Category Archives: Technology

Posts related to technology in general

Use Google Drive for sharing files, without having to use Google Docs

Technology

From the very beginning Kerika has been built to leverage the Google Apps platform, and today we are one of the most elegant apps in the Google Apps Marketplace! The Google Apps integration, however, has been something of a double-edged sword: folks who are already committed to using Google Docs and Google Drive love Kerika, but there are also folks who like Google Drive but not Google Docs, and these folks haven’t been too happy to lose the advanced formatting and other “power-user” features of Microsoft Office.

This has been particularly true for some of our consulting users who make extensive use of Word, Excel and PowerPoint in dealing with RFPs and client reports.

The fact that we have always converted files to the Google Docs format is really more a historical artifact than an integral part of the Kerika design and product vision, so now we are offering users the choice of using Google Docs or not, while retaining our integration with Google Drive. Here’s how it works:

  • There will be a new user preference that lets you decide whether you want to use Google Docs or not. By default, this will be OFF, which means that you will not be using Google Docs.
  • If the preference is OFF, then files that you add to your Kerika project boards — onto individual cards or canvases — will still be shared using your Google Drive, but the original Microsoft Office format will be preserved. This means, for example, Excel files will remain as Excel files even as they are getting shared across your project team using Google Drive.

This setting is on a per-user basis: it means that you are controlling whether projects in your own account are going to use Google Docs or not. Other Kerika users may have different preference settings, so on some projects you may find that the files have been converted to Google Docs because that account’s owner prefers that way of sharing files.

This is what the new user preference looks like: it can be found at https://kerika.com/preferences

Your new Kerika preferences page
Your new Kerika preferences page

More ways for Project Leaders to get smart email notifications when changes take place on your projects

Technology, Usability

We are adding a bunch of new ways in which Project Leaders can choose to get email notifications when there are important changes taking place on their project boards; these include the following:

  • Email me when cards are added to my project: if new cards are added to a board where you are one of the Project Leaders, you can get an email notification. By default, this is turned ON: it’s a useful way for Project Leaders to know when the work expected of the team, particularly in Scrum projects, is increasing. (Team Members never get emailed when new cards are added.)
  • Email me when cards on my projects are marked Done: if any cards are moved to the Done column on a Task Board or Scrum Board, the Project Leaders can get notified by email. By default, this is also turned ON. (And Team Members never get emailed.)
  • Email me chat messages on cards in my projects: this is actually a two-part change that we are making. Previously, everyone who was part of a project got an email if there was any chat on a card. Now, this is more targeted:
    • If a card is assigned to one or more people, chat messages are emailed only to the assigned people. This reduces the overall volume of emails sent by Kerika by targeting only those folks who care the most about a particular card.
    • If a card isn’t assigned to anyone, chat messages are sent to everyone who is part of the team. Here, our assumption is that if you are writing a message about an unassigned card, you would like to get everyone’s attention with that message. For example, you might be suggesting a path forward for an unassigned card, or calling attention to an issue that isn’t assigned to anyone to fix.
    • Project Leaders can choose to be part of the chat notifications for all cards, even if they aren’t assigned to these cards, and this is a new preference setting that we have created with a default value of Off. So, if you are a Project Leader that would like to know about each and every chat message on your project boards, you could turn this preference On.
  • Email me general chat messages: this refers to chat that takes place on the board itself, that isn’t tied to any particular card. Chat that takes place on the board itself is usually intended for the entire team, so this preference setting applies to Project Leaders and Team Members. By default, this is turned On.
  • Email me when cards in my projects are reassigned: when a card is reassigned, i.e. an old team member is taken off a card, or a new person added, everyone affected by the change is notified by email: the people who were formerly assigned the card, and the new people. This is an easy way for you to know when someone expects you to handle some new work, or, conversely, if someone else is now expected to do the work that had previously been assigned to you. We have added a new preference setting for Project Leaders to be told, by email, when cards are reassigned: this is an easy way for you to know that your team has self-organized itself to handle its work differently.

All these changes means that your Preferences page, which is always found at https://kerika.com/preferences, now looks like this:

Your new Kerika preferences page
Your new Kerika preferences page

We have been using these new features internally for the past couple of weeks, and have found them to be really useful!

