Tag Archives: Preferences

About the Preferences feature in Kerika.

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.

You can now choose your background colors

November 23, 2020Kerika, UsabilityPreferences, UsabilityKerika

A new feature that we recently introduced will let you choose a background color: one for the desktop app, and one for the mobile app. (Oops, did we just talk about the mobile app?)

To select a color: click on your user profile photo, which appears on the top-right of Kerika:

User Preferences dialog on desktop — User Preferences

Select My Preferences for this Account from this dialog, and you will land on a revamped Preferences page that now includes options for selecting a background color:

Choosing color preferences — Color Preferences

We are offering a range of light and dark backgrounds; in our own testing we found that the darker backgrounds look better on the desktop, while the lighter backgrounds look better on phones. But, of course, that’s just our opinion — try this out and select what you like best!

Making Kerika less chatty for new users

October 11, 2018UsabilityNotifications, Preferences, UsabilityKerika

It’s hard for us to get the balance right between making sure our users don’t miss out on important project updates, while avoiding the impression that Kerika is “too chatty”.

We are changing out default preferences settings — this will affect new users only, not existing users — to have most notifications emails turned OFF by default:

One reason for this change is that our Views feature does a good job of providing an overview of important updates across boards — and we are going to make it even better in the near future — so for new users in particular, we don’t want to give the impression that Kerika will increase their incoming emails, rather than actually streamline their existing communications.

The 6AM Task Summary Email is back

September 19, 2018Agile & Scrum, Team CollaborationCalendar, Kanban, Preferences, Scrum, Task Board, Task ManagementKerika

We used to have a feature that let you get a task summary email from Kerika everyday at 6AM that summarized all the things that you were responsible for that are overdue, due this week or due next week.

When we introduced the Views feature, we thought perhaps this 6AM email was not needed any more, so we took it out of the user interface for a few months — although people who had previously been using this feature continued to get their daily emails.

It seems like we underestimated the usefulness of this feature: new users started asking for something just like it, so we have brought the feature back. (And thanks for helping us understand we had screwed up in taking it away.)

You can access this feature from your Preferences page:

“Responsible for” includes not just the items that were assigned to you, but also items on boards where you are a Board Admin (and, presumably, have some responsibility for.)

This email can show your tasks organized in two different ways, and, if you like, you can get both sent to you every day:

A typical task summary, where tasks are grouped by date, would look like this:

The board names and card names are also links that you can use to open the relevant work item.

Enjoy, again.

Managing the privacy of your Kerika boards

June 7, 2018Kerika, Team Collaboration, TechnologyPreferences, Privacy, Security, TeamsKerika

Kerika offers a great deal of control over how each board is shared:

A board can be made public to everyone. This makes sense for open-source projects and many nonprofit and advocacy groups, where the goal is to get maximum visibility and publicity rather than to hide the details of what the project is about.
Making a board public means that anyone who has the URL of the board can view it, even people who are not Kerika users. Note: we are talking about viewing the board; viewing doesn’t mean anyone who isn’t part of the board team can make changes.

If a board is viewable by the public, it can be found by anyone using Kerika’s search function.
A board can be viewable by everyone who is part of the account team. This is the default setting, and it makes a lot of sense for most organizations: you want your coworkers to be aware of what your team is doing, unless the project is particularly sensitive.
An account team consists of everyone who is a Team Member or Visitor on any board owned by the account.

As people get added to individual boards, they are also automatically added to the account team. When someone is removed from every board owned by an account, they are automatically removed from the account team as well.

As with public boards, described above, we are talking only about viewing, not changing: only people who are Board Admins or Team Members on a particular board’s team can make any changes to that board. (And, of course, the Account Owner who owns the board.)
If you use Kerika’s search function, you can find boards that are being shared with the account team, provided you are part of that particular account team.
A board can be kept private. This means that only the people who are listed on the board’s team — as a Board Admin, Team Member or Visitor — can view the board. (And, of course, the Account Owner who owns the board.)
This is appropriate for any sensitive projects, e.g. stuff related to personnel matters or confidential contracts.

Private boards can’t be found by Kerika’s search function either, and it doesn’t matter if you know the URL for the board: only the specific people listed on the board team can see anything related to that board.

For each board owned by an account, the Account Owner or Board Admins can manage the board’s team: decide who is part of the team, and what sort of role (Board Admin, Team Member, or Visitor) each person has.

Board Admins and Team Members can make changes to all the items on the board, including any documents attached to the board.
Visitors have read-only access to the board and all its documents.
A person’s role can be changed at any time by the Board Admin or Account Owner: the effect is immediate, and extends to all the documents associated with the board as well regardless of whether you are using Google or Box for your file storage, or whether you are storing your files with Kerika.

A board’s team and current privacy settings can be viewed by clicking on the Team button that appears on the top-right of the Kerika app, when viewing a board:

Clicking on this button brings up the Board Team dialog:

Each person who is part of the Board Team is listed in this dialog, in alphabetical order along with their role.

