Thanks Michael for the response.
To respond to your specific points:
We in fact see quite a bit of use out of this. In some cases, you might not necessarily close the original entity, which is why I was suggesting the option for varied states. This allows you to do very interesting things like trace the origin of new entities to previous ones that are very similar. I think @rothnic may be wondering about similar capability with this question in fact:
There are concrete examples of this in other apps that I have found useful: Asana has a very key feature of “converting a task to a project,” and you can see how much it’s needed in Wrike right here:
Incidentally I doubt you’ll see a better example of a company not following user feedback in its own public forum anywhere if you look at that post
Aha also has a great feature - which I think is particularly relevant to you guys now that you’re putting such a focus on Product teams - and that is to convert an Idea to another entity, then link and update the original Idea as the new Entity evolves. And to answer your question Michael, Aha lets you convert to various types of entities:
…Epics, Features, or Initiatives.
So drawing from these two examples, and since my team uses Types for Projects and Ideas, we have a need to convert those entities to pretty different Types - Projects to Tasks, and in our case, we have a Type “Idea” that can be converted to just about anything, not just those three that Aha accounts for.
Since we are “all in” on Fibery, we use it for all kinds of biz management tracking, so we have things like vendor accounts, provided services, “occurrences” you name it, and we have had a need to convert any of these at times to something else. We used to use Jira, and if you know Jira well, you know that you can configure it very deeply, almost to the degree of Fibery, and the remapping / conversion is a real cornerstone feature I think when you get into some deep set-ups with a ton of “Issue Types,” the equivalent of “Types” in Fibery.
I am very glad to see the ability to bulk convert entities, that may save some more time. However, this also brings some need for, ideally, both of these features:
- writing some reference to the conversion in the comments
- Keeping a reference in Activity Stream that the entity originated via conversion from another Entity
…because you could have, say, a list of 15 entities you convert. I think it could get hard, with the existing iteration of this feature, to keep track of those 15 new entities, and the 15 old, if you don’t immediately delete all the old ones. But if you don’t want to delete (and we are a team that does not want to delete as a rule), you are stuck making 15 references between the new and the old to make sure you keep traceability.
To this point:
we do have many Types that are quite different from each other, true. But we have a ton of common fields, like “business function” or “product,” things that we’d otherwise use a tag for in other tools, that cover a large range of Types. So not being able to Map them means we are stuck with a lot of manual work.
So I hope that’s useful. Really think you guys have a bunch of deep potential with this feature, including when automations come out the ability to map workflows to keep “linked” entities automatically tracking when the related entity moves in its workflow. This is what Aha does with its Idea feature, and you guys can easily emulate this. It’s a powerful feature I’d love to see in Fibery, in fact I already wrote about it!: