Our team has had much to celebrate over the past few months, as we achieve milestone after milestone. This is the India-based development team of Kerika:
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Category Archives: Kerika
Using Kerika with Microsoft 365
We have made a very big extension to Kerika, by integrating with Microsoft 365: now you can sign up using your Microsoft ID, and have your files stored in your own OneDrive account!
Kerika+Microsoft works the same was as Kerika+Google and Kerika+Box: you can use your existing Microsoft account to sign up and login to Kerika; there’s no need to create and remember a new password:
When you upload files to your board for the first time, you will be asked to choose a preferred cloud storage: if it’s Microsoft, then you will be asked to give Kerika access to a single folder in your Microsoft OneDrive:
After you allow Kerika access to your OneDrive, Kerika will create a single folder in your OneDrive that it will use for all of your Kerika-related files:
That one top-level folder is all that Kerika will ever use: inside there Kerika will automatically manage all the subfolders you need to sort your different Kerika accounts (yes, some folks have more than one Kerika account!) and your board.
Kerika doesn’t go snooping around or altering any other part of your OneDrive!
Files you add to your Kerika boards will be automatically shared with everyone on the board’s team: Board Admins and Team Members will get read+write access, while Visitors will get read-only access.
As folks join or leave your board team, access to all the files on that board will be automatically managed by Kerika, freeing you up from all the admin work that other tools make you do.
You can even create new Office 365 documents from inside Kerika, and have them shared automatically with your board team:
And we have always had the ability to sync your Kerika due dates with your Outlook calendar, so that completes everything you need to get the most of Kerika+Microsoft!
You have even more storage options now
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.
Kerika’s CEO is featured in CEO Today Magazine
CEO Today Magazine featured Kerika’s CEO, Arun Kumar, in the December issue. From the article:
“From the beginning we have believed in the concept of ‘eating your own dog food’ and we used the Kerika app to run our entire business, effectively using Kerika to build Kerika!”
Using Kerika’s Whiteboards: a new Tutorial Video
We have updated our tutorial video on how to use Kerika’s Whiteboards, to reflect some recent changes to the user interface and functionality.
It’s easier now to leave an Account
This is a problem that affects our student users a lot: as they work with different teams on different boards, they get added to a bunch of accounts. After the school year ends, some of these accounts are no longer relevant, but it wasn’t easy to leave an account that you were no longer interested in.
(It was always easy for an Account Owner to kick you off their account if they wanted you to leave.)
We have made it easy for anyone to leave an account in which they are no longer active: go to your Home, and (on your desktop) hover your mouse over the account that you are no longer interested in. A “leave account” button will appear, like this:
To make sure you don’t do this accidentally, there’s a confirmation step where you are asked to type the word YES in all caps:
It’s easy to leave Kerika
We have always made it easy (we thought!) to leave Kerika, which means closing all your accounts and deleting all the associated data: there was a button for this in the Manage Account screen, but we occasionally would get emails from folks asking us to close their accounts. We concluded that not everyone was finding our old button easy to find, so we moved it right up to the main profile menu:
If you choose this action, Kerika will email you a code that you need to enter to confirm your action, since closing an account is a one-way street: there’s no way to get it back after it’s gone!
So many new features, we had to add a New Features feature…
Ever since we finished our massive rewrite and overhaul of our back-end we have been producing new features at a steady pace, as you may have noticed from the frequency of these blog posts. To make it easier for folks to keep up with the flood of improvements, we have added a “What’s New in Kerika” feature:
When there are new features in Kerika that were released since you last logged in, a small “What’s New in Kerika” badge will appear on the top of the app:
Clicking on this will show you a list of what’s new that you will find useful. Here’s an example:
On the mobile app the alert is a little different, because of the smaller layout: a small orange dot appears on your profile picture; click on that and you get the profile menu which now contains a What’s New in Kerika option:
Another way to stay on top of what’s happening
When you are working on several boards, we want to make sure you don’t miss any updates that might be happening elsewhere in Kerika.
There’s a new feature that helps with that: if you have open boards (or templates) with unread updates, the drop-down on the “board switcher” appears in orange:
When you click on the OPEN BOARDS button, Kerika will show you all your open boards, with the updated ones highlighted in orange:
This should help you stay on top of what’s happening across your entire Kerika world: you don’t need to switch to different boards just to see if there’s anything new.
Top Free Project Management Tools: Kerika ranks #1
SystemTek just published an article on the top free project management tools, and we are pleased to note that Kerika ranks #1 on the list, ahead of Trello, Asana, Clickup and Todoist.
The article notes that Kerika comes with:
- Free plan for Individuals
- Free plan for Nonprofit and Academic Teams.
- Unlimited Visitors
- Unlimited tasks
- Unlimited project boards
- Unlimited file storage, with Google Drive support
- Whiteboard capability