All posts by user

You can’t change the extension on a document

We have made a change to the Card and Board Attachments feature to prevent users from changing the extension of a file they have already added: for example, a “.xlsx” file can’t be renamed as a “.docx” file.

We did this because changing the file type often had unpredictable consequences when a Team Member tried to upload an attachment.

This restriction applies to the most common file types, not all. Here’s how it works:

Image file attachment
Image file attachment

In the example above, an image has been added as an attachment to this card, and it has the .PNG file type/extension.

When you hover your mouse over any attachment, Kerika will show you the actions that are possible with that attachment, one of them being Rename.

Attachment options
Attachment options

If you select Rename, Kerika will make sure you only change the file name, not the file type/extension (.PNG in this example):

Renaming a document
Renaming a document

Whitelisting Kerika’s email notifications

In an effort to reduce the possibility of Kerika’s notifications ending up in your spam folder, we are making a bunch of changes: one that’s already gone into effect is that all notifications generated by Kerika — for example, when someone sends you a chat message, or you get your 6AM Task Summary email — will come from the same sender: notifications@mailer.kerika.com.

It would help us a lot if you whitelisted this sender email, either for your own personal email, or ideally for your organization’s entire domain.

Thanks.

 

Consolidating multiple accounts within an organization

With the implementation of our shiny, new and fully automated billing system, it’s become a little more important for our customers to make sure that all the users within their organization are working in the right accounts — preferably, a single account.

Working in a single account, rather than a bunch of separate accounts, has advantages:

  1. It makes it much easier to pay for subscriptions: if all the Kerika users within a  department are working on boards owned by a single account, then only that account needs to purchase subscriptions.  This means less invoicing and payment stuff for you to worry about.
  2. It also ensures that all project assets — boards, documents, canvases, etc. — are owned by a single entity. And ideally this single entity would be a service account rather than an individual.  Many of our customers are using service accounts, set up using emails like kerika@example.com.

We have done a ton of improvements to the new user sign-up process to help guide people to working with their coworkers, using accounts that the coworkers have already set up, instead of creating new accounts.

But, there are still situations where an organization may find that, across all of its Kerika users, there are too many different accounts.  If this is the case for you, we can help: we can consolidate multiple accounts into a single account if you ask us.

This consolidation preserves all the existing boards, content, and project teams: it just changes the ownership of everything to be a single user ID.

Let us know if we can help you with this.

The 6AM Task Summary Email is back

We used to have a feature that let you get a task summary email from Kerika everyday at 6AM that summarized all the things that you were responsible for that are overdue, due this week or due next week.

When we introduced the Views feature, we thought perhaps this 6AM email was not needed any more, so we took it out of the user interface for a few months — although people who had previously been using this feature continued to get their daily emails.

It seems like we underestimated the usefulness of this feature: new users started asking for something just like it, so we have brought the feature back. (And thanks for helping us understand we had screwed up in taking it away.)

You can access this feature from your Preferences page:

Daily Task Reminder Preference
Daily Task Reminder Preference

“Responsible for” includes not just the items that were assigned to you, but also items on boards where you are a Board Admin (and, presumably, have some responsibility for.)

This email can show your tasks organized in two different ways, and, if you like, you can get both sent to you every day:

6AM Task Summary Options
6AM Task Summary Options

A typical task summary, where tasks are grouped by date, would look like this:

Example of 6AM Task Summary
Example of 6AM Task Summary

The board names and card names are also links that you can use to open the relevant work item.

Enjoy, again.

 

 

So long, Internet Explorer 11

We cannot continue to support Internet Explorer 11 any more, for the simple reason that Microsoft itself doesn’t want to support IE 11 any more.

All of Microsoft’s browser focus is on their Edge browser, which means that as newer HTML5 features and standards get adopted by the browsers, these are going to show up in Edge, not IE 11.

And since Kerika is a pure Web app, one that requires you to download no software of any kind, including browser add-ons and plug-ins, we really need to make use of the latest HTML5 goodies that the browser vendors provide.

These goodies are going to be available only on Chrome, Firefox, Safari and Edge, and that’s where Kerika is gong to work best.

An improved way of moving boards from one Account to another

As part of our next release, which will include a new billing system, we will make it easier for you to move boards that you own to another account.

This can help in several scenarios:

  • If someone is leaving a team, it’s good practice to have their boards transferred to someone who will remain, so that ownership of project assets — the boards and all the content in the boards, including documents — remains with the team.
  • More importantly, it is good practice to stay away from having individuals own boards, and instead use service accounts to be the single Account Owner in your organization.

A service account is an omnibus account, typically set up with an email address like kerika@example.org, that isn’t associated with a single individual.  A service account will never quit, never get fired, or take a vacation because a service account is not a real person — it is simply an account/ID used to be the permanent, omnipresent, owner of project assets so that team turnover doesn’t disrupt anyone.

If you own a board, you can move it to another account, i.e. effective change its ownership, by selecting the board on your Account’s Home, and clicking on the Board Actions button which appears on the top-right corner of the board card:

Board Actions Menu
Board Actions Menu

This will bring up a small menu of actions that are available to us as the board’s current owner:

Board Actions
Board Actions

(Note: this menu can also be accessed using the right mouse button.)

When you select the Move to another Account action from this menu, we will present you with this new dialog box:

Move Board dialog
Move Board dialog

A list of “known collaborators” is presented to you by Kerika to make it easy to select a coworker with a single mouse click, but you can also move the board to someone else, who isn’t part of your current Kerika collaboration network.

If you type in an email address, Kerika will immediately check to see whether this email address is that of a known Kerika user, before letting you proceed further:

Checking if new owner is a Kerika user
Checking if new owner is a Kerika user

We think these improvements will make it easier for our users to manage their organizations boards, and move towards consolidated ownership for easier asset management.