Tag Archives: Document Management

About Kerika’s document management capabilities.

Kerika’s New Search Capabilities

We have completely rebuilt Kerika’s search capabilities, both on the back end and on the user interface, to make it much easier to find tasks (cards) and documents across all your Kerika boards.

Screenshot showing Task results from Search
Search Task Results

Search results are organized into two tabs at the top: Tasks and Documents.

Within each tab, results are further segmented into two tabs: This Board, and Other Boards.  This makes the most common use of Search even easier: most people want to find something that’s on a large board that they are viewing.

For each search result Kerika shows you what part of the task/card matched the query; in the example above, the search term showed up in 8 Board Chat messages.

Clicking on a search result gives you two action buttons: Open the task/card, or get a link to that task.

The search results are ranked by relevance; we spent weeks fine-tuning the algorithm based upon real-world usage and we think we have got it right now! But we know there will be times when you really need to narrow your search very specifically, and that’s handled by the Filter Results button which gives you so many options:

Screenshot showing Task Filter options for Search
Task Filter

The Documents tab shows you all the content that matches your search results: we get this from Google, if you signed up using your Google ID or email, or from Box, if you signed up using your Box ID.

Screenshot showing Document Results from Search
Search Results for Documents

Selecting a document result gives you two buttons: OPEN, which will open the document for you in a new browser tab (or in Google Apps or Box on a mobile device), and DOWNLOAD.

As with Tasks, there are numerous options to filter and narrow your search for documents:

Screenshot showing Documents Filter options for Search
Documents Filter

 

You can’t change the extension on a document

We have made a change to the Card and Board Attachments feature to prevent users from changing the extension of a file they have already added: for example, a “.xlsx” file can’t be renamed as a “.docx” file.

We did this because changing the file type often had unpredictable consequences when a Team Member tried to upload an attachment.

This restriction applies to the most common file types, not all. Here’s how it works:

Image file attachment
Image file attachment

In the example above, an image has been added as an attachment to this card, and it has the .PNG file type/extension.

When you hover your mouse over any attachment, Kerika will show you the actions that are possible with that attachment, one of them being Rename.

Attachment options
Attachment options

If you select Rename, Kerika will make sure you only change the file name, not the file type/extension (.PNG in this example):

Renaming a document
Renaming a document

Using Google Drive without Google Docs

If you are using Kerika with Google, you don’t have to convert your documents to the Google Docs format in order to use Google Drive.

Google Docs Format Preference
Google Docs Format Preference

You can use this preference setting to ensure that your Microsoft Office documents, for example, are retained in MS Office format even while they they are stored and shared using Google Drive.

 

We have added support for Google Team Drive

We have long had a deep, excellent integration with Google Apps: you can sign up with your Google ID and have all your Kerika-related files stored in your own Google Drive, where you can access them independently of the Kerika app.

We are now taking that one step forward, with seamless integration with Google Team Drive.

Google Team Drives are shared spaces where teams can easily store, search, and access their files anywhere, from any device.

Unlike files in My Drive, files in Team Drive belong to the team instead of an individual. Even if members leave, the files stay exactly where they are so your team can continue to share information and get work done.

Team Drives is available on G Suite Enterprise, G Suite Business, or G Suite for Education editions.

You don’t need to do anything different: the integration is built-in with the latest version of Kerika (and, since we are software-as-a-service, everyone always uses the latest version of our product!) and the integration is seamless.

Managing multiple versions of files just got a lot easier

With our latest update we have made it much easier to manage different versions of files, across all your Task Boards, Scrum Boards and Whiteboards.

(This was inspired by our recent fix to a bug that didn’t properly download the latest version of a file attached to a card or canvas; while fixing this we started thinking deeper about how to make file management even easier for our users.)

Here’s how file management works now: when you hover your mouse over a file attachment, a new action called +NEW VERSION is available:

Uploading new version of document
Uploading new version of document

Clicking on the +NEW VERSION button will let you pick any file from your computer that’s of the same type, and Kerika will add that and track the file as a new version of your old attachment.

This is possible even if the new file has a different name altogether, as long as the two files are of the same type.

For example, a filed called Budget.xlsx can get a new version that’s called Plans.xlsx — both are tracked as different versions of the same file, even though they had different names.

This makes it even easier to manage all your files using Kerika!

Bug, fixed: downloading the latest version of a document, for direct sign up users

Thanks to our users at Oxbow Farm, we have found and fixed a bug that affected users who signed up directly with Kerika: clicking on an attachment in the card details was downloading the original version of a file, not the latest.

Here’s what was happening: when you add a file to a card or canvas, Kerika checks to see if that file was already being used on that particular card or canvas.  If so, Kerika automatically handles your latest upload as providing a new version of the old file, so you see just one entry in your card attachments view:

The bug that we recently discovered, and fixed, resulted in Kerika downloading the original version of the file when you used the download option that appears after you select an attachment from the list of attachments on a card.

If you clicked on the attachment’s thumbnail to open a preview of the file, Kerika was correctly opening the latest version of the file. The bug was only in the download action, and that’s been taken care of now.