Fibery Product Report: January 2025

Previously: Product: November 2024

We’ve made four releases in January. Total Highlights Score: 551 (for comparison, it was 205 in November).

January was a very good month in terms of delivered value.

Permissions

WIP

We currently focus on supporting Groups on all levels:

  • Share Entity with Group
  • Share Database with Group (in progress)
  • Automatically share entities with linked Groups (in progress)

Entity sharing is live and, optimistically, we will ship DBs and automatic access in February, unless aliens other priorities hijack Andrew again.

Scalability

Customer X stretched the scalability of our entity permissions by (rapidly) sharing 70K user-entity pairs (3x the next largest customer). Entity permissions didn’t work in their workspace for a few days :grimacing: as the queue grew larger and larger, and we didn’t notice this until they complained.

We have made a few changes to our code and processes to prevent, detect, and troubleshoot a similar issue:

  • Fixed a tremendously ineffective part of the algorithm that calculated potential access changes when it shouldn’t have.
  • Added a monitoring alert for the growing queue that two people can react to.
  • Added a “hotspot” detection utility to notice heavy permission setups.
  • Implemented a way to [temporarily] manually disable a particular automatic access via People Field in case it produces too much work.
  • Done Disable access template dropdown if automatic access via People Field is being recalculated to prevent double- and triple-work.

Adoption

Let’s look at our usual adoption chart

  • :+1: Database access adoption is already above expectations: more than 800 users in 129 workspaces have received some DB access—even without Groups support! Submitter access is the most popular one, as expected, but we have a problem Submitter access is undiscoverable (can’t figure out how to grant create capability) so there’s definitely a room for improvement.
  • :crying_cat_face: Guests are a flop now with barely any usage. Why? We don’t know: there’s not much negative feedback, or any feedback, for that matter. This question requires some user research.

Usability and understanding

So far, we are focusing mostly on adding more functionality before switching to primarily explaining it. However, whenever Dima has a window, we’ll polish small things here and there:

  • Navigate to access template configuration from dropdown
  • Allow to link an Entity to another if User has read capability for one and update for another
  • Always provide source entity name in access audit when access is propagated
  • Show if access template is used in automatic access when managing it

Sudden Asana integration

Oleg got fed up with AI and decided to do Asana integration. It should be completed in February.

Filters

We’ve implemented most requested features for Filters area (well, except custom formulas and context filters). No plans to improve filters in near future.

  • Set any relative value in Date Filter
  • Filter and color-code by a related Entity’s Fields
  • Add more text operators (is, is not, starts with, ends with) to filters

Adding and updating data

Batch actions

We’ve released Batch Actions fully and made them work in all views. We got a lot of positive feedback, but we do not have feature usage stats.

  • Batch edit: change fields for selected entities
  • Batch edit on Table View

Batch drag and drop was not done, but maybe we will work on it somewhere in the future.

Duplicates

We also released find duplicates, but it is not popular now, like 170 actions on duplicates and 8 merges happened in the last 2 weeks :confused:.

  • Show duplicates for entity

Next

We want to finalize this theme with:

  • Find Duplications action for Database
  • Find duplicates in any database based on Entity Name
  • and maybe even Find Duplicates by specific Field: Email, URL, etc

Required fields

Required Fields started and there are some chances that we will have the first release in February. In the first release all (or almost all) additions will invoke a Quick Add popup that a user will have to fill, then we will add in-place addition.

2025-02-04 18.13.20

Next

Then we will work on Improve Entity creation when formula is used for name (or some fields are required)

Sidebar

We’ve released many sidebar related features and the new sidebar looks quite good. We got ~4 negative feedback related to My Items. On the other hand, My Items usage is still low, only ~5% of users have it enabled by default, and less than 25% of users switched back and forth.

Maybe with Automations to add things into My Items and some promotion this feature will be used more often.

Overall, Sidebar is far from perfect, still many things to improve and converge.

