Addressing Fibery's gap in managing unstructured knowledge

The point that Fibery seems to be missing is that knowledge sharing implies dealing with a lot of unstructured information. This kind of information is typically shared across teams through notes.

Notes are pieces of text that might also include some structured information (e.g. author, date, workflow status), but essentially, they are text. If Fibery truly wants to be the operating system for teams (as I would like it to be for my team), unstructured information must be treated as a first-class citizen.

This brings us to the need for a robust text editor, one that is at least as good as the competition. Take for example, Evernote, Joplin, Notion, or Obsidian — all of these tools manage unstructured knowledge well, and crucially, they all have text editors that are significantly more advanced than what Fibery currently offers.

In this context, essential features like * find and replace, * sort and move text through keyboard shortcuts, * apply highlights via keyboard shortcuts, and others, are basic functions that users rightfully expect from a decent text editor.

At the moment, we have powerful features like links and backlinks, but I cannot even search for a word within a note. It’s akin to having a high-tech movie room in your house but no toilet.

I wonder if Fibery should consider integrating a ready-made text editor (there must be plenty available) instead of struggling to build every single function from scratch.

Here are a couple of examples from my experience:

Case 1: We start a new project, and a team member is tasked with conducting research, summarising findings, and sharing them with the team. This involves writing a set of notes — maybe 10 or 20 — and sharing them with the group.

Case 2: We have an internal wiki, similar to the logic of Fibery’s online help. It includes a lot of information ranging from email templates to IT system configuration notes, and much more.

In both cases, the notes are database entities with a RTF field that includes the bulk of the information. However, writing those texts using the current Fibery editor is painful because it lacks basic text editing features. My take is that in Fibery the RTF editor should be as good as any other RTF/markdown editor.

IMHO, Fibery should aim to be the best of both worlds: seamlessly integrating structured and unstructured knowledge. This is the only way to comprehensively meet the needs of all teams, without forcing them to choose a compromise between structured and unstructured knowledge management. For context, I have been struggling for months with whether to stick with Notion or fully commit to Fibery, just because of this gap, and eventually made the decision to stay with Fibery.

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Thanks for the feedback.
I think you should consider adding feature requests for specific things, in order to allow others to cast votes on what they value, or adding your vote/comments to existing topics that might be close/related e.g.

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Interestingly, none of the features above are popular requests (so far?). Moving text is relatively popular in lists only.

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@mdubakov

Maybe because the current focus is on structured knowledge. But, as I said before, IMHO Fibery should (and could) aim to be the best of both worlds - seamlessly integrating structured and unstructured knowledge. Remeber your writeup “Augmenting organizational intelligence”? Reading that article was a game changer for me.

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In general I support the concept here - better support for “unstructured” knowledge and how to transform that into valuable insight, etc. But I think that has very, very little to do with deficiencies in the text editor, so that part confuses me quite a bit. And some of this is supported just natively via the fact that Fibery is a web app, so e.g. text search (word within a note) works on-page. Maybe you mean search an entire database of notes for a specific word? That is also available, but I’d agree there are some deficiencies in the implementation, but that’s a more specific feature request to make or upvote.

Anyway, if nothing else I guess this “feature request” might be clearer if renamed something like “Improvements to Rich Text editor” because it seems more about that than “managing unstructured knowledge”.

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