May 9, 2024 / Smart Sections and 15 quality-of-life updates

[antoniokov]

We skipped last Thursday (holidays), so you are getting the double dose of updates today!

Smart Sections (experimental)

Most companies are organized both functionally (design, development, sales, etc.) and cross-functionally (by product, client, or cross-functional team). However, when you pick a collaboration tool, you are typically forced to build your workspace around one organization and sacrifice the other.

Fibery was no exception: access and navigation were built around functional Spaces while products, clients, and teams were relegated to secondary characters. Then we introduced Entity-level access with custom access templates allowing you to share an entire hierarchy like product → initiative → feature → task. With access unlocked, we are now coming for navigation.

Organize your sidebar by products, clients, teams, or any other high-level Entities by creating Smart Sections. They appear below Spaces and function in the same way Smart Folders do. Add Views and Docs that are unique for each product/client but also mirror the same kind of View to all of them to save time.

So far the only way to create a Smart Section is by converting an existing Smart Folder via the context menu. If you don’t have one, please create it in any Space first.

If your workspace already has a Space per Entity of some kind, consider replacing those Spaces with a Smart Section to simplify access management and remove duplication — we’ll be happy to assist with the migration.

Go to Settings → Experimental Lab to enable the functionality.

Groups in Table and List Views (graduated from experimental)

We’ve fixed many bugs related to groups, and they are ready for the very first public release. We still have many things to add and improve, but you can already use groups safely and provide your unbiased feedback.

Copy the link to a rich-text comment

Sometimes it is handy to send a link to an exact comment. Copy Link action was added to inline comments to make it possible.

Move back to backlog on Timeline View

We’ve added Move to Backlog context action on any card on Timeline View. Move to Backlog resets dates and a card is moved back to the backlog. Forever…

Presentation mode on Whiteboard

Now you can enable Presentation Mode for Whiteboard. It hides bottom panel and makes the Whiteboard read-only (for you only). Cards and Views are opened with a single click in Presentation Mode.

Double-click to resize quickly

When you see something resizable on Entity View or in a doc, double-click to resize quickly:

• if the thing doesn’t take the full width yet, it will expand to 100%;
• if it already takes 100%, it will shrink to fit the content.

Works for

• images and videos;
• embedded and relation Views;
• embedded links (aka iframes).

Integrations: disconnect + Money and Phone Fields

We’ve improved the integration settings menu to provide clearer choices. Now, you’ll find two distinct options:

1. Disconnect and Migrate: remove the integration while converting its Databases into native Fibery DBs.
2. Remove and Delete: permanently delete an integration, including the associated Databases and data (hard delete).

The integration schema now supports Phone (not just Text) and Money (not just Number) types — the documentation provides more details.

One-liner improvements

• Productboard integration: the integration template offers new Views, additional Fields, and Formulas to replicate and surpass Productboard functionality in Fibery. Check out the guide for more information.
• Notifications: we’ve added Automatically unwatch entities moved to final state rule. Enable it in Settings → Notifications.
• Feed View: we’ve significantly increased the performance and replaced the 100 Entities limit with an infinite scroll💨.
• Entity permissions:
  • now you can select a Database on a View or in search if you have access to any Entity of this DB (used to require access to all Entities);
  • now you can see a mirrored context Report or a relation Report for a certain Entity if you have access to this particular Entity (used to require access to all Entities).
• Export: now you can export documents in My Space to markdown. If you export the whole workspace, your My Space documents (but not the documents of others) are included.
• Navigation: we’ve updated background colors to improve focus on the content and achieve better contrast for panels.

Fixed Bugs

• Whiteboard: Actions don’t work in full-screen mode
• Whiteboard: Text is not rendered properly in whiteboard shapes
• Whiteboard: Fit to Screen should have some margin on top, so the toolbar is not covering the content
• App breaks if avatar extension is removed from the User type. UI should block such attempts
• DB should not appear during the next sync after it has been deleted
• Error when syncing Airtable integration
• Emoji and mention dropdowns are cut when input is in the bottom of the page
• After an unsuccessful initial sync duplicate databases are created with sync restart
• Elements outside main container have a different alignment
• Duplicated in Smart folder View don’t get highlighted in the left menu
• Comment and highlight icons overlap the text if highlight is added to the text in wide column
• Create Document twice for the same sidebar parent creates Documents with the same content (document secret)
• There are glitches on expand/collapse when a filter is applied to the grouping items
• Unable to restore Empty Space
• Relation views resized to max width should have max width on all screens
• ‘t is underfined’ error when entity database from Watching is renamed or moved to another space
• It’s impossible to undelete context Document or Whiteboard if the Space where it was created is deleted
• Restore toast allows to restore a deleted integration DB

[njyo]

Hi @antoniokov,

As shared before, I love the Thursdays for all the new goodies that they bring.

