Recent Posts
- Enter the title field of a new cards in new taskboard without conflict.
- Non-administrator users in Basic Edition no longer get error when accessing Cycle Time Chart.
- The number of available task-board categories are now in the associated menu.
- Snapshots can now recognize certain international characters (Cryllic, Simple Chinese, etc.).
- Comment counter number on card updating properly all the time.
- Default image presented when Download Snapshot selected on brand new boards (and the thumbnail processor has not generated image).
- Card Distribution by Current User chart will continue to show properly in “3D” after parameter change/data refresh.
- Edit activity types.
- IE browsers: can now pop out graphics in the Organizational Dashboard without an error and failure to render; will keep all information in title of a card when you click in the field; won’t present an error at first board export attempt.
- Seamless Value Delivery: With increased ability to deliver more and more value with no service disruption, you won’t have to worry about scheduled downtime. We can apply system patches, upgrades and fixes while the application is running. This means no adjusting your schedule around our maintenance timeline, you’ll be able to access the application anytime – day or night.
- Faster Issue Resolution: When network, load, or application problems/issues arise they can be resolved far more quickly since there won’t be a need for a window of downtime. We’ll be able to apply “the fix” whenever it’s ready.
- More Consistent Transaction Processing: You will be able see your work actions flow through the application with an even more dependable transaction speed because processing is now spread across multiple servers. No matter how many users are working on the application, the system won’t get bogged down; we’ll keep up with your fast fingertips.
- Enhanced Application Performance: You will see improved board load times. This is due to the implementation of better data caching strategies. As the roll out of web acceleration and content delivery networks (CDNs) occurs over the next few weeks, you will see continuously improving load times for all application pages.
- Increased Data Safety: We increased our Disaster Recovery (DR) capacity to manage a full fail-over for all accounts. Also, we supplemented our current backup and data retention policies to ensure the security and availability of your data.
- Enriched Security: You will be able to take advantage of the latest security best practices and guidelines since moving to a new environment allows us to build from the ground up. Our servers have the latest industry promoted security guidelines with highly restricted database access. Additional safe-guards come in the form of Cisco based firewalls, secure IP addresses and limited port access. Fort Knox type lockdown here.
- Nearly Infinite Capacity: We’ll keep adding new customers and you can keep adding new users; you won’t see the slightest blip on the radar since our ability to scale is off the charts.
- Aligned chart date format with account setting format to ensure appropriate translation of date information
- Resolved archive cards ‘permalink’ functionality (find permalink in advanced settings – takes you to the card on the board) so that the archived card now opens when you click on the permalink. To ensure speedy retrieval of these cards, the entire card archive does not open in this process.
- Removed task-board Unsaved Changes warning for task-boards that had not been changed
- Fixed the archive cabinet card count to align with the export of cards count
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- Tags: Enhancements, Improvements, LeanKit
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- Tags: integration, visibility
- Users had requested that we display the current number of cards/card size total when hovering over the lane, not just when hovering over the lane header. Now we do.
- If a card has a parent card (for Portfolio Edition customers) you now see the parent card when looking at the card edit dialog.
- You can now asssign a parent card via the right click menu
- If you opened and closed the archive during the process of editing a board, sometimes the last lane on the main board wrapped to the bottom of the screen. That’s now fixed.
- Sometimes icons from the parent card were showing “through” when you opened a task board
- When drilling through from a parent card on one board to see its child cards on another board, the view is supposed to be filtered to highlight only those cards that are children. In some cases, a user’s other previously-set filters were also being applied at the same time.
- We fixed an issue with the GetCardById API call where we were returning the wrong status code.
- We handled some issues with wrapping of lanes depending on how far in/out you were zoomed in the Google Chrome browser
- We made the system display properly in IE 10
- We corrected an issue with file attachment downloads in IE 8
- We dealt with an issue with persistent cross-site scripting. So far as we know this was never exploited maliciously. Just something uncovered in an external security audit. We’re constantly working to ensure the security of your data.
