Tag Archives: Google Apps
How to install Kerika from the G Suite Marketplace
An updated primer, showing for organizations that are using G Suite (formerly known as Google Apps for Business) can install and authorize Kerika for their domains:
1. Go to your G Suite Admin Console
The organization’s Google Admins (and there’s usually more than one such person) can view their Google Console at https://admin.google.com: click on the Apps button.
2. This will take you to all your Google-related apps.
Kerika falls into the Marketplace Apps category, so click on that button.
(All the other buttons are for apps from Google itself; Marketplace is where third-party vendors like Kerika show up.)
3. Click on Add Services
This will take you to the G Suite Marketplace
4. Search for Kerika
It would be nice if Kerika showed up right away, but you need to search for it in the box shown below:
5. Select Domain Install
The Domain Install option will allow everyone in your organization to use Kerika:
6. Accept the Terms
7. Success!
Kerika is now installed for your organization’s use:
8. All done
You are all done. Enjoy Kerika.
Shifting to Google Drive for our Direct Signup Users
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!
Free Kerika Accounts for folks at University of Malaya
We have added the University of Malaya to the list of domains from which people can automatically qualify for a free Academic Account: anyone signing up for Kerika+Google with a um.edu.my email — students, teachers and administrators — can automatically qualify to have up to 10 Team Members working on boards owned by their account.
Enjoy!
An updated overview video on how Task Boards work in Kerika
An update on our Google Apps Marketplace problems…
We are still working with Google on fixing the problem with the G Suite Marketplace that caused the Kerika product listing to disappear unexpectedly about 2 weeks ago.
Progress was slow over the holiday season because many Googlers were out of office, but folks are back in town and working with us on debugging the problem — which, as far as we can tell, is entirely on Google’s end and has to do with their back-end systems for managing listings on the G Suite Marketplace.
And… Google’s Marketplace is screwed again!
We have disappeared again from the Google App Marketplace: this is the third time in the last two weeks, and Google is trying to find the bug that’s causing this to happen.
The sequence that triggers it seems to be as follows:
1. We make an update to the Kerika product description on the Marketplace, to reflect some significant new improvement or feature.
2. The update shows up correctly, for a day or two.
3. Then the entire Kerika product listing disappears, without any warning or notification!
4. We contact Google, and they try to to restore the Kerika product listing. Unfortunately they find a really old set of screenshots and text, at least 3 years out of date if not more, and it’s a mystery where they even dredge this up from.
5. So, we try to update our Marketplace listing, and the cycle begins anew…
Waiting on Google to fix this!
An updated set of tutorial videos is coming
We are (finally!) getting around to updating the Kerika tutorial videos; what we have on our YouTube channel has definitely gotten stale.
Here’s the first in the new series:
This video is intended for new users: people who discover Kerika and sign up to start new accounts.
For people who sign up by clicking on an invitation email sent from a coworker, we have a different video that is more focused around their needs:
And, finally, for people who sign up to use Kerika with Google Apps — and this is the vast majority of Kerika users, worldwide — we have this video:
There’s a lot more coming.
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.
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.
Back on the G Suite Marketplace!
Thanks to support from Google’s engineers, the problems we had been facing with Kerika’s listing on the G Suite Marketplace has been fixed!
Here we are, in all our glory: