Tag Archives: Direct Sign Up

About signing up directly as a Kerika user, using your email. (Instead of signing up using your Google or Box ID.)

You have even more storage options now

January 19, 2024KerikaBox, Direct Sign Up, Document Management, Google Apps, Microsoft, Preferences, SecurityKerika

When we started, we made a big strategic decision to integration with the Google Apps platform: letting users sign in with their Google IDs — which meant they didn’t need to remember a password just for Kerika — and, more importantly, letting users store their files in their own Google Drive, where they remained under their own control.

This proved particularly popular with the IT departments of our users, because it meant that any corporate policies the IT folks were implementing on content management worked great on everything the users did with Kerika as well.

The ability to control how files were to be shared (e.g. not with anyone outside the domain), and how long files were to be retained (important for regulated industries) is super important to IT departments who are charged with guarding the corporate assets, and Kerika is the only task management tool that works seamlessly with a user’s existing Google Workspace.

We then implemented the same functionality for users of the Box platform: people could sign up with their Box IDs, and have their files stored in their own Box accounts. Once again, this means that the content management policies that their IT departments were implemented would remain respected thanks to Kerika being the only task management tool that works so well with Box.

To complete the range of options for our users, we now have Kerika+Microsoft as an option: you can sign up with your Microsoft ID and have your files stored in your own OneDrive account.

But we didn’t stop there: we recognize that there are some folks out there who would prefer to use a cloud service that’s different from the one they originally signed up with: for example, someone who signed up using a Google ID, or signed up directly using an email address, might want to switch to using Microsoft OneDrive.

That’s easy, free, and painless: go to your Manage Account page from inside the Kerika app on your desktop, and select the OTHER SETTINGS tab:

Click on the CHANGE button and you will see your storage options:

The above example shows the options available for a Kerika+Microsoft user: she can choose to have her files stored in her own Google Drive, in her own Box account, or use Kerika’s Google Drive.

Once you initiate this process it can take some time to complete, depending upon how many files you have in your account, and how large they are. There’s a file size limit of 200MB that’s imposed by the cloud service providers.

If you need help making a decision, or in making a switch, feel free to schedule a call with us.

Shifting to Google Drive for our Direct Signup Users

May 1, 2019KerikaBox, Direct Sign Up, Google AppsKerika

We are making a significant change to how we store and manage project files for users who sign up directly (using an email), and we are getting close to finishing our internal testing. Here’s what’s coming, and why.

Background:

Previously, when someone signed up directly (with an email address) Kerika would automatically create a new Box account linked to that user, and use this account to store the user’s project files.

This was done by Kerika’s servers: our end-users didn’t have to do anything and, in fact, had no direct access to these Box accounts.

The trouble with this approach is that we ended up with three islands of users: people who had signed up with their Box IDs (Kerika+Box); people who had signed up with their Google IDs (Kerika+Google); and people who had signed up directly.

These islands were isolated: you could collaborate only with users who had signed up the same way as you had. In other words, someone who had signed up using a Google ID could not collaborate with someone who had signed up using their email, because the first user’s project files were getting stored in her Google Drive, while the second user’s files were getting stored in a Box account.

(And over time the ratio of people who preferred Google over Box became increasingly lopsided.)

New Architecture

We are now implementing a new storage model that will deliver four important benefits:

You will be able to collaborate with any other Kerika user, regardless of how the other person signed up. You can invite anyone using their email, and not worry about whether the other person has a Google or Box ID. If you accept an invitation to join a team, it won’t matter how you sign up. No more isolated islands.

Previously we would ask for access to your entire Google Drive if you signed up using a Google ID; now, we can limit our access to only those folders that Kerika itself creates and manages.

Folks coming via the Google Apps Marketplace can try Kerika without first having to get authorization from your Google Apps Admin. Authorization is actually needed only when you want to upload files to your Kerika boards.

Our direct signup users can benefit from Google Apps (Sheets, Slides, Forms, etc.) even if they had previously not used these apps. Direct signup users will be able to create new Google Docs; something that previously was limited to people using Kerika+Google.

How this will work:

Kerika will have a master Google Drive account, and inside this we will create separate, access-controlled folders for each (direct sign up) user. This will bring all the Google Docs functionality to our direct sign up users.

From a security perspective, we believe this will be good: each user’s project files are stored in a separate folder within Kerika’s Google Drive, and each user has access only to their own folders.

We believe this is good in terms of privacy, too: because Kerika has an enterprise Google Drive account, we get the additional privacy protection afforded to paid/business users of Google Apps. (Your files won’t get scanned by Google for any advertising purpose.)

We will do all the work needed to move our direct signup users from Box to Google Drive; no one should be inconvenienced!

How files are managed when you sign up with your email

February 11, 2019Agile & Scrum, TutorialsDirect Sign Up, Document Management, Kanban, Scrum, Task Board, Tutorial, WhiteboardKerika

Most people sign up as new Kerika users using a Google ID or Box ID, but an increasing number of folks are opting for direct signup: this means signing up with your email (any email will do).