- We also closed a very small security issue related to phishing – content spoofing
- We blocked users from uploading executable files and created a back-end admin tool for blocking specific file types upon customer request.
- We can now turn-off the RSS feed through our back-end admin tool for customers whose security departments don’t like this feature. We’ve already been able to do this for file attachments.
April Application Enhancements
13 May 2013You know what they say about April showers? Well, April was a busy month here at LeanKit. Along with the effort to move to a state of the art infrastructure, many new features made an appearance. Here is a rundown of the application enhancements that made the cut for April 2013, making for a brighter May:
Drag Your Boards
This allows you to move up, down and side-to-side within boards with your mouse arrow rather than using the scroll bars. You can naviage your boards more quickly… Try it out!
Collapsible Horizontal Lanes & Card Counts
Collapsible lanes are handy when you want to focus on a specific section of the board, but that helpful feature was easy to miss. Now you will see an indicator (<<) on the lane headers to show that collapsing is available. There is also a new total count of cards within the header of the lane that is collapsed – great for fast assessment of work-levels.
Quick User Assign/Un-Assign, Bulk User Un-Assign
Since being able to see who is assigned to what work on your board is so important, we continue to work on ensuring the best way to manage user assignment. When you right-click on a card, you’ll be able to assign and un-assign users on the fly – no more pop-up screen. Users that you commonly interact with will appear as the first quick selection options. You can also un-assign all users at once, in bulk, if you need to.
Clone Your Existing Cards
Now you can create a new card by copying from an existing one. Yep! Just right-click to access the new copy feature. Once created, the new card opens in edit mode with all of the attributes from the original card. Simply update your new card and press ‘save’ (and save even more time).
Calculate Task-board Percentages Using Card Size
Percentage complete is now calculated off of the size of the cards within the task-board for a more accurate completion rate. Don’t fret if using card size is not your thing – we set the default card size to ‘1’.
Choose Board Templates
When you need to create a new board, check out the template options (New Board > From Template). The template selection is redesigned with more room for a description of the template and a zoom in/out feature to help you see how the board lanes are configured.
New API Call: Get Content of Archive By Date
/API/Board/{BoardId}/ArchiveRecent/?numberofdays=X, where X can be no greater than 60. Don’t worry if this one doesn’t make complete sense… there are lots of folks out there that will appreciate it on your behalf.
Notable Fixes Implemented in April 2013:
If you think of an application as a tree, then the customers utilizing that application could represent the leaves. The infrastructure, or root system, that supports the tree is responsible for continuous delivery of nourishment to the leaves. Regardless of where those leaves grow, close to the trunk (here in Nashville, TN) or on a far reaching branch (we have customers all over the world), the timely delivery of new features and exceptional application quality is critical to being a healthy tree with vibrant, shiny leaves.
LeanKit is a rapidly growing company with new customers consistently sprouting in all areas of the globe. Fortunately, our growth was not noticeable in terms of diminished application health or performance, and we wanted to keep it that way. In order to ensure the best kanban software scalability for our customers, we embarked upon a massive infrastructure redesign effort and implemented an entirely new architecture. This enterprise class environment enables us to be more flexible and allows us to continuously deliver value to our customers.
The new application infrastructure, in place as of mid-April, includes: load balanced and virtualized servers, increased disaster recovery capacity and no single points of failure. Here’s a rundown of what all of that means for you…
Wherever your leaf is on our tree, we assure you that we are able to continue to deliver what you need, when you need it. Thanks for growing with us.
Keeping LeanKit Snazzy
19 Mar 2013March Enhancements & Bug Fix Details
There are many translations for BIMP – some that are quite hilarious. But at LeanKit BIMP means “Bugs and Improvements” or things we’re doing to keep LeanKit snazzy. As Alex mentioned in his last blog post, here at LeanKit we “eat our own dog food” and would not have it any other way. Since we use our own tool, we have all kinds of ideas regarding ways to continuously improve LeanKit functionality. We are also very fortunate to have customers that share their great ideas with us (thanks everyone!).