This Thursday is nothing new in that regard. Some massive improvements that your team has delivered. Kudos. Imm sure the smart folders to smart spaces is not small feat.

That said, the last weeks and months feel like many improvements but many that do not feel relevant for us. That smart spaces I don’t need, neither the presentation mode of the whiteboard. But what I do need is things like a cleaner visual on the menu to make spaces pop and a way to push a default order. Or the ability to have a frozen whiteboard when embedding it…
As said, the operative word is feel.

I’m not sure how important we are as a customer, but it feels like there’s a lot of heavy work that’s happening that maybe solves somebody’s problem but it doesn’t feel like our problems get resolved.

What I would love to have in order to have faith in the progress and that it makes sense for me to share needs and feature requests, is to have a roadmap that we paying customers can vote on and that’s transparent.
I really don’t know how many people are asking for a presentation mode on the Whiteboard. I know Imm asking for a Whiteboard that doesn’t suck while having deep linking to start…

So yeah, how to make us paying customers feel heard? Obviously the 10 votes I had are used off long time ago.

As always, deeply appreciate your hard work. Just wish we had more visibility on roadmap and maybe the way to influence it towards what we need.
Thanks

[interr0bangr]

I like the smart sections, would just ask that you make their font size much bigger as it seems weird that the items listed within them are bigger than the section name itself.

Also, when I try to favorite a smart section, it is empty!

Presentation mode on whiteboards is a great addition as well.

[interr0bangr]

@njyo

As always, deeply appreciate your hard work. Just wish we had more visibility on roadmap and maybe the way to influence it towards what we need.
Thanks

Would also love it if the roadmap (. | Fibery) was more open and transparent. It’s been pretty barren for the last few months even though I know there’s a lot of work going on.

[YvetteLans]

@njyo

As always, deeply appreciate your hard work. Just wish we had more visibility on roadmap and maybe the way to influence it towards what we need.

Fully agree!

The public roadmap is empty currently. Which also feels odd for an open start-up that releases almost every week (which is so awesome and impressive! ).

It would be helpful to know what’s coming. Also because some changes will have quite a big impact on our workspace.

@antoniokov

When you see something resizable on Entity View or in a doc, double-click to resize quickly:

• if the thing doesn’t take the full width yet, it will expand to 100%;
• if it already takes 100%, it will shrink to fit the content.

That looks great in theory, but as mentioned here the expandable width are giving me a headache Really hoping for a full width option for every resolution.

[mdubakov]

@njyo

That said, the last weeks and months feel like many improvements but many that do not feel relevant for us.

This is maybe true, we are mainly working on Fibery 2.0 release and do not share many things, this is the reason of the public roadmap degradation as well.

Our target customer and use cases shifted to “Product Development company with 100+ people” and use cases to “product discovery and development processes, like feedback processing and backlog prioritization, feature specs, connection to strategy and execution, etc”.

Imm asking for a Whiteboard that doesn’t suck while having deep linking to start…

What do you mean here?

Or the ability to have a frozen whiteboard when embedding it…

We will implement it soon

What I would love to have in order to have faith in the progress and that it makes sense for me to share needs and feature requests, is to have a roadmap that we paying customers can vote on and that’s transparent.

Based on our prioritization score, here is how the backlog looks now. Does it resonate with you?

As always, deeply appreciate your hard work. Just wish we had more visibility on roadmap and maybe the way to influence it towards what we need.

We will get there eventually after Fibery 2.0 release, since this is a part of use cases we want to support. We need proper permissions for that and this is what we are working on as well.

[Yuri_BC]

The new release has smart stuff, thank you.

Please update us about entity level permissions?

I’m surprised that the more cosmetic (although smart) features and bugs get pushed while the fundamental needs like entity level permissions are not well in place, which makes managing roles and teamwork extremely difficult with Fibery.

[mdubakov]

@Yuri_BC

while the fundamental needs like entity level permissions are not well in place

Only one engineer in our team is smart enough for entity permissions and he was busy with Highlights/Multi-relations things. Now it is done, and he will get back to permissions.

[ccollins]

I didn’t know I needed Smart Sections, but I love them!

Quick question: Currently it looks like smart sections are visible to everyone in the workspace. You can limit visibility to the content inside via entity/space access and folder filters. But is there any plans to limit visibility to the section name itself?