Done

  • Show Databases in left sidebar and remove Space setup
  • Collapse all menu items with a single click
  • Favorites → My Items
  • Quick Filter Items in Sidebar by Name
  • Separate “My” from “All” in the sidebar

Next

We’ve kickstarted Nested Spaces (or Spaces in Folders), but postponed it so far. Maybe we can solve this problem via My Items, our goal is to have 60% of users use My Items. Some more polishing for sidebar will follows as well, so it seems we will complete Sidebar theme only in March/April 2025.

Now we are adding Default Space, so it will be possible to add Views and Databases in top level, together with Spaces. It will increase sidebar flexibility and remove redundant concepts like Sections and Smart Sections (they will just be top level Smart Folders).

  • Default Space: Add Views and Databases on top level, Remove Smart Sections, remove Sections
  • Admin sets spaces order for all users and user can’t reorder spaces in All Items mode
  • Automations to add things into My Items
  • ? Remove Hidden Spaces
  • Home Page in Fibery
  • We are also thinking how to merge Private and My Items.

Dependencies

We decided to add dependencies management now. It was planned on Q2, but we got a nice lead and this was a showstopper, so we moved this theme to this quarter. We’ll add a special type of relation (dependency) and visualize them on Timeline view. We hope to finalize these features in February.

Dependency relation config on field editor (in progress). Final design of dependency relation setup.

Dependencies on a Timeline (in progress)

2025-01-31 19.39.24

AI

We’ll restart AI theme in February and explore new approaches to make AI Assistant great (for the first time). We did not settle with any exact plan so far. First, we will experiment with approaches for 2-4 weeks and then decide.

We want AI Assistant to answer questions like:

  • For current customers whose contract is up for renewal within 6 months, what are the top 10 negative feedbacks? Consider customers whose contract’s renewal date is between January 28, 2025 and June 28, 2025.
  • Compare sales in March 2024 and March 2023
  • Find risks and areas for improvement in user feedbacks received per each component in products

Performance

Sergey started to dig into performance. First step is to make rich text loading smooth. Then we will try to find what to work on next. We are going to spend 1-3 months on this theme.

Email/CRM Theme

Fibery can handle emails in a nice way now, including multi-accounts and webhooks for instant updates. We use it on our account already, and it seems it works fine, but more time is needed to find problems.

  • Deprecate Gmail IMAP sync
  • Gmail OAuth Security Verification
  • Sync several emails accounts to the same database
  • Sync email replies from user-assigned folders / labels

Next step is to popularize this approach via educational materials, videos, templates and guides. We will not focus on this theme in February, but there are chances to get back to it in Q2.

Whiteboard

We have released the Follow other users feature, allowing users to visually track another user’s actions in real time on the board and the first part of the Comments in Whiteboard is almost ready for release. This addition will further expand collaboration capabilities for teams.

Done

  • Whiteboard: Follow other users

In Progress

  • Whiteboard: Find text
  • Comments in Whiteboard

Next

  • Groups improvements
  • Sections improvements
  • Embed views into the whiteboard (reports, tables, etc)
  • Share whiteboard

P.S. Your thoughts and ideas are welcome 🩵.

8 Likes

Thanks for this post! Well done with all these updates! I’ve been particularly enjoying the “share by Groups” feature lately!

My biggest (only?) criticism is when needing to work on some spaces in “All items”, if a space is both in the “Spaces” section and in the “My items”, then it often opens in both of these sections. The sidebar quickly becomes cluttered in this way. Either removing this “auto-open” behavior or removing “My items” from the “All items” tab would resolve this.

Currently, I spend a lot of time in the “All items” tab, probably because we are still early in our use of this workspace and I am doing a lot of setup. I will probably use the “My items” tab more often several months from now when most of the setup and adjusting of our workspace is complete.

I think this would really help from a UX perspective. Some people find the current “opening” behavior unintuitive, or don’t like how the top view automatically opens. I had created a “Community” space where the top view is a document that serves as an introduction to our team’s Fibery workspace. But when people start creating private views, this overrides the “on open” page. Either keeping one view as the default “on open” or having a separate home page would provide a nicer experience.