Our leadership and technical teams work hard to take all of those great ideas into account and make them a reality by moving them from the Backlog and into the To Do and Doing lanes. Here are the Done Enhancements, released mid-March:
Introduced ‘Shrinking’ Icons
For those of us that love to load up on the card icons, we have an improvement to ensure at-a-glance card status is not compromised. Instead of the icons wrapping around the card, they will just decrease in size (when there are more than 5) to make room for more!
Improved Assigned User Visibility
When you go to the assigned users section of a card, users assigned to the card are now grouped at the top of the list. Users that are not assigned to the card have shifted to the lower section of the list. Makes sense, right?
Added Password Change Functionality
There is a new confirmation message so you know when you’re done with your password change. Speaking of password changes, there’s now a ‘modal’ (small pop-up window) that sits over your home page for you to quickly manage your password.
Included Spinners
Yes, “spinny” things are visual… So, we naturally enjoy them and hope they help you too. Now, there is a small spinner next to the term “Loading” when you are in settings and when opening a board.
Clarified In-App Purchase Process
We want to keep everything simple and clear, so we replaced the term upgrade with purchase.
Enabled Browser Spellcheck
Spillchuck, er spellcheck, is now available in card editor fields that contain a formatting toolbar.
Removed Subscribe Redundancy
Instead of Subscribe > Email Subscribe, it now reads Subscribe > Email. Yes, it’s a bit picky… right on.
Adjusted Hostname Structure
Now we only allow letters, numbers and dashes in a hostname; this eliminates IE browser issues with underscores in a URL.
These are the bug fixes that we included in Mid-March release:
More Visibility, Easier
The volume of tools in use during an average day can be daunting – calendars, lists, email and project tools, just to name a few. Using multiple tools/business applications is a reality most of us have accepted and maybe even embraced (is there an app for that yet?). But using multiple applications should not introduce inefficiency in our work while maintaining visibility and simplicity.
Those that work on multiple projects, with multiple teams, or interact within or cross-organizationally have to maintain information in the multiple applications to ensure transparency and foster collaboration. The more complex the system of non-integrated applications, the more likely it is for our work to be inefficient and our re-typing to be error prone. LeanKit has partnered with Zapier to help provide a way to allow simple drag and drop application integration to/from LeanKit to assist us all with this difficult conundrum.
With Zapier’s automated online integration tool, the project and task information you manage in other business applications for communication/meeting management (Google, GoToMeeting), CRM (Salesforce, Zendesk) or marketing automation (Emma, HubSpot) can be consolidated and made visible in LeanKit. Likewise, your business applications can automatically reflect updates made to your LeanKit project boards. And that’s just scratching the visibility and simplicity surface.
Zapier has over 180 online service application integrations to choose from; check out all of the apps here. There is no coding to get the LeanKit integration started – we’ve already done that for you – allowing for quick set-up of your origin/destination business application and associated update settings. Should you want to try Zapier out (a.k.a. getting Zapped!), they’ve provided a special offer. Zapier’s recent blog about Automated Project Management with LeanKit also has more great information.
Be sure to sign up for a free trial of LeanKit if you have not experienced our Instant Project Visibility.
Continuous Delivery? Check.
As you may know, LeanKit is growing in many directions. With each passing day we add happy customers, rock star employees (we’re hiring!), and (most importantly) new ways to harness the power of visual management. As our team grows, we gain more capacity to explore and deliver tools that help users get the most out of LeanKit. While we may be running out of office space, our frequency of improvements and volume of added new features will only continue to expand.
We use LeanKit to manage our own work, so you better believe that we have digital Kanban boards from floor to ceiling (seriously, we’re running out of wall space). That being said, an improvement to LeanKit enhances not only our customer’s workflow tool, but ours as well. We are constantly exploring new ways and tools that compliment our software (See our recent blog post: The Future of Visual Management).
