CHANGELOG: June 22 / Bi-directional links, performance & stability improvements

Bi-directional Links

Fibery is heading into augmenting company intelligence direction. It will unite information organization with work management. Bi-directional links is the next step into cohesive information structures and associations in Fibery. It might looks as a subtle step, but it is huge in fact.

You can freely link entities using simple mention mechanism (# key). Here is the basic example:

We use this in Fibery extensively to connect customers feedback with features, product areas with ideas, digest documents with all kind of work, meeting notes with assignments.

We will write a deeper article soon and show main use cases. So far you can mention some entity and find References section in the entity that have incoming references:

Next steps for us are linked selected text and jump to exact place in a referenced entity. Long live Ted Nelson!

Performance Improvements

  • Table View: Filters are faster on large tables
  • Table View: Single entity popup no longer freezes large table
  • Board View: Scroll is much faster on large boards

:face_with_raised_eyebrow: Stability Issue

Fibery was not stable last week. It was a mysterious problem for us and two people spent 3 days investigating the root cause, adding extensive logging and monitoring. It appeared that the problem was caused by RAM restrictions we put in place. In a nutshell, the problem was in Java GC that did not handle process well. We’ve removed the restrictions and now digging into GC settings to solve the issue once and for all.

Fixed Bugs

  • Table View: 🏃‍♂️ appears after changing a Field that’s not included in sorting
  • Table View: 🏃‍♂️ appears even if the sorting is correct
  • Formulas Editor: Autosuggest doesn’t pop up in functions on collections (Filter, Sum, Min,…)
  • Board View: Show Created By instead of User on the board view with the full mode card
4 Likes

Great to see this release and can’t wait to see the jumping to exact place! Will really help in gaining context of the reference so you won’t have to peruse the entire document to see where the incoming reference actually is!

1 Like

Awesome feature, i have quite a few use cases for it. The one I’ll be using the most I think is writing feature specs and linking tagged conversations from Intercom which I brought into Fibery, or integration entities and so on. Much better than adding relationship everywhere.

An article about this would help getting users because many of your competitors doesn’t have it and this can be a differentiator.

Just a little bug I found (I don’t want to create a new topic for this), if you edit the paragraph in which the entity is referenced after the reference is generated, it won’t update the text in the reference. For ex. write something, add the entity with # , click on the entity, wait the references list to appear, close the view, make some changes to the paragraph and open it back.

Bi-directional links do work like expected (after clearing some layers of caching).
We’ll keep you posted, how the feedback for day to day usage is!

Thumbs up guys (Ted would be proud)!

1 Like

Hey guys, since you asked here:

Our main use cases are about building a product.

We are curious to see how bi-directional links are useful in other kinds of organizations. Please share your scenarios in our community: https://t.co/pWBkpck6Mp

You'll definitely find applications (and bugs :) we haven't imagined

— Fibery (@fibery_io) June 22, 2020

My use case is meetings, super useful I have been waiting for this forever - used to try to do this in Confluence with creating links to Jira - but that was so limited as Jira only contains select Software Development work, while I can put Everything in my team’s Work Management in Fibery.

I simply create an Entity for a meeting, then as the meeting goes along, @mention existing stuff that needs discussion, and create new ones by highlighting text. You then can keep track of how many times something was discussed in a meeting (and possibly not acted on!), if something originates in-meeting, and other great traceability.

Hope that’s useful!

Some use cases https://medium.com/fibery/bi-directional-links-in-fibery-26d564892ec1

Hey - very cool feature!

Can documents display references?

Or maybe more generally: instead of using lots of documents, should I instead set up “page” entities, which then would display references? And of course lots of other nice things would happen in Fibery then too, with documents as “first class citizens”. However I guess I’d slightly lose the wiki aspect of documents.

1 Like

@colman So far it is not possible to see a list of references in a document. We collect this data, but did not implement UI for that. I hope it will be done in near future.

2 Likes