Tag Archives: Box

About Box’s cloud storage. See also Cloud.

Signing up directly with Kerika

January 21, 2016Kerika, Technology, UsabilityAccount, Box, UsabilityKerika

Our very first version of Kerika, introduced back in 2011, had just one option for people to sign up: you had to use your Google ID.

In 2014 we added Box as an alternative to Google: you could sign up using your Box ID, or your Google ID.

This gave our users more choices in terms of how they signed up for Kerika, and which cloud service they used to store their project files, but we continued to resist offering a direct sign up mechanism:

We remained convinced that third-party signup and login, using OAuth, would dominate user preferences — under the theory that no one really wanted to remember yet another password for yet another web service.

Our technical architecture also restricted us from offering a direct sign up choice because we had tied together the issues of authentication and file storage: it was how our original integration with Google had been done, and we had simply duplicated that model when we added Kerika+Box.

This changed in 2015, when Box announced the Box Platform as a new service — although originally it was called the “Box Developer Edition” when it was unveiled at the BoxDev conference in April 2015.

Kerika was probably the first task management app to sign up to use the Box Platform; in fact, we were in the very first batch of beta users for the service.

This new integration with Box allowed us to finally offer a direct sign up mechanism for new users:

Sjgning up directly with Kerika — Signing up directly with Kerika

Now, you can sign up with any email address: it could be a company email, a Yahoo email, a Microsoft Live email… even a Gmail address.

When you sign up directly with Kerika, we use the Box Platform to securely store your project files:

We create an account at Box that’s dedicated to storing your Kerika files.
We do this automatically and behind the scenes: you might never know that your files are actually being stored at Box, rather than on a Kerika-operated server.

While this seamless integration is great from a user experience perspective, it doesn’t mean that we want to hide our Box links: in fact, we would actually like to boast about our use of the Box platform because Box is so well regarded for the robustness, security and privacy of their cloud storage service.

So, now you know where your files are stored when you sign up directly as a Kerika user: inside the Box Platform!

When you add an existing Google or Box file, we copy it into your Kerika folders

September 25, 2015Technology, UsabilityBox, Google AppsKerika

If you use the “file picker” that’s built into Kerika to add an existing Google Drive or Box file to a card, canvas or board — for a Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard — you will see a message that says the file is being copied.

This is the file picker:

Clicking on the File Picker button brings up the File Picker dialog:

And this is the “copying…” message that’s shown.

So, what’s happening?

Well, Kerika stores all your Kerika-related files in a set of special folders within your Google Drive or Box account, if you are using Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box, and these are organized neatly into folders corresponding to each of your boards.

Here’s what the folders in your Box account look like (you can learn more by reading about how Kerika integrates with Box):

It’s a similar structure if you are using Kerika with Google:

Keeping all the Kerika files together in a set of related folders makes things cleaner for you: when you look at your Google Drive or Box Account, you know exactly what’s being used by Kerika, and what’s other stuff.

And this is why we make a copy of your existing Google Drive or Box file when you use the File Picker: it enables us to put a copy into your Kerika-specific folders, where it is easier to share with the rest of your project team.

Kerika is now a Box Pro Partner

September 23, 2015KerikaBox, KerikaKerika

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 🙂

Using the Trash in Kerika

August 7, 2015Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, UsabilityBox, Document Management, Google Apps, Kanban, Kerika, Scrum, Task Board, Teams, Trash, Usability, Whiteboard, WorkflowKerika

A new tutorial video that shows you how the Trash works in Kerika (like a Recycle Bin): you can retrieve any card, canvas or even entire projects or templates that got deleted by mistake!

How Project Settings Work in Kerika (A Preview of Coming Attractions)

July 29, 2015Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, Team Collaboration, Technology, UsabilityBox, Document Management, Google Apps, Kanban, Microsoft, Scrum, Task Board, Teams, Usability, WorkflowKerika

Here’s a teaser video of the new Kerika user interface, which we are getting close to releasing…

Among other things, we will consolidate and improve a bunch of project management features under a new “Project Settings” button.

Check it out:

Box restores our Box Notes hack :-)

July 23, 2015TechnologyBoxKerika

Our last blog post noted that a very useful Box Notes hack had gone away, following an unexpected update to the Box platform a couple of weeks ago.

We asked Box if they could consider adding something to their API that would allow us to restore this functionality, and their response has been very helpful and very fast!

Here’s how fast they responded:

July 15, we enter a support request at 6PM.
The next morning, Box Support put us in touch with Jon Berger, the Product Manager for Box Notes.
The same day, Jon talks to his dev team and commits to providing us with a fix.
Less than a week later, the fix is in production!

Very nice.

A nice Box hack that’s going away?

July 16, 2015TechnologyBox, Google Apps, WhiteboardKerika

For a while now, our Kerika+Box users have had a very nifty feature that allowed them to create a new Box Note from within Kerika itself, and have that note automatically attached to the Task Board or Scrum Board card that they were working on.