Simplicity is key…understanding daily status and progress should require a glance, not a meeting. So, when you’ve finished browsing through our recently polished website, LeanKit.com, take a second to scan through the improvements and additions that we have made to our system, just for you (…but also for us!)
New Features / Enhancements
Move Cards Between Boards
Your wish is our command! Portfolio Edition users in LeanKit can now move a card from one board to another. Feel free to pass work from one team to the next, move a card from Project A to Project B, or transfer an item from your “planning” board to your “In Process” board. Start with a right-click of the mouse (or by hovering over the drop down menu) on any card, and proceed to move cards to and from any board that you have ‘user’ (or above) permission to.
Card Color Picker
So maybe you needed more than 16 different colors for your card types, or maybe you weren’t satisfied with the ones that we provided…whatever the reason, you spoke and we listened! We have added the ability for you to use a color palate when specifying the color of a card type. Feel free to use Periwinkle, Banana Cream, or even Lavender as the color of a card…we recommend refraining from black (unless you don’t need to read the text on the card!)
New Help/Contact Tabs
Have a question about LeanKit? No problem! We’ve now added a simple to use help tab on both our public website and within our app (Hey look! There it is –>)! Clicking on one of these tabs will give you direct access to our knowledge base as well as the ability to contact one of our friendly LeanKit gurus. Like giving positive feedback? We’re happy to receive that too…so submit away!
Hover Menus 2.0 (For those who can’t right-click)
Contrary to popular belief, Mac users CAN right click (so stop picking on us!). However, for those who are using a SMART TV or any other device where right clicking is burdensome or impossible, we have added the ability for users to simply hover over a lane title or the left side of a card to open up the “right-click” dropdown menu. These shortcuts make it easy to quickly perform certain actions such as moving, editing, or adding cards. (This feature has been out for some time now, and we admit that it needed some tweaking. We have added some features to make it less prominent and the ability to disable it for those who want to keep things old school).
IE 8 Improvements
Do you use Internet Explorer 8? If you answered yes, not to worry, we’re here for you. Some of our customers running IE 8 have been experiencing various issues when using LeanKit (i.e. adding attachments, or improper wrapping of lanes) and we’ve been working hard to standardize our user experience for all browsers that we support. Do we recommend that you use IE 9 or above? Yes. Do we understand that IE 8 is the only option for some of you? Yes (and we sympathize). But regardless, we’ve made a bunch of tweaks so that things run smoothly on IE 8. Please let us know if you find anything that we may have overlooked!
Improvements To Analytics
Graphs and charts are meant to be pretty and colorful. We’re cleaning up our analytics section to look a bit less intimidating. Just because it’s a super-powerful data-crunching machine doesn’t mean that you should need a degree to navigate through it! In addition, our analytics will now save your user’s last request, so if you set a specific date range for a cycle time diagram or had previously explored a burn-up chart for a specific set of child cards of a parent project, expect to see your settings right where you left them when you return to that page.
Security Improvements
Good news for admins! We now offer the ability to set strong passwords (requiring either a number of characters, the inclusion of 0-9, or special characters) and lockout user accounts after a number of failed attempts to log in. These settings are found in the organizational settings ‘gear’ located on the home scree (where all of your boards are pictured).
Additional Minor Fixes:
-Decreased duration of time when opening the card edit dialog
-Default date format set to “Month/Day/Year”
-User can no longer disable him/herself
-User who is the ‘Account Owner’ cannot be disabled
-Issues pertaining to card comments and lane notifications
-401 statuses for API calls
-Cards in Taskboards will keep their lane position until physically moved
-Hover menus for lanes have an increased delay, and can be disabled in board preferences
At LeanKit, we’re firm believers in practicing what we preach. The core product that we build is software that allows our customers to create kanban-style boards for managing teams and projects. We think it’s a pretty great tool, and we’re always working to make it better. But, we know that a tool is only as good as the process it supports. Using LeanKit by itself won’t magically make your team better. Using LeanKit to effectively implement Lean-Agile management practices with good technical practices in a healthy, supportive working environment can work wonders.