[interr0bangr]

Bugs I’ve found so far with the Smart Section feature:

Sorting by entity name doesn’t work for me:

Smart sections that have been favorited are not displaying any entities within them:

[interr0bangr]

I would also ask, will there be an option to reorder smart spaces so they can be displayed above the default “spaces” section?

or, even better

Could there be an option to hide the default “spaces” section entirely if we want? Same with “My Space” and “Favorites” for those of us who want minimal clutter and visual duplication.

Non-smart spaces now have no value (to me at least) other than a way to edit database structures and integrations, which I would argue feels more natural to access via a more traditional “workspace settings” screen like ClickUp or Hubspot.

I’m interested to hear what the long term vision/end game for this might look like, because as it stands I don’t know why someone would use want to use both regular spaces and smart spaces at the same time.

[njyo]

Thanks for your candid reply, @mdubakov!

@mdubakov

This is maybe true, we are mainly working on Fibery 2.0 release and do not share many things, this is the reason of the public roadmap degradation as well.

As I emphasised feel in my message, I really meant that. The team has definitely been firing from all cylinders, and I’m excited to see where Fibery 2.0 lands. Even though we are not a product development company with 100+ people. Then again, I believe that many of especially the refinements are things that will tighten the product for all.

This may also just be a matter of balance between big features vs smaller refinements. Especially on the smaller refinements (e.g. quick navigation fixes) this that address annoyances, it would be good to have a way to vote for what to be added next. And, sadly, I’ve run out of votes on the FRQ forum like ages ago.

In other words, besides the major workpieces being added for Fibery 2.0, I think it would be great for us as the fan user community to have a bit of an ability to direct the refinements that will make it in. If you had a section of “small refinements” that we can suggest, your team vets and removes anything too large and then lets us prioritise and that slowly gets added one-by-one, that would give us some agency, which builds excitement and a feeling of connection.

Imm asking for a Whiteboard that doesn’t suck while having deep linking to start…

What do you mean here?

Apologies, that may have been harsh, considering that whiteboards have gotten a good amount of love and refinements over time and have gotten significantly better since these days. Apologies.
What I did mean though, is that the Whiteboard still has a long way to go to be at the same level of quality as the rest of the tool. I force myself to use it, but my team still often escapes to Whimsical, which hurts, as you can imagine. Here a short list of what’s still cumbersome:

1. Sections and lines: These have become better but are still iffy
   1. Sections don’t work reliably when moving them. Unless the section is placed first and then everything else is drawn on top of it, it is unreliable when moving. Also, resizing sections is difficult, but connecting them is easy.
   2. Lines between objects have improved but often enough mess up when moving things and add additional corners so that we still try to avoid them as much as possible
   3. Lines should enable having labels on them. Not having these just makes things much more cumbersome.
   4. Entity relations display should be a default setting… or maybe as Whimsical have “whiteboard types” that have some default settings toggled.
2. Grid and guides: The grid has improved much functionally, even if visually still a bit crude.
   1. New objects added do not default to sizes that match the grid.
   2. No setting to default to showing and snapping to grid. So every whiteboard I need to first toggle them on. Also, What’s the point of showing a grid without snapping?
   3. Besides a grid, having alignment guides would be super helpful
   4. The grid steps are generally too small to be useful as it’s hard to align items with the grid (to be fair, this is hard, and I think only OmniGraffle has solved this well)
3. Rich text: While being able to change the font is neat, I honestly do not need more than one font, but I need rich text:
   1. Choosing one default compact font rather than Arial would be useful. Or at max, the ability toi swap between narrow and regular width.
   2. What I want to be able to do is have specific words bold, italic or having numbered and bulleted lists. Like this, everything is the same text or then I need to create more objects.
   3. There is left, centre, right alignment but not top, centre or bottom alignment?
   4. Mentioning people is not possible…
4. Comments vs Sticky Notes: The lack of first-class comments requires us to use post-its. A very crude work-around.

Overall the visual refinement is just steps behind the rest of Fibery and as such will also make the whole thing feel just much worse than what it actually is.
And yes, I’m super happy with the bulk import of entities and the general deep linking of the entities that you provide, as I said many times, IMHO that’s one of the key differentiators from any other tools like JIRA or Linear etc.

Based on our prioritization score, here is how the backlog looks now. Does it resonate with you?

