We have added Talladega University, located in the city of Talladega, Alabama, to the list of schools and colleges where users can automatically get free Academic Accounts from Kerika when they sign up.
This means that anyone with a talladega.edu email address who signs up for Kerika will automatically get a free Academic Account, allowing them to have up to 10 people working as Board Admins and Team Members on their boards.
Enjoy.
Your Account Team consists of everyone who is working as a Team Member or Board Admin, across all the boards owned by your Account.
Visitors don’t count, and no one is double-counted: if the same person is working on several boards owned by your Account, that person is counted just once.
We have made it a little easier to manage your Account Team, by making the menu option for this screen a little more prominent:
This feature is part of the Manage My Account function, but given the fact that this is one of the most important and commonly used features in accounts, we wanted to make this easier to find and access.
We have made it easier for Visitors to keep up with changes on the boards they are involved with, by extending our unique “heads-up” notification highlights to include Visitors. (Previously, this feature worked only for Team Members and Board Admins.)
These heads-up notifications are customized for each Board Admin, Team Member and Visitor: they show you exactly what’s new or changed on every card on a Task Board or Scrum Board.
(The term “heads-up” comes from the helmets used by fighter pilots, who need to see critical data all the time, without having to turn their heads.)
Views are unique to Kerika: no other work management system provides such an easy way to see what matters, across all the boards you are working on.
These Views make it easy for organizations to really scale up their use of Kerika across multiple projects and many ongoing projects at the same time.
We have now added a very useful new View: What’s New and Updated. As you might guess from the name, this View lets you catch up on everything that’s new and changed, across all the boards you are working on — as a Board Admin, Team Member or Visitor.
This View can work very effectively as a Dashboard for managers who need to keep track of many different boards, all working at the same time: instead of constantly revisiting each board one-by-one, this View is a simple, comprehensive way to see everything that’s changing across all your boards.
The updates are shown in Kerika’s unique “heads-up” notification style: the blue New tags highlight cards that have been newly added to your boards (that you haven’t opened yet), and the orange highlights show you precisely what’s changed on your old cards.
The new and changed cards are sorted into columns, with each column containing all the new and changed items within a particular board. The newest changes appear at the top of a column, and if a board has nothing new to report, the corresponding column is not shown (so your View doesn’t get cluttered up.)
(Cards that are moved to the Done or Trash columns on a board are not included in the View, to help avoid getting the View cluttered.)
As with all Views, it’s easy to operate on all the cards within a column, by selecting the Column Actions button that appears on the top of each column:
The Mark All Cards As Read action is useful if you want to ignore everything that’s going on in a particular board, e.g. when you have just returned from a status meeting where you got fully briefed on what’s happening on a particular board.
Another way to temporarily ignore individual boards is to Hide Column: this collapses the column from the View, and let’s you focus more intently on the handful of boards you care most about.
Selecting a card in this View lets you open the card within the View itself, or to open it on the board where the card actually sits:
(Sometimes it’s easy to deal with cards just by themselves; sometimes the View Board action is more helpful, if you want to be sure you understand the full context in which a card changed.)
Using your mouse’s right-click action will also bring up a bunch of useful actions for that card:
In addition to all the other actions you can perform on cards, you also have the option to get the URL (address) of card using the Get Link action. Every cards, every canvas and every board in Kerika has a unique address, and using these URLs anywhere on a board, e.g. in the board’s details or chat, will automatically set up a link between the two cards.
When you mark a card as “read” on this View, it remains on the View until you click on the Refresh button (shown at the top-right corner of the View).
And, as with all Views in Kerika, the What’s New and Updated View includes the “For Me” toggle button on the top-right corner: clicking this will quickly filter the View to show you just those items that are personally assigned to you.
This feature is available to all our users, just like every other feature in Kerika: it doesn’t matter whether you are still in your 30-day free trial, you are working on the free Individual Plan, or are benefiting from Kerika’s free Academic and Nonprofits Accounts. Everyone always get the same Kerika goodies :-)
We have offered free accounts to small nonprofits and schools/universities from the very beginning of Kerika’s existence, but this was always on an ad hoc basis: someone would occasionally ask us for a free account for their school or nonprofit team, and we would agree.
Looking back, we found that we agreed to almost 99% of all the requests that ever came to us: the only situations where we turned someone down were
With these caveats aside, we have tried to be very generous and helpful for small organizations that are doing philanthropic work, or are schools.
But our old process for dealing with these requests was really haphazard, and when we implemented our new billing system and improved account management features, we also made it easier for us to grant nonprofit status to a much larger group of organizations, providing they are small teams.
Our new process makes everything much easier for schools and nonprofits: we are whitelisting entire domains so that everyone from that domain who signs up automatically gets a free Academic & Nonprofit Account.
This means that only person ever needs to make a request on behalf of a school or university: if that gets approved, we will approve it for everyone from that school/university.
With a free Academic/Nonprofit Account you can have up to 10 people working on boards owned by that account: it doesn’t matter how many boards you have, or how big these boards are.
If you need more than 10 people, you will need to sign up for a Professional Account, which is $7 per user, per month (normally billed annually, as $84 per user).
Here’s a partial list of schools and universities we have already whitelisted for free service:
Among small nonprofits we have whitelisted:
(Update Oct 12, 2018: we did a better sort of the list, to be purely alphabetical by organization name.)
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.
Yesterday we had our first instance of “leaver’s regret”: someone asked us to delete their Kerika account, and we acted promptly upon receiving that request.
Too promptly, as it turned out, because a couple of minutes the ex-user changed her mind. But by then it was too late: we had completed closed her account and deleted all the associated data.
Maybe we should be a little slower in responding to these requests? Deleting/closing an account is an irreversible action: we scrub all the boards owned by that account, and we don’t have any way of getting that data back. Our goal in implementing this process was to be very faithful to our privacy promises, namely that your data remains your data; it’s never Kerika’s data.
But, faced with this leaver’s regret situation, we are now thinking that maybe we should wait, for up to a day, before acting on these requests.
What do you think?
We have been offering free Kerika Accounts to schools and universities for many years now, and we have made this easier and more broadly available.
A free Academic Account lets the Account Owner have up to 10 Team Members working on boards owned by that Account, and this service is really intended to help small nonprofit groups benefit from Kerika.
With our new billing system we have added an admin feature that let’s Kerika staff whitelist an entire domain as Academic, which means that all accounts created within that domain will automatically get free Academic status.
If your school or college wants to use Kerika, let us know: we have already whitelisted dozens of domains.
For some time now we have offered the ability for you to hide entire columns on a Task Board or Scrum Board; we are now extending that to Views as well:
In the example shown above, several columns are hidden in this What Needs Attention view, and Kerika shows a count of how many items are hidden in each column.
This feature is available through the Column Actions button that’s at the top of each column:
This can help you focus in on specific work items that need more attention than others.
We have made a small usability tweak/improvement to handle the (rare!) situation where you are part of someone’s Account, but for some reason the Account Owner is no longer sharing any boards with you.
To make this clearer, we are now showing a helpful message:
