I’m curious to hear how others are using Fibery with third party members and for their own personal work/projects.
An issue I’m finding challenging/frustrating is with collaboration and managing work between different groups of people.
In my job there are these groups:
- Internal teams: people I directly collaborate with - Internal stakeholders: people that make requests, people that may have information that’s helpful for projects - External clients/stakeholders: people outside the org that need to be kept in the loop
What makes collaboration challenging is that all of these groups use different tools/apps and I’m beginning to accept that some version of this problem is somewhat unavoidable.
For some people it seems like the solution is to fallback to things like email, slack/teams, or meetings/zooms. But all of these things are very unstructured and also create siloes.
I’ve been using Fibery for a while and I’m finding it very useful for personal projects and I would prefer to continue building the muscle memory of using Fibery vs. switching between an unknown amount of apps/tools to find information. Things like publicly accessible spaces/entities seem like they could also mitigate ad-hoc chats and emails, Go to this link to the see the status of your projects/tasks
Maybe that’s the question, how do you start to introduce Fibery into your workflow with others without requiring them to make a wholesale switch? And how do you approach sharing/permissions if you don’t necessarily know in advance who may need access to what?
The concept of Fibery spaces seems to make sense for more permanent teams/collaborators but seems like per entity permissions is how you’d approach more temporary stakeholders.
I don’t have any significant experience to share around this. It’s something that has come up for me but I basically haven’t tackled it much since the friction was too high. I have occasionally just shared public/open read-only versions of things, but that does not at all address the need for “ad-hoc collaboration”, so to speak.
I do think that this could be a significant route to increased adoption of Fibery if a robust system to manage ad-hoc collaboration were built, but it would probably necessitate changes to the pricing model, etc. On the bright side the steady addition of more sophisticated permissions systems does help make this more of a functional possibility. You could also just use totally separate Workspaces under the same account and invite people to those, though if each collaborator needed access to some amount of shared/common data then it could still require sophisticated permissions management.
Many collaboration tool are built around the idea of “teams/departments” and this is a simpler place to start from. You can assume varying quantities of team sizes (1-5, 5-20, 20-50 etc.) but the harder thing to predict and deal with is the collaborators that have varying levels of involvement. I’m not the biggest fan of Google Docs but it always amazes me how easy it is to share an editable doc with anyone (not downplaying the technical challenge of making this work)
Public/read-only views do help but it seems the minimum requirement for ad-hoc collaboration is the ability for commenting. At least you could keep the discussion/inputs within context of the document.
Otherwise you run into the same problem which is falling back to the lowest common denominator for communication, email. You end up collaborating and discussing the document everywhere but the document.
I had gotten so fixated on “Spaces” that I had overlooked “Workspaces”. That could be a better approach and add an extra layer of separation between work/personal stuff.
Following this discussion, and hoping for some creative ideas – I’ve yet to implement Fibery fully into my agency, but as I’m planning this is my biggest friction point. I’d love to collect feedback from ad-hoc sources as well, without necessarily spinning up a new user seat for them.
I’d imagine, however, that a webform and some API connections could get me pretty close – meaning I could patch in input from various sources as comments on an entity. But would love to hear if there’s a low-to-no-code way to do this!
We have the same needs. Would be awesome to collaborate with clients in the workspace without having to pay fully for it.
That was the only benefit of Trello I could just create a simple kanban board per client for free. Where the client could move a task to done, create a card when they have questions and leave a comment.
Would be awesome if that’s possible in Fibery some day.
Hey grex22, yeah this is a big friction point. It feels like you’re always having to decide how necessary it is to add someone into the system.
I started exploring the automation that can be used to send emails when entities are updated. While this isn’t the ideal solution at least it may help deal with people that default to email.
Downside to this approach is that depending on how the automation is setup you could end up filling an inbox quickly if it’s notifying/sending emails too often (but maybe that acts as the prompt to get someone to start embracing a better tool for work/project management)
It feels like what we’re after here is some hybrid between a ticket system, and a board. I know there’s the Fibery forms but are people able to then update/comment based on the entity that’s created?
I think there is always going to be a tension here if you want people to contribute and you want them to be identifiable (i.e. not anonymous) but you also want them not to have to register/log in as users.
When something like Google Docs makes it apparently easy for ‘outsiders’ to contribute, although it appears as though these users are not explicitly signing in, Google is in fact doing it for them behind the scenes.
Of course, the fact that currently any Fibery user who is acting as an ‘editor’ is a chargeable user makes this issue even more apparent/painful.
FWIW we have had internal discussions about how ‘occasional users’ should be charged, and perhaps users who only access a limited number of entities/docs should be free. But of course, any such solution needs to protect against abuse.
It would be really nice to have a good solution for occasional users or clients. So that you can collaborate with them during a project.
Yes, that can be challenging.
We have the following use cases:
A freelancer that is only working for a temporary time on a project (example: you have a project to create a website for your company and you want to collaborate with the website builder during that project)
Onboarding a client → also a temporary project where it would be really handy to collaborate with that client during the onboarding.
Long term collaboration with the onboarded client → it would be awesome if a client can create a ticket in the workspace and see the status of that ticket / comment via that ticket.
If you look at the per entity permission, then in all scenarios only give access to one entity + it’s childs will already solve these use cases. Example:
Project
Tasks of the project
Notes of the project
When I was working in Trello or Notion, the clients did have their own account. That’s not a problem for us.
In my ideal world you could invite a guest to the workspace. They will have a guest account. After they log in they only have access to one view or one entity that is shared with them via entity permissions and they can only view items if they are assigned to them. And ideally create new ones (like a ticket).
You then want to make sure they can’t see other guest user accounts (so that Client A can’t see Client B) and disable functionalities like search.
Yeah it’s not a simple scenario and the challenge isn’t isolated to Fibery. I do hope more apps start to account for this kind of scenario. As the number of contract/freelance based work increases it needs to be easier to come and go from a system, I just want to stop using email haha.
Adding onto this. Entity views/permissions definitely help here. I think in addition to the current ability to share a public link, it would be great if you could share a link that would let others join a specific entity (not the space)
The use case would be when you’re collaborating with a third party but that third party also wants to share visibility of that work with others. That way you’re not having to manage invites and setup users, the third party shares that with their team and the people they deem relevant to the work.
But first things first: I never used Softr so I don’t know if it’s a good tool or only good marketing (that’s always the question).
I do like the idea to quickly build a frontend / app based on data in Fibery.
After looking the video I thought of the following:
You can build a client portal where you can collaborate with clients on projects, show their tasks/support tickets, let them create new items etc.
You can create a space where you can collaborate with a third party without the need to pay for a full user account.
And Softr’s website says you can even easily create a web app. A lot of Fibery users miss mobile functionality. You can then create an app that suits your needs (such as quickly add items and retrieve information, such as all deadlines/tasks/etc. for today).
So to summarize: it can be an extension of Fibery.
I could just create a simple kanban board per client for free. Where the client could move a task to done, create a card when they have questions and leave a comment.