We’ve made four releases in February. Total Highlights Score: 788 (for comparison, it was 551 in January).
Polina recorded a nice webinar, watch it to see all changes in action:
Permissions
Things are going well:
- the adoption for most features is decent;
- the delivery pace is steady;
- there seem to be few conceptually unsolved problems now.
Here is how different permissions features are being adopted in collaborative workspaces (WAU ≥ 2):
Database access has turned out to be an unexpectedly popular thing with a quarter of collaborative workspaces using it. At the end of the March, we’ll be able to tell how Group permissions are doing—⅓ of the equivalent User permissions numbers would be a success.
Despite our counterintuitive way to set up User Groups, 90% workspaces on Pro plan with 20+ active users have created at least one User Group DB.
Done
Everything you can share with an individual User, you can now share with a Group:
- Share Database with Group
- Automatically share entities with linked Groups
We’ve also made a few usability tweaks to help power users to discover and understand the new functionality:
- Show if access template is used in automatic access when managing it
- Update sharing popup placeholder to make Guests more discoverable
- Navigate to access template configuration from dropdown
- Disable access template dropdown if automatic access via People Field is being recalculated
In progress
The next big thing is revamping the outdated and limited Space access. Andrew has dived into the foundations that will unlock these things:
- Allow not to extend access from Space to its Databases
- Allow to have Databases outside Spaces (in Default Space)
- Consolidate default access template names across Space, DB, and Entity levels
- Deprecate Contributor Space access
We are gradually transitioning from mostly working on powerrrr! to mostly working on simplicity, discoverability, and understanding:
- Explain sources in access audit
- Add Access screen for Spaces and Databases
Next
In March, we’ll start the parts of user management that don’t depend on the core. Ihar has kindly agreed to help as we are building on top of the DBs in the sidebar idea:
- Manage Users like any other Database
- Manage User Groups as part of User DB settings
Required fields
We’ve released Required Fields in February.
45 accounts have at least one field, and 7 more than 2 fields. Quite OK for 2 weeks after release.
Next
Now we are working on better in-place UI and it will take the whole March to complete it seems.
- Required fields special UI: Table View
- Required fields special UI: List, Board View, Calendar, Feed and Timeline Views
- Required fields special UI: Search
- Show toast on new entity creation, views always comply to filters and do not show entities that are out of filters range
Then we will work on “Improve Entity creation when formula is used for name”.
Sidebar
We’ve released the new sidebar structure. It looks like new sidebar reception is positive. We have (unexpectedly) low negative feedback %, most users (and especially admins) are happy with the changes. Anyway, some minor things here and there should be improved.
Done
- Default Space (without databases)
- Admin sets spaces order for all users and user can’t reorder spaces in All Items mode
- Spaces in Folders (former Nested Spaces)
- Merge search results for both tabs in the sidebar
Next
We are going to finalize navigation theme with the following features
- Home Page in Fibery
- Create personal Folders in Favorites (maybe)
- Kostas is going to re-write left sidebar to improve DnD, we’ll see how this experiment goes…
Timeline View and Dependencies
We implemented and released most major features to enable dependency management in Fibery.
- Dependency relation config on field editor
- Dependencies on a Timeline
- Improve entities creation on Timeline View
- Hide empty lanes on Timeline View
Current adoption is very modest, it is safe to say that ~15 accounts use dependencies and only 5 use it quite a lot. Daily usage
Next
We are going to finalize timeline improvements with the major update
- One line per entity (always) + Entities List + Visualize nested Entities (parent/child) on Timeline.
Or maybe just do Drag and drop to change vertical position on timeline without major changes… We’ll see.
We will also implement a proper weekends handling on Timeline:
- Avoid weekends when moving dependent cards
- Weekend setting per user
AI
We experimented with AI Agent. It can reason and ask relatively complex questions around Fibery data. For example, this is the answer to a question “Find workspaces with trial expiration date coming in March and provide usage information about every workspace”
However, it works quite slow (1-3 mins) and it is expensive. Now we are optimizing it and going to include into FIbery in March/April. We also shared prototype with 4 customers, got positive feedback from 1 and waiting something from other accounts.
Anthropic shows much better results, and we may use it for AI Agent.
If you want to play with the AI Agent on your workspace, DM me here or ping us in Intercom.
Performance
We’ve improved docs loading and added cache to the most popular views.
- View Cache
- Improve Document and RichText field load timings
For March:
- We constantly have performance issues because of queries for capabilities. With Dima we agreed on approach to reduce load, I will implement it. Estimate is about a few days it seems.
- View cache hit rate is 20% across all workspaces. I’ll prototype a solution to store view-cache in browser indexdb, so hit rate should increase. Estimate is unclear so far.
Email/CRM Theme
While we completed all planned features, it is unclear what to do next. Community feedback showed that there are many missing things to transform Fibery into a powerful CRM. However, it might work good for some limited use cases and some companies already.
We spent some time on CRM solution template, but it is far from ready. Future of CRM is unclear .
Whiteboard
We have released the first set of features for comments on the whiteboard to enhance team collaboration, and search functionality for the whiteboard. The second part of comments is already in progress, along with a few basic improvements for sections.
The main features left to implement are sharing and embedding the whiteboard for external sources, as well as embedding views on the whiteboard for cases like dashboards. In the background, I’ll be working on describing Mind map use cases and gathering useful Whiteboard: Templates — possibly for implementation in Q2.
Done
- Inline Commenting on Whiteboard
- Whiteboard: Find text
In Progress
- Sidebar, reactions, and search for comments
- Whiteboard: Sections improvements
Next
- Share whiteboard
- Embed views into the whiteboard (reports, tables, etc)
- Whiteboard: Groups improvements
- Whiteboard: Mind Map (maybe)
And this will conclude whiteboard improvement initiative. Then we will mostly only fix bugs.
P.S. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome