SwiftKanban goes bigger and better with the 8.0 release. With this release, we are delighted to announce some exciting new features that truly enhance the core competencies of a Lean-Agile team and help it achieve true business agility. Beginning with a refreshing new UI in Card layout, user-friendly Card Designer, better, more effective Portfolio Management, to powerful new Collaboration capabilities through the integration with Zapier, here are a lot of things we’d like to talk about in this new release.

Introducing New Card Layout

SwiftKanban introduces a new card layout with distinctive icons, enhanced color, better layout, and more user-friendly features to give a new look and feel to your Kanban Board. With the new card layout, we have offered you the following capabilities:

• An aesthetically pleasing new card layout with refreshing icons, better spacing, and easy interaction across all screens in SwiftKanban.
• A Unified, single tab in a card to create and view its Parent-child hierarchy, Traceability (previously known as Other Links), and Dependency links.
• Visually enhanced Parent-child Hierarchy view where you can now view the hierarchy both in graphical and list view.
• An enhanced Traceability view (Alternatively known as Other Links in old card layout), where you, along with an existing card, can now also add a new card while setting the traceability link.
• The new Dependency view where you get clear visibility of a card’s dependency on others as a Predecessor or Successor.
• Board Zoom level reduced to four only to ensure you maneuver less to get the flexibility of viewing more or less of cards.
• Cards on the Kanban Board look more compact as their height is auto-adjusted based on the number of attributes, flags, and actions shown in them.
• The Description field of the Card can now be maximized for better visibility. The Card ID and Title are also now visible across all tabs.

If you want the comfort of the current look and feel, you can switch back for now, and give us feedback on how you’d like us to improve the UI.

Please visit this page to learn about all the new improvements in the Card Layout feature.

Note: New Card Layout is currently in Beta mode.

Introducing the New Card Designer

Get more flexibility in designing the layout of a card in the newly introduced card designer. The new card designer helps you add two new attributes Child % Progress and Card % Progress as well as the existing attributes to your card sticky. Also, the icons (to be shown on a card) are now categorized as Flags and Actions Items in the card designer so that you can add them to either top or bottom of the card sticky as per your requirement and make it “easy-to-work-on”. Learn more about it from this page.

Unleashing More Power to Portfolio Kanban

We have made the overall “Portfolio Kanban” capabilities of SwiftKanban even more powerful. with the introduction of these features:

• Controlling Card Progress calculation at a more granular level with more options.
• Separating the card’s % progress from its child cards’ progress – for powerful portfolio reporting!
• Configuring the Portfolio Lane with more options to compute Parent Card progress.
• Introduction of the Portfolio Column – a % Progress Column – that enables greater sophistication and control on visualizing your Portfolio (or any higher) level Processes.

Card % Progress and its Child % Progress

SwiftKanban’s Card Hierarchy and Progress % calculation become more powerful with two specific attributes – “Card % Progress” and “Child % Progress”.  This lets you model even more sophisticated processes, where a card’s progress is not only measured by the % of its children cards’ progress but other things such as the card’s own To-Do’s or Effort completion if you need!

Now, every card in a hierarchy will have its own % progress attribute called Card % Progress, and a child card % progress attribute called Child % Progress. Together, they will provide a more comprehensive picture of a card’s own progress as well as the progress of its children’s cards.  What’s more, you can now use this to measure and visualize the progress of a parent card not only in a “Portfolio Lane” but also in a standard lane as it makes its way across the lane.  You could even use a combination of a “% Progress Column” (think of it as a “Portfolio Column”!) included in a default swim lane with a workflow.  More details about the “% Progress Column” are provided further down in this document.

Each of these attributes will display the value on the card based on the calculation preference selected for each of their card types. As of now, we have four preferences for the Card % Progress and three for the Child % Progress. For further information related to the attributes and their preferences, see this page.

Enhancing the Card Progress Preference in Portfolio Swimlane

Earlier to visually check the % progress of cards using Portfolio lane were based on Hierarchy (Parent card % progress based on the child cards’ completion status), To-Do (Based on its To-Do’s), Child Cards To-Do (Based on To-Do’s of its Immediate Child Cards), and Manual (Based on the value set in the Progress field of a card) options.

Since the progress of a task may be determined by a combination of factors – such as the progress of its sub-tasks, its progress along a specific workflow, or a combination thereof, we have enhanced the Portfolio Lane settings.

The introduction of two new attributes – Card % Progress and Child % Progress – in a card has made it possible to have the cards move in the Portfolio lane as per the selected Percent Progress Type option. For more information related to this enhancement, see this page.

Note: Portfolio lane is available to SwiftKanban Enterprise License subscribers.

Introducing Percent Progress Column in a Default Lane

Similar to Portfolio lane, you can also define a specific column of a default (non-portfolio) Swimlane to be a Percent Progress Column. You can use it to visualize and manage cards in a particular column. If any of the stages of your value-stream or lane requires a card to be managed and moved based on portfolio, then you can simply convert that stage or column into a Percent Progress Column.

Existing Portfolio Lane users, you can convert your existing Portfolio Lanes to “Default Lanes” and then convert their In-Progress Column to a % Progress Column!! This way, you can now add additional columns to your “erstwhile” Portfolio Lanes.

For further information related to this new feature, click here.

Note: It is a part of the Portfolio Swimlane license. So, if you have that license, you can also use the Percent Progress Column feature.

Powerful New Collaboration and Workflow Automation

With Remote and Distributed teams becoming more and more common, we have dramatically enhanced our collaboration and workflow automation capability with integration to Zapier.

Teams use a variety of tools to collaborate with each other and to manage their work.  These include email, tasks, calendars, chat, and remote meeting tools.

With Zapier, you can now build your own “zaps” to automatically create or update cards on your Kanban boards from your email, calendar, or task management tool.  And vice versa!

Zapier Integration

Have you ever wanted to create a card on your Kanban board based on an email or calendar invite you received? Have you ever wanted to create a task on your calendar from a card you are assigned to on your Kanban board? With Zapier integration, now you can do just that. Zapier supports over 2000 applications – and SwiftKanban is now one of them!

For example, you can automate a few actions in SwiftKanban like the card is automatically getting added every time you receive an email from your users for an enhancement or defect. Also think of a scenario, when you instantly get a notification in any other Zapier-supported application when a card is added, updated, or archived in SwiftKanban.

All these are possible when you integrate SwiftKanban with another application via Zapier and create a Zap to automate repetitive tasks. To know more about this integration, click here.

Note: Currently the SwiftKanban app is available as Beta in Zapier. If you want to try out the triggers for the SwiftKanban application in Zapier, please get in touch with us at [email protected].

Enhancements in External Work Request

• Just like for the Outlook Windows app, you can now raise External Work Requests directly from your Web Outlook account by adding the External Work Requests (EWR) plugin to your Web Outlook. To know more about installing and using the EWR add-in, click here.
• Now, submitting your External Work Request form opened from an application or website will return you back to your application or website.
• To ease your effort of filling the External Work Request form, earlier the default values could be set for any input text fields as per your business need. Now, we have extended this capability to pre-populate even the drop-down fields in your EWR form.
• Now, you can set permissions on who can use the External Work Request form for submission of work.  This enhances the security and privacy of this feature. We have introduced a new field in the External Work Request itself to enter the email address of the people who are allowed to use the EWR for work submission.

End of Life: IE v 8, 9 and 11

From now on, Microsoft Edge is our certified web browser and we are going to stop supporting IE 8 and 9 as they are not up to modern web standards. If you are still working on IE 11 or the previous version, then you are requested to switch to Microsoft Edge or any other supported browser to continue your hassle-free working with the application.