We’re active participants in the Lean-Agile “community”, going to a lot of events. Of course, part of that is because we have a product to sell. But we are also keenly interested in the latest ideas from community thought-leaders. And we want to see and hear how customers and potential customers are “doing” kanban effectively. That informs our product development, we incorporate those ideas into how we run LeanKit as a company, and we like to share back to the community our experiences as a kanban team.
Which brings us to the future of visual management. A kanban board works best if the team sees it all the time. A whiteboard with sticky notes does that automatically – at least for the people in the room. It doesn’t work so well for a distributed team. An electronic system like LeanKit solves that problem. But you run the risk of the board becoming a status reporting system that people look at occasionally rather than an always-visible information radiator and hub for collaboration.
So how do you get the best of both worlds?
We’ve long thought that the answer lay in interacting with LeanKit via a large screen TV. We’ve seen customers use giant, smart touchscreens like those from Smart Technologies. They’re awesome products made by a great company and, we think, well worth it if you can afford them. But not every departmental manager can justify that kind of capital investment. So, we’ve experimented with retail-available touchscreens like the HP Touchsmarts connected to a normal computer. A very nice option, but still fairly expensive, say $3-4,000 for a screen and computer. More than we felt comfortable recommending to most customers as a real-world actionable solution.
A plain old big-screen LCD is great as a pure information radiator. You can get a 50-inch for about $600 on Amazon. Since a big screen will last years, you’re really talking about 50 cents a day in cost. That should be very do-able if you think about the hourly labor-rate for most of the teams doing kanban and/or the value of the products they produce. But what about interactivity. The touchscreens may be expensive but they let you move cards on your LeanKit board – not just view them.
I can hook up a computer to the LCD, but the cost for a real PC seems a bit much for a screen I only occasionally interact with. And the user interface is a little clumsy for interacting with the board on the screen. Do you put a desk in front of the screen where you move the mouse? Not practical.
Enter the smart TVs
For those who haven’t seen one yet, a smart TV combines (obviously) a TV with a decent-but-not-over-the-top computer processor, integrated WiFi and web browsing, and point-and-click/drag-and-drop interaction with the screen. You can get this included in newer TVs or you can buy add-on devices that plug-in to a TV. We’ve tried several models and found we liked the LG G2′s as the best example of an integrated device and the Sony Internet Player with Google TV as the best of the add-on options. The integrated device has the benefit of uber-simplicty. Buy it. Hang it on the wall. Plug it in. Go. And they’re not too expensive. About $1,500 for the 55-inch.
We’ve found, however, that we prefer the Sony add-on device. First, they’re definitely cheaper, about $150 plus the TV. So $800 total cost using the Panasonic 50-inch we mentioned above. We also prefer the style of remote that comes with them. The LG’s have a point-and-click Wii-mote style controller. That’s intuitive but a little touchy for fine-grained movements of a mouse. The Sony has more of a touchpad controller, like your laptops only in the palm of your hand. Both controllers have a full QWERTY keyboard on the back. And, even though they are an add-on, all you have to do is plug them into HDMI port of the TV. The remote is even easily programmable to replace the TV remote. The extra install time relative to the LG was measured in minutes.
Making things even better, you can connect other peripherals to the TV through the Sony box. In the picture you see with this story we’ve got a Logitech Skype webcam connected to the TV (just a 42-inch in this case, a new 50-inch arrives later this week) through our Sony box. This allows us to have always-on HD video conferencing between our teams in multiple locations, combined with always-on interactive electronic kanban. It cost less than $1,000 per location. We installed it in minutes (minus the TV bracket) without any special skills or tools. The sales and marketing team did this, not the engineers. And you would not believe how much it improves the quality of interaction between remote teams.
If your entire team can be in the same room to work together all the time, awesome. We’re thrilled for you. But that’s a luxury most of us can’t manage. Distributed teams are reality for most of us. With the latest technology (including LeanKit!) you can retain much more of the experience of being together than ever before. And you can do it easily and cheaply. You probably don’t even need to get permission or get a special budget allocation. Order them from Amazon today. Have them installed in a few days. Start reaping the benefits immediately.