2 Likes

Definitely looking forward to trying out share with groups, though it probably won’t solve much for us. Currently, we are creating 2 spaces for each use case.

e.g.

  • Projects Admin
  • Projects

Projects Admin has no access to all at Space Level and only Database level access for each user as “Submitter”.

In Projects, users have Access. Then, we create views to display items from Projects Admin.

Projects Admin/ (no access)
├── Database_1/ (only Submitter)
|    └── Fields/
|        ├── Person (share access by person)
|        └── Relation (share access by group through Person lookup field in Team space)
├── Database_2/ (only Submitter)
|    └── Fields/
|        ├── Person (share access by person)
|        └── Relation (share access by group through Person lookup field in Team space)
└── Database_3/ (only Submitter) 
     └── Fields/
         ├── Person (share access by person)
         └── Relation (share access by group through Person lookup field in Team space)

Projects/ (full access)
├── View 1/
|   └── Projects Admin/ (only submitter access)
|       └── Database_1.table (now can see entities if shared via person, related group's person lookup or submitted)
├── View 2/
|   └── Projects Admin/ (only submitter access)
|       └── Database_2.table (now can see entities if shared via person, related group's person lookup or submitted)
└── View 3/
    └── Projects Admin/ (only submitter access)
        └── Database_3.table (now can see entities if shared via person, related group's person lookup or submitted)

The biggest issues with this setup:

  • Requires two spaces to manage permissions effectively
  • Tedious and complex
  • Notification issues (had to create rules to notify in some cases since user does not have access to Admin space.

Just sharing our setup in case it is helpful for anyone else. There are more details here: Feature Request: Share Space but restrict entity views

I think Fibery is too complicated for many guests. The idea of allowing access to our workspace and then a user having to create an account and navigate the UI is a whole obstacle in and of itself.

One thought is to create unique links to Fibery entities, views or docs and can be shared. Password restriction would be great as well. Then if Fibery Sharer wants to remove the link, they can do so. Pitch.com does an AMAZING job with this:

They even have an embed feature.

Lastly, if the entity has a Comment field, Fibery can prompt non-signed in users to create an account and comment. This would likely increase Fibery guest share usage, site backlinks, create new sign ups.

One issue we found with this is since we use Formulas, many entity names are similar.

e.g.

  • Ticket / Product 1 / Repair Needed
  • Ticket / Product 2 / Repair Needed
  • Ticket / Product 3 / Repair Needed

The idea is cool but not really helpful (for us), since these are not “true” duplicates. I think the AI tab where duplicates are found should have multiple AI workflows/tools.

Ideas:

  • Find Duplicates or Similar with actions thereafter (like create a view with similar items, merge, convert or Move All to Final State and Update Relations)
  • Summarize Ticket (summarizing rich text fields, comments, states and other related/referenced entities)
  • Realtime Analytics (there are 27 entities that are similar)
  • Custom Rule creation based on prompt and current entity’s details

I use Hidden Spaces as an Archive mostly.

Home Page would be great. I think there should be another View called “Dashboard” and we can add different cards that link to different views, charts/reports and maybe embeded views (e.g. Assigned Tasks). Similar to Airtable Interfaces.

Though we can create a “make shift” dashboard in Fibery with embeds and rich text columns in a Document, it’s not intuitive or convenient. A dedicated view for creating template-style dashboards would be great. If not, I guess the Fibery team can come up with a dedicated home page that I imagine would have useful data and shortcuts.

Looking forward to this.

3 Likes

As a dark theme user using the whiteboard, I wish fix Text color issue in whiteboard depending on theme :face_holding_back_tears:

1 Like

The problem is clear, but solution is not so clear. Collapsing spaces when changing My/All may be weird, and removing My Items from All will make it harder to find and understand… We will think.

2 Likes

We have public sharing for entities. What are the drawbacks you see with the current implementation?

