🔮 Fibery roadmap for Feb-April 2023

[mdubakov]

This is the roadmap till May. Why till May? In May 2023 we are going to have our first offline retreat and discuss Fibery 2.0 in details. Till that event we will focus on improvements in several areas.

This list of features is just our desires and it is unlikely we’ll complete all the things enumerated below. It also may change based on unexpected events and moon phase, so this is not a promise but an intention. Here are the Themes and Features.

Permissions

We are focusing in Entity Level permissions here. It is unclear when we will deliver anything, but we will try to progress in this are as deep as we can.

This is the top request we have with 200+ references attached. Time has come.

Tables improvements

Fibery Tables are very limited, so we will work on new tables to solve the following problems:

• Groups in Table View
• Totals / other formulas in the footer of Table View
• Columns stickiness
• Overall user experience, like fast filters, sort, etc.
  We’ll create a prototype based on AG Grid and see how it works for us.

Filters improvements

Just some quality of life things many people need:

• Group filters with nested logical operators (or/and)
• Filter and sort in relations selector

Documents improvements

Knowledge management in Fibery is not great, many people are struggling to setup Wiki, so we will focus on many improvements in this area:

• Nested documents
• Fast creation of documents
• Files block
• iFrame block
• Callout block
• Custom emojis

Getting started improvements

• Better import (Notion, Confluence)
• Invite users via a link
• … the scope here is less clear, we got a new person (Kalman) in our product team who took this area, so we expect to have more here soon.

GPT-3

• AI assistance in Documents and Rich Text fields
• Invoke AI actions in automations
• … we are still exploring this area and most likely more things will come here.

Whiteboard View

Fibery was the first tool to include whiteboard, but we never polished it enough. We will finally form a small team that will focus on it. Please, don’t expect anything major in the next months, our goal is to have a vision and nail use cases, then select a technology and start execution.

Please do share your desired Whiteboard use cases with us.

Communication in Fibery research

I know you miss features like Watch entity , but we want to postpone this whole huge communication theme till May and learn more. We created a very novel concept how communication should be merged into Fibery and in the next months we will do several things to verify this concept and be ready for the deep discussion in May.

• We will conduct 10+ customer discovery sessions to learn how you communicate and use chats. By the way, if you are willing to do it, please contact us directly or in a comment below and we will contact you. During this session we will learn how you work, provide our ideas about this area in Fibery and have a conversation around chats, sync/async communication, etc.
• We will create a prototype of our idea to verify technical feasibility. It affects how Documents will be structured and so fare we are not sure it can be done in a reasonable timeframe.

I understand that this roadmap will not please all the users, but this is what we settled with till May internally.

P.S. Your feedback is appreciated, as always! If something is very brief and not clear, please ask questions and I will add more details

[HereBeBeasties]

if you are willing to do it, please contact us directly or in a comment below and we will contact you

Very happy to help with that.

Not going to lie, lack of watchers is disappointing. I feel you may be letting an as-yet-unclear grand vision of better comms generally be the enemy of a good, quick and pragmatic solution.

To be frank with you, you are not going to replace Slack/Teams and I think trying to do so would be a huge waste of time and resources:

• Users won’t do it
• You don’t have the integrations and network effect that Teams and Slack have
• Lots of things we do in Slack aren’t anything to do with Fibery
• Mobile clients

Heck, I couldn’t even justify replacing Slack with Matrix/Element because of the integrations side, even though that has had years of polish by a well-funded team.

I don’t want real-time chat and rooms and threads and whatever. I just want simple notifications when entities I care about change.

In fact, I’m happier with individuals having noisier conversations on Slack about specific tickets, with comments in Fibery summarising the outcomes - it cuts down the noise in Fibery.

If you are insistent on adding real-time chat then I think doing all that on top of Matrix would be beneficial. You could embed their Hydrogen chat client in the page. It supports threading, etc. and is robust. Would need to figure out how search works, though. You could even have in-entity video conferencing! (Perhaps useful for an ongoing incident.)

[julien.erny]

Thanks for this, I’m sure it’s deeply appreciated (by me at least ).

Quick clarification: do you intend to give a shot at bulk editing in the “Tables improvements” workstream?

[rawkode]

Agreed. Slack Connect has owned us all now. The ability to communicate with clients, partners, and suppliers all through a shared interface means we’re all stuck with Slack forever.

Fibery needs to become the home for docs, tasks, and async collaboration, but it won’t remove Slack from us.

I’d much rather see pages/docs/whiteboards and repeating tasks evolved

[webinit]

Hey, hey, hey… easy tiger. A Slack replacement is on the top of my most desired feature list!

[mynym]

@mdubakov

Please do share your desired Whiteboard use cases with us.

Thanks for the invitation to share. Happy to do so:

As mentioned earlyer, a (lean-)Miro-style whiteboard with database integration was a killer app for me (and for some people I know.