If you haven’t noticed, our pace of development has picked up a lot recently. We’ve got some awesome new team members. We’ve borrowed/adapted a great new 1-page product management approach that we heard from Mattias Skarin at Lean Kanban Central Europe. And (gasp!) we’re really limiting our WIP of “management-sponsored projects” pretty severely to force ourselves to focus and to allow slack time for inevitable interruptions and creative problem-solving space for the team. Who knew this Kanban approach worked so well?
We’re still not as fast as we’d like (could we ever be?) but better-and-better all the time. We’re now pretty consistently releasing new capabilities or non-critical bug fixes on a weekly basis. (Critical fixes go in immediately, of course.) But, we don’t want to bombard you with spam updates. So, while we’re releasing code all the time, so long as the changes don’t require you to do something right away and/or won’t create any downtime for you, we’re bundling the announcements. So, in case you haven’t noticed already, here’s what we’ve released recently:
New Features / Enhancements
Staleness Filter
You can now filter your board to show cards that have stayed in their current lane for more than a specified amount of time. It’s called the Staleness filter. The idea is to help you easily see which work is stuck in your process. It could be that, while your over-all cycle time is great, certain types of work take longer and people kind of work around them. Maybe that’s OK sometimes, but now you can see where the rocks are in your process flow and remove them if you wish.
Invitations
We’ve made it easier for you to add new users to your account. Instead of having to go into the admin screens and fill out all the information for a new user, users with the right level of permissions can invite them from the home screen or a board simply by clicking a single button (it looks like a head-and-shoulders with a plus sign), inputting one or more e-mail addresses, and clicking Send Invitation. The invitee can then fill out the rest of their information. PS You can still create users the old way.
Our First Board
We introduced a feature called Our First Board. This is a sample board, populated with sample cards that we designed to help new users more easily understand the key ideas in Kanban and the key features of LeanKit. This was designed initially for new customer accounts, but we decided to put it in the template library just in case you might find it helpful in training new users joining your LeanKit account. If you are a Basic Edition customer, the Welcome board doesn’t count toward your limit of boards.
Saving Cards with Board Templates
In the process of creating the Welcome Board, we “accidentally” added another feature, which we made available to Portfolio Edition accounts – the ability to save a set of cards when saving a board as a template and to decide whether to clone those cards when creating a new board from the template.
Each card will be recreated in the same position on the new board as on the original – unless it was in the archive. We don’t save archive cards because there can be SO many! The re-created cards will include: title, description, priority, size, card type, class of service, blocked/unblocked with reason, tags, external link, and external card ID. We don’t save/clone attachments, comments, history or due date.
We think this feature will be great for organizations that have standard tasks or deliverables that are required each time a certain type of project is done. Now you can save those standard deliverables as cards on a series of “checklist” board templates. Each time you need to do a project of a standard type you can create a drill-through board using the right template. In our world of IT, things like server builds, third Saturday maintenance, deployment checklists, Scrum planning meetings, stage gate governance reviews, etc. spring to mind. We know our friends/customers in the Lean manufacturing world are very big on standard work. Used in conjunction with lane policies, we hope this will be a powerful tool for encouraging consistent workflow without “enforcing” compliance.
Faster Board Refreshing
We changed how we handle refreshing your board with updates made by other people. “Why should I care?” you might ask. Two reason. One, this will allow our infrastructure to support many more customers. Which will keep our hardware costs down as we expand and allow us to spend that money on building cool new features instead. And two, more tangibly, it will improve the speed with which you see changes made by other people. It was already pretty fast. 5-10 seconds. Now it should be 1-2 seconds. Much nicer for a stand-up meeting. No more standing around waiting for the updated card to move! This change is being rolled out gradually to ensure system stability so it may be a little while before everyone sees the change.
And a Few More