For these folks, here’s a quick tutorial video that shows you how your files are stored and shared.

https://youtu.be/AXTSyB2j7YA

Bug, fix: some users had trouble logging in recently because browser kept refreshing

December 27, 2018Bug Fixes, KerikaBug, Direct Sign UpKerika

Some Kerika users — specifically those who had signed up directly — had trouble logging in if they had left Kerika running overnight on a browser.

Their browser was endlessly refreshing itself, bouncing between the /app and /setup URLs. There was a workaround (type “https://kerika.com/logout” to clear Kerika’s cookies) but the workaround was far from obvious, so obviously some people were inconvenienced.

(Would have been a lot more had it not been for the Christmas holiday season!)

This has been fixed now. We found a problem with the configuration of our NGINX web server software.

Checking email addresses when you add someone to a Board Team

December 4, 2018Team CollaborationAccount, Direct Sign Up, TeamsKerika

One of our users had a problem recently when they mis-typed an email address while adding someone to a Board Team: the mistake was essentially a typo of “.com”

The user didn’t notice their error, but our system did: when Kerika tried to send the email invitation to the mis-typed address, the email bounced (naturally).

And while the user didn’t notice or complain, we want help our users avoid these mistakes by including some email checking when someone is being added to a Board Team.

Kerika now tries to see if the email address looks incomplete or malformed, and alerts you if you made a typo.

Why we can’t handle some file names

July 18, 2018TechnologyBox, Direct Sign Up, TeamsKerika

For users who sign up directly, the files they add to their Kerika boards are stored by us using the Box Platform.

The Box Platform has some limitations that you may bump into:

Certain characters are not allowed in file names, e.g. “/”. We noticed people were running into this problem, most probably because they were hitting the wrong keys inadvertently when renaming files.
Kerika is going to take of this silently from now on: if you try to rename a file using a character like “/” that Box can’t handle, Kerika will silently ignore that character in your renaming action.
File names can’t be more than 260 bytes. For people using English and similar languages, this generally means a file name cannot be more than 260 characters (with each character requiring one byte of storage). But for most Asian languages, e.g. Thai or Japanese, one character may require two bytes of storage, because the size of the alphabet is much larger than the Roman alphabet used by English.
This means that in some languages, file names may have to be much shorter, depending upon how many bytes are needed for storing each character, which in turn depends upon the size of their alphabets.

Some folks from Thailand were running into this problem: Kerika will start detecting this better, and provide more useful error messages

We are adding ReCAPTCHA to our signup and login pages

July 12, 2018Kerika, UsabilityDirect Sign Up, SecurityKerika

We recently got hit by spammers signing up as Kerika users, using fake emails from domains like mailinator.com, which seems to exist principally to help people do bad things on the Internet.

After signing up, these spammers (who seemed to be based in the Philippines) would invite hundreds of people with accounts on Tencent’s qq.com service in China. This would result in invitations being sent to these qq.com people to join the spammers on their Kerika boards.

To avoid a repeat of this problem, we are using Google’s reCAPTCHA in “silent” mode, on our signup and login pages — for people who sign up directly with Kerika using their email addresses.

This doesn’t affect the majority of our users, since most people sign up using their Google or Box accounts. And because the reCAPTCHA works silently, it shows up only when Google has reason to doubt that the person at the keyboard isn’t human.

Showing the names of documents when they are referenced inside Kerika

March 22, 2018UsabilityDirect Sign Up, Document Management, WhiteboardKerika

We added a feature recently (or did we actually a bug?) for our direct login users: when you reference a file that’s attached to a Kerika card, canvas or board, from another place in Kerika — e.g. another card’s details or chat — we now show the file’s name instead of just the URL.

This makes it easier to cross-reference file attachments from within different Kerika cards or boards, where different work items or conversations refer to the same shared file.

Here’s an example:

Get more done, with Kerika!

December 1, 2017Agile & Scrum, TutorialsBox, Direct Sign Up, Document Management, Google Apps, Kanban, Scrum, Task Board, Teams, Templates, Tutorial, Whiteboard, WorkflowKerika

We have a new (five-minute) video that gives a fast overview of Kerika’s many capabilities:

https://youtu.be/ewYBEefaKt4

Let us know what you think!

Downloading attachments, with a single click

September 12, 2016UsabilityBox, Direct Sign Up, Google AppsKerika

Did you know that we have made it really easy to download files that you attach to a Kerika card, canvas or board?

Just hover your mouse over an attachment, and you will see these buttons appear on the right:

These buttons let you:

Download a file
Rename a file
Delete a file attachment

Couple of other points to note:

Rename a file shows off our integration with Google Drive (for our Kerika+Google users) and with Box’s service (for our Kerika+Box users): renaming the file from inside Kerika will automatically rename it in your Google Drive or Box folder as well.

Deleting a file attachment doesn’t actually delete the file from your Google Drive or Box account: it just means that file is no longer attached to that particular Kerika card, canvas or board.