1. Automated card archiving
With product Update 6.8, we introduced a mechanism to ease the process of archiving completed cards. As a first step, we renamed the "Archive" column to "Ready to Archive" (the folded column on the right side of the board).
When cards are moved in the "Ready to Archive" column, they will be automatically archived 7 days later. This prevents your board from getting cluttered and improves the overall system performance.
Important: To prevent mass archive of existing cards without prior notification, the automatic archiving will start gradually at Saturday, 10th of Nov, 2018.
Administrators and Project managers will be able to change the auto-archiving cadence.
Expand the "Ready to Archive" column and click on the Auto Archive drop-down menu to select one of the available options:
- Archive cards in 7 days (the default behavior)
- Archive cards in 14 days
- Archive cards in 30 days
Note: The manual way of archiving cards is preserved.
2. Swimlane WIP Limit
Applying "Work in progress" limits to your workflow is one of the core Kanban practices. It helps your team to minimize context switching and focus on achieving high-quality results. In general, WIP limits are set up per column, a group of columns (CONWIP) or individual board cells. With Product Update 6.8 you will also be able to set up "Work in progress" limits per swimlane.
With the swimlane limit, you control the number of cards allowed in the "In progress" area of the board, irrespective of how many "In Progress" columns there are. This allows for allocation of capacity in accordance with your goals and demand.
For example, you can choose to invest ~60% of the team capacity in developing new features and ~40% in fixing bugs. This is achievable by setting a sample limit of 5 on the feature swimlane vs. 3 on the bugs swimlane. In the Kanban domain, this process is called "Capacity Allocation".
How to set up a swimlane limit?
To set up a Swimlane Limit -> open the Edit Workflow mode of the board
-> select the gear settings icon that belongs to the lane (1) -> enter the limit number in the box (2).
How to manage the swimlane Limit?
You can control if users are allowed or not exceeding any of the limits in your board at the top of the Edit board page.
Pro Tip: With the WIP Business rules, you can get system notifications every time when the limit is reached/exceeded or satisfies a limiting condition.
3. Google Sheets Integration with Kanbanize
With the new Google sheets integration, users will be able to export Kanbanize data in a Google spreadsheet and easily manipulate it.
To use the Kanbanize Spreadsheet Tool, follow the link below and make a copy of the spreadsheet into your own Google account:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1Jz7E9jlXKvApeRAQAZV3kfASI_Iz2611J-AM88ImjIQ/edit?usp=sharing
Fill in the required values and select which properties you want to export. Moreover, the tool allows users to easily update their boards and create new cards.
You can open and edit the file from any device using Google Drive. To get more information about the Spreadsheet tool, please check the dedicated article.
4. Integration Improvements
- A New API method is available with this release:
The "get_tasks_with_log_time" method gets details of cards that have logged time for a certain period of time.
- The enhanced APIs
- The "get_task_details" method now shows the workflow to which the item belongs
(0 – cards workflow / 1 – initiatives workflow).
- The "get_all_tasks" method now accepts optional parameters such as column, lane, section. You can use it as a filter to get cards from a specific board location.
Note: If both parameters: column and section are available -> the column will be considered with a higher priority and the section will be ignored.
- Webhooks improvement
Once you set up your webhooks, you will be notified in real-time when changes occur. With this Release -> the ID (user_ID) of the user who has made a change will be available in the webhook data.
- Feedback Form
With a simple feedback form in Kanbanize you could collect "positive" and "negative" feedback to specific cards on a board. A scenario mostly used for HelpDesk/Service teams that require customer feedback for the performed services.
5. Mobile improvements
Last month we improved our mobile apps to properly show HTML in card description. Now we go to the next level and add the same improvement to card comments and subtasks.
Dealing with long-threaded emails in card comments and getting lost!? The latest updates to our mobile apps come to the rescue! Long comments will now be collapsed by default so you can easily get an overview of a conversation. Once you find a comment you are interested in - you can expand it to get a full view.