It is possible (likely?) that documents will get superseded by a ‘global’ documents database, at which point entity sharing of ‘documents’ will become possible.
Sharing of views is a more complex problem, since different people have different intuitions about what sharing a view might entail.
If I have a view of tasks, which has a filter of ‘Assigned to Me’ and I share this view with someone else, what should I be giving them access to and/or the ability to do? What will they see?
What will they see if a different user also chooses to share this view with them?
Basically, a data view (table, board, list etc.) is merely a query of one or more databases, and what gets returned (= shown) depends upon the query (including filter settings) as well as the access rights of the person you is looking at the view.
So what does it mean to ‘share a view’?

I would assume it includes the set filters. So yes if a view has “Assigned to me” then an external user would see a blank view. I see the views as being integral to a view, although I’m not quite sure how this would perform with pinned filters (perhaps they function just as they would for an internal user?).

1 Like

Hi there,

No, I think “Assigned to me” refers to the person looking at the view, so I would see MY tasks, and they would see THEIR tasks (this is how Notion does it).

1 Like

I think we’re describing two different things.

My notes were in reference to Guest features. My thoughts on Guest as outlined above are that Fibery is too complex for many users, so adding an official Guest account to a workspace is not always ideal.

  • There is only one public link. Multiple unique links (like specified in the example above) allow you to share an entity with multiple guests. This allows for you to remove the link later without removing others and ideally, apply access templates (e.g. allow viewer on this specific public link to view child entities or lock a specific Entity View so that you are only showing specific fields).
  • No option for password protection, so once you share a link, it is public, period.
  • Making a space public means everything is available in the Space and can also be viewed when someone simply visits your “Public Fibery Workspace”.

Sharing a view with an external party, outside of my Fibery instance (to me), means sharing whatever is visible in that view, via a unique link and acts as a sort of container. Obviously, nothing is assigned to the user, so there is no way to add further user based checks to determine appropriate visibility permissions. The only thing that makes sense is to control, whether the viewer can view child elements or not, via the unique viewing container.

Sharing a view with an internal user (to me), means sharing whatever is visible in that view, via the Space, but ideally allows for more granular access control (like, can only see items within the view or database that are assigned to them). Technically, you can create a filter that shows only assigned, however, is not truly secure, because the user can still find, search or view entities not assigned to them… But, we already discussed this in Feature Request: Share Space but restrict entity views

This is similar to postgres RLS policies where users can only read records related to themself or creating postgres table views.

I get it’s complex so I’m sure Fibery permissions and sharing will continue to transform over time.

Well, I was making the assumption that the external user was not assigned to any tasks, but I wasn’t clear on that. Yes, they would see whatever tasks were assigned to them.

So this sounds exactly like what is possible with Guest users, so I suppose the question is what is wrong with that option?
And you kinda answered with this:

If the UI for guests were simplified, what would otherwise be lacking?

Assuming the groups and sections improvements are focused around mind mapping?

My biggest whiteboard wish list items are:

  • Ability to have new entities automatically added to the whiteboard if they’re in a certain database. Although maybe this is covered under the scope of your mind map stuff?
  • Ability to hide relation lines between certain entities/databases without actually deleting their relation. It’s frustrating that its all or nothing right now.
  • Displaying the relation line on “to-one” related entities. Super weird it works on some relationships but not others.
  • Ability to resize and color code entity cards on a whiteboard, essentially allowing them to be visually manipulated like a regular “box” shape.
  • Ability to edit fields directly within the entity card, instead of having to open the entity to do it.

It is interesting that there doesn’t seem to be consistency for what it means to share a view.
To be honest, I also think that the terminology can affect how people think of sharing.

For example, imagine I have a ProjectManagement space with a table view:
https://workspace.fibery.io/ProjectManagement/My-tasks-123
If I ‘share’ this URL with someone (i.e. send them an email containing this link) then I am not granting them any specific access.
If they don’t have a Fibery account, or they don’t have access to the ProjectManagement space then they won’t see anything. If they don’t have access to the Tasks database then they will see an empty table. If they have an account, and have the necessary access, then they will see the Tasks assigned to them (which is not what I saw when I ‘shared’ the view).