At the bottom of the dialog is the board’s current privacy setting: in the example shown above, the board is being shared with everyone who is part of this user’s account team. (We have obscured the URL in the screenshot for security reasons.)

If you are a Board Admin or the Account Owner, you can change the privacy of the board using the Change Privacy link that’s shown on the bottom of the dialog:

So, every board can have it’s own privacy settings: private, shared with account team, or public.

When you are viewing the boards in an account, Kerika shows clearly what the privacy setting is for each board:

If you are part of someone’s account, you will be able to create new boards in that account: you will automatically be a Board Admin on those new boards, but the owner will always be the account you are working in.

You can set your privacy preferences for each account; this will determine whether new boards you create are automatically shared with your coworkers or not:

All your preferences can be set at https://kerika.com/preferences. The default setting is Share with Account Team, which works well for most people, most of the time.

Using Service Accounts to manage all your Kerika Users

May 24, 2018Agile & Scrum, Team Collaboration, TechnologyKanban, Preferences, Scrum, Task Board, TeamsKerika

For some segments of our users, e.g. college students using Kerika for their course projects, it makes sense to treat each user as an independent entity, since the relationships between these students will vary from class to class, from semester to semester.

These collaboration networks are very dynamic, and it’s impossible to predict whether a team that got together to work on a three-month class project will stick together after that project is over, or work as the same group of people on the next class project.

In business environments (companies, nonprofits and government agencies), however, the teams are more stable: people don’t change jobs every few months. But, turnover can still be a problem: if Joe leaves your company, how can you be sure that all the boards and documents that Joe had created are not lost along when Joe is gone?

The simple solution to this is to use service accounts to own all the boards that are being used by a community of users, like a department or even the entire company (if the company is small enough).

A service account looks like any other Kerika account — it is associated with it’s own email, e.g. kerika@example.com — but it isn’t actually a real person: the email will have been set up by the organization’s IT staff or management, and the password is typically shared between a small handful of supervisory people.

Unlike real people, service accounts will always stick around: they won’t retire, resign, or get run over by a bus…

This means the organization has continuity and security with respect to it’s Kerika boards and documents: because the project assets are owned by kerika@example.com, rather than joe@example.com, it doesn’t matter whether Joe is still working at the company or not.

We encourage all our professional users — people working in companies, nonprofits and governments — to set up service accounts as a best practice, and we can help you: just email us at support@kerika.com and we will do all the account consolidation for you:

All the boards owned by the people in your organization will be transferred to the ownership of the service account instead.
Everything about each board is preserved as part of the transfer: all the cards, canvases, due dates, etc. remain the same after the transfer; it’s just that the boards are no longer owned by joe@example.com and susan@example.com, but instead are now owned by kerika@example.com
You can decide who to consolidate within the service account: typically it is everyone in the organization, but if you have different departments or cost centers, it will make sense to have more than one service account — one for each department or cost center.
After the consolidation, individual users within your organization will no longer have separate accounts: their Kerika identity, preferences, history, etc. are all preserved, but instead of working in several different accounts, they will all be working in a single service account, that’s under the control of your organization.
All this can be done by us, overnight: the next day your users can come into work and login as they did before, and have access to all the boards they had the previous day. All the boards will look the same, and your users can pick exactly where they left off.

When users have been consolidated within a service account, any new boards that they create will automatically be owned by that service account, rather than by the individual users. This ensures that all current and all future project assets are owned by the service account, i.e. by the company, rather than by individual users.

It’s still possible for individual users to have privacy within the service account: for sensitive work (e.g. personnel matters) they can adjust the privacy of individual boards to be “share with board team only”. When the privacy is set to board team only, the board will be visible only to the people who are specifically added by the Board Admins to the board’s team.

The Account Owner, i.e. the service account, will always have access to every board within that account, regardless of the board’s privacy settings. This is consistent with how other organizational assets are currently managed: if you have a work email, for example, you expect to have privacy from your coworkers, but you know that the company’s IT department will always have access to your email if they need it — and your email doesn’t really belong to you, but to your employer.

Changes to how you access different Accounts in Kerika

May 16, 2018Kerika, UsabilityAccount, Preferences, TeamsKerika

With our latest update, launched over the weekend, we have made some significant changes to how users access multiple Kerika accounts.

The motivation for all this is simple: our old billing mechanism was manual and error-prone. It was difficult to track which accounts had paid for subscriptions and to ensure that subscriptions were renewed in a timely manner.

So we are moving to an completely automated system that will allow our customers to manage their subscriptions more easily, make online or offline purchases, and manage their account teams.

We are about halfway there: we have done the changes to the account management piece, and have some more work before the billing system is ready.

One consequence of this is the way you view your Home Page has changed: the Home will now always show the boards and templates that related to a single account, rather than across multiple accounts.

(Previously there were three buckets: Favorites, Owned by Me, and Shared With Me.)

