All posts by Kerika

About Kerika

Kerika is the only task management tool that's designed specially for global, remote teams.

Kerika’s Templates

Technology,

We offer a small selection of templates, covering a wide range of possible projects, to help our users get started with new boards — and, more importantly, to help introduce the concept of templates to folks.

Some of the templates we have on offer:

We experienced some performance issues related to these templates recently which we have fixed: as the total number of Kerika users grew, the number of people wanting to use the same templates grew somewhat faster than we had anticipated, so we needed to make some back-end fixes to make sure there wasn’t a slowdown in performance.

 

Ctl-Enter: a faster way to send chat

Usability,

We have added a keyboard shortcut to make it a little faster to send chat messages — on cards, canvases or the board itself.

After typing in your chat message, use the Ctl-Enter (or Ctl-Return) key combination to send the chat immediately. It will save you having to reach for the mouse to click on the Send button…

Sending Chat with Ctl-Return
Sending Chat with Ctl-Return

 

(And thanks, as usual, to our users for urging us to add this new feature!)

Bug, fixed: sometimes email replies to chat weren’t working

Technology,

(Thanks to our users in the Washington Professional Educator Standards Board for helping us find this bug.)

We recently discovered a rather quirky bug that was causing some chat, when replied to as emails by the recipient, to not get sent properly.

Here’s what is supposed to happen, and what went wrong:

  • If you are assigned a card, on a Task Board or Scrum Board, you will get email pushed to you whenever any other Team Member (or Board Admin) chats on that card. This helps you stay in the loop on the most important items on a project board: the ones you are currently assigned to do.

    (Board Admins have the option of getting all chat, on all cards on the board that they manage, pushed to them as emails, if they want to really be in the loop with every conversation that is going on in the board.)

  • When chat gets pushed to you as email, it shows up looking just like regular email, and you can reply to it wherever you are dealing with your email: your desktop, laptop or mobile device.
  • When you click on the “Reply” button in your email client, Kerika automatically changes the address for that reply to be the URL that points to the specific card (or canvas) that’s being referenced in the chat.

    Here’s an example of chat email:

    Chat example
    Chat example

    And what clicking on the Reply button does:

    Replying to Chat Email
    Replying to Chat Email

    In the above example, although the chat email came from Cheryl, the reply is being sent to a special address:
    “Card-nj3j@kerikamail.com>”

  • This email is received by a server that listens only to chat replies. When a chat reply is received by the server, it checks to see who the reply came from.
  • Since only Team Members and Board Admins are allowed to participate in the chat on a particular board, the Kerika chat server tries to make sure the email is coming from someone who is authorized to comment on that particular card or canvas.

    (This helps reduce the possibility of spam email appearing inside your Kerika conversations.)

The problem we found is that some email clients, e.g. the native Mac Mail client, handled the “From:” and “Sender:” fields differently from other email clients like Gmail.

In the case of Gmail, Google places fills in both the From and Sender fields, but in the case of Mac Mail, only the From field is filled in.

For now, a temporary fix is to have the server look for both the From and Sender fields, but longer-term, as part of a server re-architecture that we are planning, this problem will get solved differently that further reduces the possibility of spam.

Join us at the Lean Transformation Conference

Agile & Scrum, Government, Kanban & Lean, Kerika, , , ,

Once again Arun Kumar, Kerika’s founder and CEO, will be speaking at the annual Lean Transformation Conference organized by Results Washington.

This conference is all about Lean and Agile in the public sector: thousands of folks from state, county and local (city) government agencies will be attending, and as usual Kerika will also have a display booth on the 5th floor of the Tacoma Convention Center.

Arun’s topic this year is “Can You See It Now? Visualizing your Lean and Agile Workflows”.

We look forward to seeing our Washington users at the conference; please do stop by our booth or sign up for Arun’s talk!

 

Google Authentication Errors

Technology

We are currently seeing a bunch of errors from Google with respect to their authentication service — which lets you login to your Kerika+Google account using your Google ID, and they seem to be affecting a wide range of users.

Here’s a sample of what we are seeing:

Google Errors
Google Errors

 

This error normally shows up when a user is logging in with a Google for Work ID, e.g. Google Apps for Business or Google Apps for Education.

What’s surprising today is that we have seen at least 1 user with a regular Gmail address have this same problem, which is theoretically impossible.

Right now there’s not much we can do but wait this out. The problem seems to be small enough that Google is not even reporting it on their Google Apps Status Dashboard. :-(

Bug, fixed: Team Members weren’t getting notification emails when they were assigned cards

Agile & Scrum, Technology, ,

Our thanks to Tatjana and Steve from Ducks Unlimited in Canada, who helped us track down a bug that was stopping notification emails being sent properly when a Team Member is assigned a card on a Task Board or Scrum Board.

(Board Admins were getting these emails when people’s assignments changed, but not the Team Members themselves.)

We fixed this with our latest release.

When you add an existing Google or Box file, we copy it into your Kerika folders

Technology, Usability,

If you use the “file picker” that’s built into Kerika to add an existing Google Drive or Box file to a card, canvas or board — for a Task Board, Scrum Board or Whiteboard — you will see a message that says the file is being copied.

This is the file picker:

File picker
File picker

Clicking on the File Picker button brings up the File Picker dialog:

Using the Box file picker
Using the Box file picker

And this is the “copying…” message that’s shown.

Copying message
Copying message

So, what’s happening?

Well, Kerika stores all your Kerika-related files in a set of special folders within your Google Drive or Box account, if you are using Kerika+Google or Kerika+Box, and these are organized neatly into folders corresponding to each of your boards.

Here’s what the folders in your Box account look like (you can learn more by reading about how Kerika integrates with Box):

It’s a similar structure if you are using Kerika with Google:

Keeping all the Kerika files together in a set of related folders makes things cleaner for you: when you look at your Google Drive or Box Account, you know exactly what’s being used by Kerika, and what’s other stuff.

And this is why we make a copy of your existing Google Drive or Box file when you use the File Picker: it enables us to put a copy into your Kerika-specific folders, where it is easier to share with the rest of your project team.

Google doesn’t seem to like client-side compilation of less.css

Technology

Less is a CSS pre-processor: it extends  CSS by adding variables, mixins, functions and many other techniques that allow easier maintenance of your browser stylesheets.

You can compile Less either on the client side, or on the server.  We thought it didn’t matter; but it turns out that Google search engine crawler doesn’t like the client-side compilation:

less.css compilation
less.css compilation

 

If you are using Less on your website, you might want to also avoid client-side compilation so that Google doesn’t barf on it…