On the other hand, what if there was the option to ‘share this view’ what would it mean?

Does it mean that a unique URL is generated which I can distribute to anyone I like (whether or not they currently have a user account) and when they click on it, they get to see a table of tasks assigned to me. This would seem to be close to public sharing as it is now possible for report view.
Should they be allowed to open each of the individual Tasks shown in the view, and thus be able to see fields that are not present as columns in the table? How far into the relation hierarchy should they be allowed to dig?

Or perhaps when I ‘share’ a view, I have to provide the email address(es) of the person/persons that I am sharing with. They receive an email invite, maybe with a magic link that only works for their email (and thus a user account is implicitly created). They then get to see the table of tasks assigned to me. Again, the question arises as to whether I am implicitly granting access to all of the displayed Tasks.
What happens if in the future, a new Task is assigned to me, and it thus appears in the table view when I visit the URL. Should the person with whom I previously ‘shared the view’ 6 months ago now be able to see this new Task as well?

What happens if the person with whom I share becomes a regular member in Fibery? Do they simultaneously have access to the table view of tasks assigned to me, but also a table view of tasks assigned to them?

I don’t expect everyone to have immediate answers to all these questions, but I’m willing to bet that the answers vary from person to person, based on this topic discussion so far(!)

2 Likes

I don’t necessarily believe Guest feature is “lacking” anything, but I think you’ll need more feedback from other users on why the feature isn’t being used. For us, it’s as simple as (too complicated). Inviting a user to the space means I have to worry about permissions across the entire workspace (which is already tedious enough) and then worry about them creating their account and navigating.

If I’m sharing with a “guest” it’s usually for a specific use case, topic, project, etc (e.g. contractor/vendor access to specific items). I just want to go straight to the view or entity and create a unique link for the “guest” or invite them to view it via email without the extra steps. Just my thoughts!

Yes, that what I was referring to here:

Couldn’t access controls be created at the container level to control hierarchy?

  • If user views from this unique Container A (fibery.io/share/a), they can see Project → Tasks → Subtasks
  • If user views from this unique Container B (fibery.io/share/b), they can see Project → Tasks

Yes, I think this is great, honestly. Then, apply access control at container level for the specific ‘magic’ link.

I’m sure there will be like with most tools; Fibery is not immune to this. Obviously, it is up to Fibery at the end of the day to determine the direction and/or if there is a middle ground.

1 Like

This is a really interesting comment. When we created per-entity permissions (which was the precursor to Guests) it was so that you could avoid these things.
You share a single entity with someone (and you make a choice whether sharing should be extended to any linked entities) and at that point, you know for certain that they won’t get any permissions for anything else.
In other words, you absolutely shouldn’t have to worry about permissions across the entire workspace. Seems we haven’t communicated this value to people very well.
:thinking:

2 Likes

Maybe I am the only one, but I honestly had no clue you could do this :man_shrugging:
I always assumed sharing from the dedicated “Share” option was only for Internal users. Never thought to try adding an email for someone outside of the workspace.

1 Like

I think this is the nub of the issue.
Sharing a Project and linked Tasks is (or ought to be :wink: ) easy in Fibery.
However, a view (table, board, list) is not a ‘container’ for entities, but rather is merely the result of a specific query (and the query result can change over time).

The implication is that it is relatively easy to determine whether any Task that belongs to Project A should be shared (since the relation between Project and Task is info available on the back end).
However, Tasks don’t ‘belong’ to views, so the determination of who should be able to see it based on ‘view sharing’ is much tougher.

1 Like

@ChrisG This is slightly related to public sharing for entities.

I saw you mention that “multiple entity views” may allow for setting a default view when sharing publicly.

Example: hiding fields/relationships that you don’t want visible to the end user.

Is this currently possible or on the roadmap?