Switching between all your open boards, and all your accounts, has been consolidated into a single Account Switcher function that appears on the top-left corner of the Kerika app, where the old Board Switcher used to be:

Clicking on the Account Switcher will let you switch between boards, and between accounts:

Calendar syncing and Preferences are now applied on an account level, so if you are working in multiple accounts, you can choose to have different preferences for each account.

You can access your Calendar and Preferences settings by clicking on your face on the upper-right corner of the Kerika app:

With this change, it becomes more important for organizations to consolidate ownership of all their boards within a single account. You can do this yourself, by selecting boards from your Home Page and using the Move to Another Account function:

You can also let us do this for you: just contact us at support@kerika.com, and let us know which accounts you would like to consolidate and we can do all the work.

Your 6AM summary email now includes Tasks

October 20, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Preferences, Scrum, UsabilityKerika

All Kerika users have the option of getting an email sent to them at 6AM everyday, in their local time, that summarizes all the cards that are overdue, due this week, and due next week.

(Actually, we have two options for this email: you can get these cards summarized by due date, or by board. Or both.)

This is turned on by default for new users but you can change your preferences at https://kerika.com/preferences.

We have improved this email to include Tasks as well as cards.

This required some smarts in the code to handle scenarios where a Task’s Due Date is different from the Card’s Due Date, but we managed to do this nicely.

Enjoy.

Restyling Preferences

August 17, 2017Kerika, UsabilityPreferences, UsabilityKerika

We have restyled your Preferences page, to be more in line with the new design of Kerika that we released a couple of months ago. It now looks like this:

We are using the familiar “card container” style for showing different categories of preferences, like WIP limits, along with the left-side tabs that are similar to those you find on the Home page.

The Boards tab lets you set the following preferences:

The privacy of new boards you create: you can make them accessible to anyone with a link; to just people who are part of your Account Team; or to only those people you invite to the board as Board Admins, Team Members or Visitors.
Whether to use Work-In-Progress (WIP Limits) on new Task Boards or Scrum Boards that you create.
Whether to have your documents converted to the Google Docs format, if you are using Kerika+Google, or whether you want to retain them in their original format e.g. Microsoft Office. (This preference isn’t shown to Kerika+Box users, or those users who signed up directly.)

In the Notifications tab you can decide how much you want to hear from Kerika when stuff happens (that concerns you).

If you are assigned a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board, and someone does chat on that card, Kerika will always push that to you as an email: we assume that since you are responsible for a card, you need to know sooner rather than later when someone has a comment or question about that work item.

If you are a Board Admin, however, you can decide how many notifications you want when stuff happens on boards that you are responsible for.

For example, you could be notified if someone adds a new card on a board: this usually means that there is new/more work to be done by your team, so you might want to quickly check whether it is important — or whether it is even relevant for that particular board.

And, as a Board Admin, you might want to know whenever someone moves a card to Done. This is usually a welcome notification: people like to hear that stuff is getting done, but if a team/board gets a lot of stuff done every day these emails can be a nuisance and you might want to turn off this preference.

And, depending upon how involved you want to be with each card and each Team Member, you can get notified whenever a card is reassigned from one person to another. Some Board Admins like to be very much in control over who is doing what, so if a Team Member takes the initiative to reassign work to another Team Member the Board Admin may want to know right away. Other Board Admins take a more relaxed, hands-off approach and let the team handle its own work allocation.

Finally, you can choose to get a 6AM email summary of everything that is overdue, due this week, and due next week: for all cards assigned to you personally, as well as a all cards on boards where you are one of the Board Admins. You have the additional option of getting this list summarized by date, or by board — or both.

The Canvas Preferences let you determine how lines, shapes and text look like, by default, when you use Whiteboards.

One useful preference in this tab is to have items snap to grids: this helps you lay out process diagrams more neatly.

We made it easier to sync your Kerika Due Dates with your Calendar

August 14, 2017Agile & Scrum, Kanban & Lean, UsabilityCalendar, Kanban, Preferences, Scrum, Usability, WorkflowKerika

We made some user interface tweaks to make sure people are aware of a really great feature in Kerika that’s existed for a while, but was buried in a Preferences screen that not everyone paid attention to: you can have your Kerika Due Dates automatically show up on your Google, Microsoft or Apple Calendar.

Well, that’s buried no more: we have added a Calendar Synch button in a more prominent place on the top-right of the Kerika app:

Clicking on this button will let you choose the type of calendar you want to synch with:

(Hint: you can have your Kerika Due Dates synch with more than one calendar, if you like.)

Pick your favorite calendar type, and you will see detailed instructions on how to set up syncing of your Kerika Due Dates. Here’s an example of syncing with Apple Calendars:

The URL is personal, and should be kept confidential. (That’s why we aren’t showing it in the illustration above.)

The URL is long and random so it will be impossible for others to guess, but it’s not a good idea to share it with others unless you really want them to know all your Kerika Due Dates, e.g. if you have an assistant or delegate that helps manage your daily schedule.

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