got archived: when you view an archived Scrum Board, it will show that Backlog in it’s current state. This makes it easy to archive Scrum Boards that represent different Sprints that work off the same shared Backlog!
You can change your mind: If you need to work again on a previously archived project, just drag it out of the Archive column and drop it into the Projects column on your Home Page, and that will “un-archive” (restore) your project.
You can create templates from archived projects: if you drag an archived project and drop it into the Templates column on your Home Page, that will create a template based upon that project, while leaving the project in your Archive.