Hi guys,
I have been really loving the fact that you have References available in Lookups. I use this in quite a few ways.
In CRM, I have a list of Contacts at a company. They are sub-Entities of the Parent Company Entity. I use this to show me in the Parent Company entity all the mentions of the contacts in the company. So I can see in just one place all the relevant activity of each and every Contact, very useful.
Another example is in a Project/Task set up. I lookup from each Task references and show all of them in the Project Entity. This way I can see all the relevant mentions of the tasks in the Project in one place.
In my team, we wind up with a combo References/Comments area at the bottom of most Entities that show each of us full context of what’s “going on” in each entity. As we get used to this set-up, it has occurred to me that it would be equally, if not more, helpful to have the ability to rollup comments with a Lookup, just like you can rollup with highlights/references.
This would give some real benefit to Project Management. Imagine you have a Project Entity that rolls up comments from each task within. If this were to work chronologically, like with References, you could see in the Project entity a running update of what’s going on, because the latest comment posted in any task in the Project will flow to the top of this thread, just like with References. This is super powerful. Now in Fibery, like in other apps, you have a dilemma here: how do you keep an update of both your tasks, and the overall project the tasks are in? If updating Tasks, you can’t see those updates in the Project entity. So at times you may have a need to write a comment in your project entity directly as an “update,” which is redundant if you’re also writing updates in Tasks comments.
And this would also have similar application in CRM if you are running multiple Deals under a Campaign; Epics and Stories that are in a Sprint, and so on.
I think from a UI standpoint this is a natural fit, as comments and references are almost indistinguishable right now.
I really hope you guys give this some consideration. It’s a feature that would separate you as I am not aware of being able to roll up sub-entity comments into a parent like this in any tool. ClickUp has an open request about just that: https://clickup.canny.io/feature-requests/p/roll-up-task-comments
Thanks!
And PS, I generally want to shout out about how well-designed References are in their initial release (although I can’t wait to see continued improvements, too!). One way I use them is when running a meeting. I can go into the comments of each of the Entities discussed in the meeting, write a comment with a “#” of the meeting entity, then I get a terrific, chronologically ordered summary of what was said and decided about each Entity in-meeting, via references. Great stuff!
