We recently found and fixed an odd bug related to the optional 6AM Daily Task Summary email that you can get from Kerika: if you had toggled the preference setting for this email — from ON to OFF, and back to ON again — the email was getting sent at 8AM instead of 6AM.
Essentially a coding mistake on our part, and one we didn’t notice (and none of our users noticed, either) for a long time because no one would try changing this preference setting very often.
The bug’s been fixed.
We have improved our Views feature to include a simple toggle that lets you filter the entire View to show just those items that are assigned to you.
This new toggle appears on the top-right corner of the View, and we have added a Tip to help you understand the function:
Clicking on the toggle will immediately shrink the View to show just those items that are assigned to you:
All the other items are hidden from the View, and a simple count at the bottom of each column shows you how many items are assigned to others. In the example shown above, 1 item is assigned to someone else, and is due today.
It’s a simple, fast feature that we think shows the best of Kerika’s design approach :-)
This feature has been added to all of our Views that need this:
What have we been up to lately, you ask?
Fixing bugs. Lots and lots of bugs, all minor but we don’t like to have any known bugs at any time.
We recently implemented some new error reporting services so that we can trap server and browser exceptions more efficiently.
This threw up a bunch of errors that we hadn’t been aware of before. Obviously these were minor, since no one had observed any ill effects before, but it’s long been a point of pride for the Kerika team that no known bug gets away alive.
So, we have been cleaning up even minor server exceptions, and obscure Javascript warnings from the browser console, so we have a completely clean slate.
One advantage of having a clean slate is that it makes any new errors immediately more visible. If you get used to ignoring some exceptions/warnings because you know they are not important, your team eventually gets desensitized to the presence of these errors and warnings, and bigger, more important issues start to get ignored as well.
Best to squash all bugs, no matter how small.
We occasionally get requests from Gmail users for a free Academic/Nonprofit Account; we often have to turn down these requests.
With a free account from Gmail, Yahoo, Outlook, etc., it is impossible for Kerika’s staff to confirm that a user is truly from a qualifying organization.
As a result, these requests don’t get quick approvals, which is available for people signing up with an email address that clearly points to a nonprofit or academic account.
We can make exceptions in particular situations where we are sure a Gmail user is using Kerika solely for a nonprofit purpose, but this is rare.
If you are working at a nonprofit or university, please sign up with your official email address.
Thanks.
We have made this easier: you can go to the Manage Account page inside the Kerika app and you will see this section at the bottom:
Clicking on the Close My Account button (and the subsequent confirmation dialog box) will generate an email to Kerika’s Admins, who will then manually close the account.
We have decided not to automate the actual account closure step since it is irrevocable: once your account is closed, all the boards and content on those boards are deleted and cannot be restored.
To help users, we usually wait for a few hours — up to a day at most — before actually deleting the account, in case someone wants to send us an “Oops, I didn’t mean to do that…” email.
This isn’t something that you will see, as a customer, but we have spent several months improving our internal systems for managing users, accounts, payments and invoices.
We used to do things in a very ad hoc way before, as we concentrated all our efforts on improving the Kerika app, but we realized earlier this year that we had reached the limits of ad hoc approaches and needed a lot more automation to handle growth.
Everything, pretty much, is now automated: our admin staff can quickly look up any any user or account, see which payments have been made (online or offline), and manage changes to accounts.
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.
If you purchase subscriptions, or do other actions like request a refund, Kerika prompts you to update your Billing Information:
This information is needed to complete a transaction:
At the bottom of this screen you can optionally include Billing Contacts: people who need to get copies of all your transactions, such as your organization’s Purchasing Department or outside accountants/bookkeepers.
We store this information securely: as you may have already noticed, all access to Kerika servers is done using SSL/HTTPS, and within the Kerika virtual network, our servers communicate with each other using SSL as well.
We never ask for your credit card information: we use Stripe to handle all online payments, and we never see your credit card at any time.
If you pay by bank check or electronic funds transfer, this information is handled by Bank of America: details of these transactions, such as your bank information, are stored only at Bank of America and not stored on the Kerika servers.
The rollout of our new billing system seems to have been smooth — so far, fingers crossed! — and with this you now get better controls over who is part of your Account Team:
Please note that you don’t get charged for Visitors: if someone is only a Visitor on your boards — i.e. is not a Team Member or Board Admin on any board you own — you don’t need to pay for this person.
It doesn’t matter how many boards this person “visits”.
Visitors do show up on your Manage My Team list in the Manage Users tab, so you are reminded that they have access to some, possibly all, of your boards, and you can remove a Visitor entirely from your Account in the same way that you might remove a Team Member or Board Admin.