Previously: Product: October 2024
We’ve made four releases in November. Total Highlights Score: 205 (for comparison, it was 400 in September).
Overall, November was not packed with huge releases, mostly some small improvements here and there. Many people got involved into new pricing and payment system, thus less work on product features.
In December we will have a holiday week from Dec 25 till Jan 2, so we will skip some releases, the last release this year will be Dec 19 and the first release next year will be Jan 9.
Main product areas we focused on in November:
- Permissions
- Search
- Space Setup & Icons support
- Whiteboard
Permissions
Assignments and Guests
We eliminated the conceptual debt with Convert Assignments into regular People Fields: now all People Fields have the same functionality.
The Guests adoption hasn’t been great despite Advertise Guests as a new feature and a totally new sidebar is coming so we’ve postponed Improve Guests user experience for now. Here are the up-to-date adoption numbers:
Two areas to do research on (e.g. customer interviews):
- Why are there so many unused custom access templates?
- Why aren’t Guests more popular?
User Roles
We’ve done an analysis on User Roles. The most unexpected observation is that 26% of all seats in paid workspaces are Observers (up from 12% two years ago):
Groups
Andrew has started the development of Share Entity with Group. Share Database with Group will be next.
Creator usability and other random improvements
We’ve finalized some things in new Space Setup and improved icons support in various places.
Done
- New Space Setup: Fields screen
- New Space setup: Polish Relations screen
- More space actions in sidebar
- Markdown Templates AI Assistant
- Set Icon with a Formula
- Customize automation button color and icon
- Display URL, Phone, and Email Fields as icon-buttons
Next
Now we will work on some features requested by important customers recently, that will help to prevent accidental changes and enable sync between several Fibery accounts.
- Lock Documents
- Lock Entities
- Fibery to Fibery sync
Rich text improvements
Before we rendered a document, then retrieved mentions and refererences, it lead to layout shifts when the mentions were dynamically loaded and displayed. Now we retrieve mentions and references async and render the document without layout shifts. As a result, you should experience faster rich text fields loading time, especially on pages with many references. Avoid jumps when loading mentions in Fibery Documents and Rich Text Fields.
No new near future plans for rich text improvements so far.
Adding and updating data
Now we are working on Batch edit Entities from all the views. Progress is good and we should release it for Board View soon, then we will expand batch edit to other views: Timeline, List and Table so far.
Required fields feature is slightly posptoned, and instead we will focus on the Sidebar changes and then get back to Required Fields.
Sidebar
We were ready to start Sections implementation in sidebar, but I discovered some flaws in the idea, since as a result we would have Sections, Smart Sections, Folders and Spaces — and this is too much… So we started from scratch and spent this month on ideation. As a result, we want to do the following major changes into sidebar:
- Nesting Spaces. You will be able to create hierarchy of Spaces. Maybe we get rid of Folders and replace them with Spaces eventually.
- Databases visible in left menu (can be turned off/on with a single click). Thus we will be able to get rid of special Space Setup mode.
- My vs. All filter. You will be able to add things into My and we will add some rules to add them automatically for you.
- Search sidebar items. Quickly filter all elements in sidebar
Now we are working on the design and implementation should start this week.
Next
- Nested Spaces (+Databases, +My, +Search)
- Quick Filter Items in all Spaces
- Separate “My” from “All” in the sidebar
- Collapse all spaces with a single click
- Show Databases in left sidebar
Search
We did several important improvements to keyword search. Most important is that we show results in Recent Items very fast now, and changed relevancy algorithm. Search should be quite decent now, but sometimes it still feels slow.
- Search exact match using quotes
- Give more priority for starting word
- Keep Entities in recent items up to date
- Filter Recent in search and keep recent results on top
- Indicate Entity’s finished status in recent items and semantic search
Next
Now we are working on keyword search performance improvements and want to improve AI Search as well. First step would be to research models that we can host on our own AWS instances.
- Improve Search speed
- Try Voyage (or other) model hosted on our AWS
Email/CRM Theme
We had several problems with multiple accounts sync to a single database, but it seems all of them are solved and it should be released this week.
One major problem is security verification of our Gmail OAuth. It is still in progress and we need it to fully replace Gmail IMAP auth… I hope it will be approved this month. We are testing Tuesday data enrichment on our own as well (so far so good).
In progress
- Enrich leads with Tuesday data
- Gmail OAuth Security Verification
- Multiple accounts for the same integration
Multiple accounts sync is already working on our own Fibery workspace.
Some important things are still missing for Fibery CRM use case, like Emails signatures, better Emails List design. So far I am not sure when we will go for it, maybe after more feedback for CRM use case.
Whiteboard
It appeared that bringing ProseMirror into Whiteboard is a very challenging task. We already spent 6 weeks on it and it is not done (but close). In the meantime, some small additions were made here and there to the Whiteboard.
Done
- Whiteboard: Text Editor v.2
- Resize and scale text in textbox
- Adding and displaying external text links on the whiteboard
- Add vertical text alignment for whiteboard blocks
In Progress
Now we are working on new Sticky Notes and Comments in Whiteboard, something should be released in January (I hope).
P.S. Your questions and ideas are welcome, as always.
With 
, Fibery Team.