More ways for Project Leaders to get smart email notifications when changes take place on your projects

Technology, Usability

We are adding a bunch of new ways in which Project Leaders can choose to get email notifications when there are important changes taking place on their project boards; these include the following:

  • Email me when cards are added to my project: if new cards are added to a board where you are one of the Project Leaders, you can get an email notification. By default, this is turned ON: it’s a useful way for Project Leaders to know when the work expected of the team, particularly in Scrum projects, is increasing. (Team Members never get emailed when new cards are added.)
  • Email me when cards on my projects are marked Done: if any cards are moved to the Done column on a Task Board or Scrum Board, the Project Leaders can get notified by email. By default, this is also turned ON. (And Team Members never get emailed.)
  • Email me chat messages on cards in my projects: this is actually a two-part change that we are making. Previously, everyone who was part of a project got an email if there was any chat on a card. Now, this is more targeted:
    • If a card is assigned to one or more people, chat messages are emailed only to the assigned people. This reduces the overall volume of emails sent by Kerika by targeting only those folks who care the most about a particular card.
    • If a card isn’t assigned to anyone, chat messages are sent to everyone who is part of the team. Here, our assumption is that if you are writing a message about an unassigned card, you would like to get everyone’s attention with that message. For example, you might be suggesting a path forward for an unassigned card, or calling attention to an issue that isn’t assigned to anyone to fix.
    • Project Leaders can choose to be part of the chat notifications for all cards, even if they aren’t assigned to these cards, and this is a new preference setting that we have created with a default value of Off. So, if you are a Project Leader that would like to know about each and every chat message on your project boards, you could turn this preference On.
  • Email me general chat messages: this refers to chat that takes place on the board itself, that isn’t tied to any particular card. Chat that takes place on the board itself is usually intended for the entire team, so this preference setting applies to Project Leaders and Team Members. By default, this is turned On.
  • Email me when cards in my projects are reassigned: when a card is reassigned, i.e. an old team member is taken off a card, or a new person added, everyone affected by the change is notified by email: the people who were formerly assigned the card, and the new people. This is an easy way for you to know when someone expects you to handle some new work, or, conversely, if someone else is now expected to do the work that had previously been assigned to you. We have added a new preference setting for Project Leaders to be told, by email, when cards are reassigned: this is an easy way for you to know that your team has self-organized itself to handle its work differently.

All these changes means that your Preferences page, which is always found at https://kerika.com/preferences, now looks like this:

Your new Kerika preferences page
Your new Kerika preferences page

We have been using these new features internally for the past couple of weeks, and have found them to be really useful!

Card history on project boards in Kerika

Technology, Usability,

The next release of Kerika will include a bunch of bug fixes and usability improvements, as usual, but a big new feature that we hope you will find useful is Card History: every card will contain a succinct history of everything that’s happened to it, since it was created.

Here’s an example:

Card history
Card history

Our implementation of this new feature is actually kind of clever, under the covers (of course!): rather than log every action immediately we wait a little to see if the user changes her mind about the action.

So, for example, if a user moves a card to Done, and then moves it back to another column soon afterwards, the Card History doesn’t show the intermediate action since the user clearly changed her mind about whether that work item was actually done or not. In other words, the system is forgiving of user errors: an important design principle that we have tried to adopt elsewhere as well.

Because the Kerika user interface makes it so easy to make changes to your task board, a built-in delay in the history is necessary to avoid creating a “noisy” or “spammy” history.

From a technical perspective, the most interesting aspect of creating this new feature was that we expanded our infrastructure to include Amazon’s DynamoDB.

DynamoDB is a fast, fully managed NoSQL database service that makes it simple and cost-effective to store and retrieve any amount of data, and serve any level of request traffic. This is our first foray into using NoSQL databases; up to now we had been exclusively using MySQL.

 

The most baffling shortcoming of Apple’s Maps

Technology, Usability

Of all the many shortcomings of Apple’s Maps program, the one that we find most baffling is that it doesn’t seem to use GPS for its most basic function: looking up an address.

Here’s an example: we make an appointment in our (Apple-made) Calendar program on our (Apple-made) iPhone, that references the local office of one our users.

The original calendar entry

In King County, Washington, every address is based upon a giant coordinate system, so it isn’t really necessary to specify the city of an address. The “NE” in the street name refers to “North East”, not Nebraska, and no one in King County would ever think of looking up a street address by first considering Nebraska as a possibility. And, yet, that’s precisely what Apple’s Maps program suggest: rather than using the GPS that’s built into every Apple iPhone ever made, it assumes that our next appointment is probably 15 states away, rather than 15 minutes away by car:

Apple Maps

Google’s Maps program, on the other hand, is very much GPS-aware, and the suggestions it offers are locations that are closest to where the phone is, not furthest away:

Google Maps

Why on earth (no pun intended) would Apple produce a map program for its phones that doesn’t make use of the phone’s most important feature — it’s ability to know where it is?

Security screening of new employees: a new process template, brought to you by HISPI

Technology

We are exploring a collaboration with the Holistic Information Security Practitioner’s Institute (HISPI) to create Kerika process templates focused on best practices in security.

The first of these is now available: how to do a security screening for new employees.

This template is available to all Kerika users, of course, and will be improved in the future as we continue to work with HISPI.

 

Facebook Home on Android: a great way to monetize the addicts

Ephemera, Technology

In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.

This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)

It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.

These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.

Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.

In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.