In the last years, we all learned how powerful Miro is to organize the big-picture view on everything. I do not start a project without an outline on a Miro board. If this outline could be turned into the high-level dashboard, visualizing everything that is happening ‘on the ground’ (stored in Fibery), with all the details one click away - that would be the dream of every manager that had to deal with complexity.

Very curious to see where you are heading…

[Komzpa]

• iFrame block

It will be great to have some simple IFrame API that will be able to embed as a field into entities and manipulate (or be aware of) surrounding entity at least. But IFrame in any way will be highly welcome, as it will allow to write UI-visible plugins to Fibery.

[Bachi2k]

@mdubakov

We will conduct 10+ customer discovery sessions to learn how you communicate and use chats. By the way, if you are willing to do it, please contact us directly or in a comment below and we will contact you.

Very happy to help with that.
This would be huge for us!

[YvetteLans]

As always, it varies from situation to situation.

If you are already using Slack with many different stakeholders, I understand that you don’t want to switch to Fibery chat just like that.

Although I personally believe that it always has advantages to communicate with people who work in Fibery also in Fibery. So that it becomes a complete story and you are less likely to have miscommunications.

The benefits for my clients and myself are huge. I am therefore very happy that this is on the roadmap

[YvetteLans]

Really happy with this roadmap! The table improvements and filters improvements will fix so much of our problems and the AG Grid prototype looks great

[tpaktop]

@mdubakov

if you are willing to do it, please contact us directly or in a comment below and we will contact you.

Would be able to help with that. I’m closely working with one of your featured use cases on the daily basis and can provide a good real-world scenario of Slack daily usage.

[StevenSkillit]

Roadmap looks great! Excited!

[njyo]

Thanks a lot for sharing, @mdubakov! An exciting roadmap indeed, I’m quite stoked.

A few comments:

1. Table improvements: Please add a simple way to add new rows in tables via keyboard (ALT+ENTER or something) so that one doen’t have to grab the mouse, click the three dots and then click the right add row option? Small but massive fix for a table fan. Million thanks!
2. Filter improvements: An advanced mode where one can write SQL-style queries (with JOINS and all) would solve the whole nested operators. It would also 1) allow for more flexible filtering and 2) keep entities cleaner as they do not need to be littered with lookups.
3. Yay to all your document improvements! Thanks a lot!

Whiteboard view
For us this is massive and I’m excited for the improvements. Our use case is as follows:

We use the whiteboard as the central piece to model our product flows. Being able to place entities is crucial, because that allows us to:

1. List the View entity (the screen in use, which itself defines the Template, Components, Objects, etc.)
2. Describe the actions taken by a given Actor (the user group used as swimlane)
3. List the Backend API Calls triggered by the different actions (defining our internal APIs grouped into Backend Services)
4. List any Notifications, Log Events and other things to be triggered

As such, these flow diagrams define how our software Features works and is the central piece for engineers, designers, product owners, etc. to collaborate.
While being able to draw lines easily is helpful, the main thing for us is to easily be place boxes and Entities with some explanations and easily to shuffle them around. What we’d love to see:

1. Simple grid with standardised sizes that makes it easy to move boxes/tiles around
2. Ability to add (threaded) comments and resolve them
3. Ability to place (and link) any other Document or other WhiteBoard as a precursor for transclusions
4. Improved connectors → they are iffy right now
5. Improved frames → they are iffy right now

I know it’s not fair, but the tool I compare it with is Whimsical. While Miro is great for joint brainstorming, I’m a diagramming person and I want our team to think through User Journeys, Entity Relationship Models, Object Lifecycles, etc. For this, Fibery in principle is great, just needs to become more refined.

Happy to share more details on this.

Also happy to participate in your research on chats.

Thanks again to the whole team for the continuous improvements.

[julien.erny]

@mdubakov just a quick question: some of the features in the actual Public Roadmap are not appearing in this roadmap. For instance, Field Location + Map View are not mentioned here but they are in progress on the Public Roadmap.
Are you still going to work on them or are they shelved for now?
Thanks

[mdubakov]

They will be released since they were started during Slow December

[jondkinney]

This list looks really great. In particular, my organization will require entity based permissions to prevent clients from accessing one another’s data before we can adopt Fibery. As it’s the number one request, any chance that you’ll be focusing on and releasing that sooner than any of the other things? Or will these all trickle in random orders? At least, I assume you’ll continue to do incremental releases over the next 3 months tackling this list?

[Chr1sG]

@jondkinney

any chance that you’ll be focusing on and releasing that sooner than any of the other things? Or will these all trickle in random orders

The entity permissions feature has been being worked on for some time, but it is probably the single most complex problem to tackle at this time, so there’s no certainly about the deadline.
The other items may be worked on in parallel, but because of the varied skill sets needed, they are not taking significant resources away from it.

[mdubakov]

@jondkinney

At least, I assume you’ll continue to do incremental releases over the next 3 months tackling this list?

We’ll release weekly, as usual. Permissions are hard and we still nailing some details, so real implementation is not started, more like prototyping. I don’t think you will see major improvements here in 3 months. Most of the other things will be released sooner than permissions.