(Which meant, naturally, that this new Box Note was also automatically shared with everyone on that particular board’s project team!)

And since this was a very handy integration with Box, we added it to our Whiteboards and canvases as well:

We added this because Google Docs had equivalent functionality: Google enabled us to create a new Google Doc from within a Kerika+Google board and have that new Google Doc attached to the card the user was working on.

The trouble was, Box’s Content API didn’t really have an official way of doing this, so we came up with a workaround that worked fine for the longest time — so long, in fact, that we forgot that it was even ever implemented as a workaround…

Unfortunately, that broke a few days ago. Box did an update to their platform that stopped our workaround from working any more, which means that, at least for now, we will have to stop offering this feature for our Kerika+Box users.

Hopefully we will be able to get Box to give us official support for this feature, so Kerika+Box remains at least as good as Kerika+Google 🙂

Bug, fixed: Exporting from a Kerika+Box board now shows user names correctly

May 25, 2015TechnologyBox, BugKerika

We found a weird bug related to the export feature for Task Boards and Scrum Boards that affected users of Kerika+Box, and it has to do with the way Box keeps track of user names that’s different from the way Google keeps track of user names.

Both Box and Google ask for your first name and last name when you sign up, but their content APIs — the programming interfaces that Kerika uses — differ in the way they provide these names to Kerika.

Google gives us the first name and last name separately, e.g. it would tell us a user’s first name is “Arun” and his last name is “Kumar”.

Box, however, gives us both names together, as “Arun Kumar”, and this presents a problem because we can’t always figure out what the last name is.

And, by the way, given the wide range of cultures represented by our users, it’s far from easy to guess which part of a name is the “last name”.

For example, consider Latin American name like “Maria Beatrice Fernandez Rosario”. Here, the last name is probably “Fernandez Rosario”, but we can’t be sure.

The bug showed up when people did exports, by appending “null” to the name — basically this meant Kerika didn’t know what the last name of the user was, and simply tagged it as “null” (which is computer-speak for “I have no idea”).

We have fixed this.

What happens if you have a Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box account, in the same name?

April 30, 2015Kerika, TechnologyBox, Our Users, UsabilityKerika

As you know, we offer a great integration with both Google Drive and Box, giving you the choice of using either of these cloud storage services when you sign up as a Kerika user.

For most people, the choice of whether to use Google or Box is often made by their employer, whose IT departments may have already developed a cloud strategy for their organization.

For a small number of people, particularly those in organizations that haven’t committed to a particular cloud strategy yet, they do have the choice of using either cloud service, or even both.

So, what happens if you have the same email address, e.g. someone@example.com, and you set up a Google ID and a Box ID that use this same address?

You could end up with two different Kerika accounts that use the same someone@example.com ID: that’s because each sign up, from Google and from Box, takes a different path into Kerika.

This is not a great situation to be in, and we certainly don’t recommend it, but the software does try to behave well when confronted with this situation.

If another Kerika user invites you to join her project team, the invitation will show up in both your Kerika+Google and your Kerika+Box account — and in your email, of course — but when you try to accept the invitation Kerika will check to make sure you are logged into the correct service.

Here’s an example: Jon, who uses Kerika+Google, invites Arun to join one of his projects. Arun happens to have both a Kerika+Google account, and a Kerika+Box account, but Jon doesn’t know that — and he shouldn’t have to care, either!

When Arun sees the invitation, he happens to be logged into his Kerika+Box account:

Invitation received on Kerika+Box account

But when he tries to accept the invitation, Kerika checks to see whether Arun and Jon are both using the same cloud service, and discovers that Arun is logged into his Kerika+Box account and not his Kerika+Google account:

Prompt to login to Kerika+Google account

So, Kerika works behind the scenes to help Arun sort out his two accounts.

Why Box can seem too “chatty” with their email notifications

March 16, 2015Technology, UsabilityBox, Teams, UsabilityKerika

Some of our Kerika+Box users have been complaining about the number of email notifications they get when new projects are created: this has to do with Box, rather than Kerika, but it’s helpful to understand what’s going on, and what you can do about it.

When you create a project in Kerika, Kerika creates a dedicated folder for the files that will be used in that project. This folder is shared with whoever needs access to that Kerika project.

Every Kerika user can set a personal preference: you can choose to share your new projects with your account team automatically when they are created, or just with people as and when you add them one by one to a Kerika project. By default, this is set to “share with account team” since this helps people discover new projects within their organization.

One downside of this: whenever you create a new project team, especially if it owned by a service account, a new Box folder will get created for this project and shared automatically with everyone who is part of that account.

This was resulting in way more emails than anyone wants to see, so we have made a change in the way we work with Box:

When people get added to a Box folder, through Kerika, they will no longer get an email notification.

However, the Account Owner will still be notified; there doesn’t seem to be any way around this.

Get more done, with Kerika

Task Management for Remote Teams