Facebook Home on Android: a great way to monetize the addicts

Ephemera, Technology

In many industries, a small proportion of the users will consume a disproportionate amount of the product, and will provide the vast bulk of a company’s profit.

This is true in the beer business for example: the beer companies have long known that a small percentage of their customers will drink a vast amount of beer every day. (This factoid used to be a staple of marketing classes in the 1980s, when it was offered as an example of the 80:20 rule — 20% of the consumers will drink 80% of the beer. Which actually amounts to about a case of beer a day…)

It is also true for Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) businesses: Forbes reported in 2011, for example, that just 4% of Dropbox’s users pay for the service, and yet Dropbox is a growing, profitable company! The other 96% contribute indirectly, by adding to the network effect and recruiting others who have a 4% probability of becoming a paid-up subscriber of Dropbox.

These percentages can seem small, but they can quickly add up when you have millions of users.

Facebook has a similar profile of users: a small number of people are logged in obsessively, and these will provide the bulk of their advertising revenues — not just because they are more like to see the advertisements, but because they are more likely to view Facebook as a trusted source of useful content.

In this context, creating Facebook Home on Android makes a lot of sense: it doesn’t matter whether a very large proportion of your user base never uses it, if you can get the addicted segment to be logged in all the time. These people will drink all the beer you are selling.

How Kerika integrates with your Google Contacts

Technology, Usability

When you sign up for Kerika, using your Google ID, you get sent to an authorization screen where Google asks whether it is OK for Kerika to access some of your Google-related information. One part of this involves access to your Google Contacts.

We often get queries about this, so we thought we would clarify something that’s really important: we don’t use your Google contacts to spam your friends and coworkers!

The Google Contacts are used for one reason only: to provide an auto-completion of names and email addresses when you are adding people to a project team. Here’s a simple illustration:

Adding people to a project team
Adding people to a project team

To add people to a project team, you would click on the People button, which appears on the top-right corner of the Kerika application, and this would show a display similar to the example above, where all the members of your project team are listed (along with their roles). To add a new person, you would click on the +Member link at the top, and then start typing in a name or email address:

Enter a name or email address
Enter a name or email address

As you type in a name or email address, we pass on this string to Google which tries to match it up with entries in your Google contacts. These entries start showing up immediately, and get filtered progressively as you type in more characters:

Matching names against your Google Contacts
Matching names against your Google Contacts

This matching of names and emails is done by Google, which means Kerika never has direct access to your Google Contacts!

This auto-completion is a handy feature: it eliminates a major source of errors, which is mistyping email addresses. This means that the chances of you inviting the wrong person to your project are much lower!

 

 

A new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas

Technology

We have added a new template for our users: The Business Model Canvas.

The Business Model Canvas is an increasingly popular tool for startups to systematically analyze their proposed business model by identifying:

  • Key Partners
  • Key Activities
  • Key Resources
  • Value Propositions
  • Customer Relationships
  • Channels
  • Customer Segments
  • Cost Structure
  • Revenue Streams

Using this template is easy: when you start a new project, you will find “Business Model Canvas” among the choices for Task Board projects:

Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template
Selecting the Business Model Canvas as the template

You can also access the template directly at https://kerika.com/m/GFXC, and click on the “Use this template” button on the upper-right corner to get started fast.

Once you start your new project using this template, your task board looks like this:

Using the Business Model Canvas
Using the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

Each of the main sections of the Business Model Canvas are presented as columns on this task board, and you can customize this as you like:

Customizing the Business Model Canvas
Customizing the Business Model Canvas

Individual cards on this task board are setup and ready for you to fill in; here’s an example:

Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas
Individual cards for the Business Model Canvas (Click to enlarge)

The card shown above, as an example, can be used to identify one of your key suppliers. For this supplier (and for all of your other key suppliers), you should identify the motivations of this supplier: why this supplier would want to do business with you? Motivations could include:

  • Supplier is seeking optimizations and economies of scale
  • Supplier is seeking to reduce risk and uncertainty
  • Supplier is looking to acquire particular resources and activities.

For each supplier, you should identify the key activities that will be performed: this can added to a simple Google Doc, and attached to this card. (We have provided Google Docs templates for individual cards.)

And, finally, for each supplier you should identify the key resources that will be acquired; this can be added to the same Google Doc, or listed separately.

In this way you can easily work through the business model canvases various steps.

Using a process template like Kerika’s is vastly superior to simply printing out a large poster of the canvas, because the cards in the Kerika process template can be used to support conversations, manage content, track status, and collaborate across multiple locations: and that’s just not possible with a paper canvas!

The Business Model Canvas is also gaining popularity within larger organizations that are seeking to adopt (and adapt?) lean startup principles, so we expect that this new template will be of interest to a wide variety of users. And, by the way, creating this template is just part of an ongoing process here at Kerika, to capture and present best practices for a variety of professions and industries!