I have found very useful when an app let’s you build in your own “private” area before pushing your content to the “Production” Instance where your team will live. Notion and Wrike are two tools that do this well. You can build tasks that only you see, create rough drafts of Docs that you don’t want to publish yet, etc.
There could be a number of ways to bring this into Fibery. One thing that occurs to me is there is no concept of just an “Entity” with no “home,” which is something you can do in the aforementioned Notion or Wrike as they both have an atomic-level item that can be created and doesn’t need to live anywhere. So I imagine from a technical point of view those platforms simply allow these Pages (in the case of Notion) or Tasks (in the case of Wrike) to just reside in a container in the backend that is only visible to the creator until moved.
Regardless, my team was asking about this, and I think it would be a great addition to Fibery.
Do you mean that you want to play around with defining new types without interfering with other people’s work? If so, can’t you just create an app with no access for anyone except the admin, and then allow access when you’re happy
Or do you mean that you want to create entities of an existing type but which you don’t want to be accessible to others until they’re ready?
If so, then you could define a limited-access ‘Sandbox’ app with the necessary types, create as many entities as you want and then use an action button to copy the entity as the correct type in the ‘production’ app.
There is already an example of how to duplicate an entity with an action button, so you’d only need to modify it slightly so that it made the new entity within the production app/type.
Thanks Chris, you deserve a medal around here for all the help you provide!
In this case, my request is more about a more “organic” private area the way the other apps handle this. I think what you’re describing, while probably effective, is too much of a workaround for easy use in a non-technical team.
I doubt this is a priority right now. But as Fibery grows, and this board gets a few years old, I’m assuming others will come along interested in this feature, since it is a basic and useful one on many other apps. So my hope is that by posting this I’ll get the conversation started.
Fair enough.
I’m not familiar with the private area in other apps that you mentioned, but I thought I would add that I personally have two fibery workspaces so that I can ‘play’ around in one of them, and then use the app-sharing feature to copy any useful stuff over to the ‘real’ one.
Thanks Chris. I too have multiple Workspace Playgrounds, very useful and I’m very glad they can be created as free accounts without limit. Great for testing set ups.
Hi!
In fact, our main idea was that teams don’t have secrets and transparency works. However, we see, that it doesn’t work like this, so we have that problem in the backlog and hope will solve it.
For now, there are some workarounds, I’ve recorded a small video for one of our customers and maybe that would be helpful for you guys as well
As a point of follow up, I wanted to clarify that some of the better implementations of this I’ve seen - Notion, Wrike - simply allow for creation of what would be a Fibery “Entity” with no sharing. The user then assimilates these unshared Entities in their “Private Area,” they can be grouped in Private Folders, etc. However, once shared, they are no longer private.
I mention this mainly as there is a lot of discussion now about the potential of more bespoke permissions being developed:
So perhaps this Private Area could be an offshoot of those more sophisticated permissions.
I could really use this feature. I jumped back in here right now in fact to discuss this because I’m about to try to create a whole Project in Fibery, but I’d like to be able to keep it in rough draft, as I can’t do the entire thing in one sitting. Right now however I’ll have to create and keep a 1/2 done Entity to represent the Project because I can’t keep it invisible for others while I work on it!
Currently it seems there is no way to move something out of “My Space”.
So if a user creates a complex view / document, it is then stuck in “My Space”.
And what does “Clear user view settings” do in the right click menu, it appears occasionally.
And finally, is there any plan for being able to make something always appear, e.g. a README that explains to the user how they can use My Space.
Re: point 1 - ah I see! That is a bit confusing, as the user has to learn to right click to duplicate something into My Space, but then has to drag it to move it back out again… and you can drag that are outside of My Space around, but you can’t drag something into My Space…
Nope! However, as you say it does consistently appear when holding that down. Perhaps my keyboard is having some mechanical issues, it has had a hard life.
Thanks for the additional context. Regarding being able to always make things appear in “My Space”, some additional context from our account.
In the beginning we hardly had any spaces, but over time we added more spaces. It became over whelming, so we solved this by creating a “My work” space. This contained a set of Views that gave the users the data they needed for their day to day work and everyone was much happier.
Most of the time the users would work this “My work” area, and then occasionally use the other Spaces, usage frequency highlighted in YELLOW.
With the introduction of My Space, it raised a couple of questions:
Language (My work vs My Space) is confusing
Whilst not your problem, I wonder if this effects other people too?
e.g. have other people solved the problem using a My work / similar app
Is having a “My work” space a Fibery anti pattern?
If so, should all users be making these make these Views?
If that is the case, it raises these points
Duplication
Onboarding
Not all users will want to build those Views
Which brings me back to language.
I did a very basic poll with our users, and surprisingly people found the work “Space” confusing. The them the word didn’t mean anything, as they have never created a Space, it just made them think of MySpace.com.
So I wonder, is there a better word, that captures what “My Space” is all about?
Some abstract suggestions:
Private
User’s Name
Vault
or some that use Fibery language…
Favourites
My Views
My Documents
and then there’s the question of consistency with favourites…
My Work is not an anti-pattern (at lest so far), since you can pre-configure it. One potential problem here is that if you give all users Creator rights, they can break things for other people. If you will not, they will unlikely feel at home in My Work, since they can’t really change things.
We have an idea to pre-configure My Space, but so far we are not sure about its priority, so we are collecting feedback now.
My Space was an obvious choice for us, since we have Spaces (former Apps). My Work is misleading, since Fibery is not only for work, but for knowledge and other stuff as well.
We think that My Space is where people can experiment with Views, learn Fibery and become power-users. However, My Space has no private Databases, but we are not sure so far that this is important to have.
Thanks for your response. To clarify I am not suggesting that “My Space” should be called “My Work”, that is not a good name for it
If it’s about experimentation and learning, there’s a big opportunity to include something in that area that encourages that, but it’s a challenge to make it make sense when every account with have different spaces and entities I think the Slack bot has this same challenge too. The idea of having a lab where people can experiment is nice.
Looking forward to seeing how it all comes together,
Private
Favourites
I think the Slack bot has this same challenge too. The idea of having a lab where people can experiment is nice. 