Not sure what all the things mean, but here’s my quick take:

1. Introduce Database access → Not sure what this means, but I assume that yes, this is important
2. Dependency management is missing → Ditto
3. Allow non-Admins to create automation Rules → Not critical but surely important for larger organisations. In the end, I’d rather give somebody rights to make automations on a given database even if that means that they’d be DB admin.
4. Workflow 2.0: track cycle time and changes history → Sounds useful, but not critical to me
5. Quick filters and search in Views → Dunno. The one thing I want here that I had mentioned was to be able to disable filters and searches rather than deleting them
6. Rich-text formulas → Sounds nice, but not critical to me. On the other hand, there are a number of formula and automation limitations that feel limiting right now. That said, if this means more markdown support, then cool!
7. Validation rules → Not sure what that is…
8. WYSIWYG editor instead of plain text templates in automations → Not sure what this entails
9. Templates per Database → Not sure what that is… what I do know that I want with databases now is multiple inheritance
10. Automatically provide access to assigned and linked Users → YES!
11. Structured search (with filters and custom sorting) is missing → maybe yes. The search is currently not super helpful unless I search very specifically
12. Groups in List View, Table View and Smart Folders → Hmm, to me a better board view limits my work much more (can’t find my other FRQ)…
13. Rename workspace (change the URL) → YES! We’ve been waiting for this for ages
14. No good way to capture similar Databases → I think multiple inheritance solves this
15. Users are worried about entities limits & performance → Dunno what this is
16. Creator doesn’t understand how permissions/access are applied to other … → YES! And having the View as Different Role/User as well as the Admin toggle here would be amazing!
17. Filter, sort, and color-code using formula (ad-hoc calculation) → YES!
18. Calendar (dates) as integration template → Sounds useful, yes
19. Polymorphic relations are missing → YES! YES! YES! YES!
20. Customize Fields that update Modification Date → Maybe, not sure

Thanks for reading, happy to discuss more and hope it helps!

And as always, thanks for all the hard work to you and the whole team!

[RonMakesSystems]

@njyo

• Allow non-Admins to create automation Rules → Not critical but surely important for larger organisations. In the end, I’d rather give somebody rights to make automations on a given database even if that means that they’d be DB admin.

I might be missing the use case, but why not just share a space as “Creator” if you want them to be able to create rules… If all editors can create and adjust rules, complicated rules can be broken. I personally really value that only the creators have access to rules, just like only they have access to hidden fields. Would this be something that is toggleable?

I love the quality of life improvements, and appreciate the energy that goes into them but at the same time I feel like “Move to Backlog” can just as well be a user-created button… Giving users the tools to build what they need rather than ship features they can build themselves is the biggest reason I love Fibery so much!! (Yes, the up side is that this button is conditional to only show if the date field is not empty, BUT then give us the ablity to create conditional buttons instead! That is probably a lot more complicated, but you get what I mean.) All of this is said with a love for the product and a desire to see it grow.

[Nevil_Hulspas]

You should have highlighted the changes on the grouping view, apparently there is naming to each group + colors, which is amazing!!

Only thing which I was missing was the “is exactly” filter here:

For instance the word “high” and “highest” both contain the word “high”, so I couldn’t set a filter based on the word high. It made both the same color. I solved it with a grouping, but I think it’s good to have an “is exactly” filter option here too.

I also cannot sort correctly on the grouped values. For instance we want to group by priority, which is set by us as follows:

Then it won’t sort by that order. It can only sort alphabetically:

And as you can see, the order is not correct.

Other than that, great improvements.

---

In regards to this:

@njyo

the last weeks and months feel like many improvements but many that do not feel relevant for us

I think I know where this is coming from. Having been a customer of Fibery for a few years now, the thing I notice is this:

• Experimental feature gets released (about 60% “done”)
• Feature gets improved during experimental phase (about 80% done)
• Feature is now public
• Nothing happens for months / years, feature is still about 80% done

Whiteboard is a good example, it’s just not very good. And is has been there for years. I think they call it feature creep, where a lot of new features are introduced that don’t tie in to the bigger picture, and makes the product strategy seem directionless. Even though the amount of features is a sort of strength of Fibery, the fact that there is a lack of getting features to 100% sometimes makes it basically useless. i.e. Whiteboards. It was maybe better to not work on that at all, and invest the dev resources into other core features. (just to be fair, I haven’t worked with whiteboards lately, so I’m talking about whiteboards about a few months ago)

Unless getting the features to about 80% actually IS the strategy. But it doesn’t feel like that.

[Nevil_Hulspas]

Just one other thing I just noticed, there is still no visual separation between each database if they are grouped:

This is very important for us. I know I can make the rows colored based on the database, but that’s a subpar solution imo.

[Chr1sG]

@Nevil_Hulspas

I also cannot sort correctly on the grouped values

If you don’t apply a manual sort, the groups should be in the ‘rank’ order (which is the order set up on the edit page)

[njyo]

@Nevil_Hulspas

I also cannot sort correctly on the grouped values. For instance we want to group by priority, which is set by us as follows:

@Nevil_Hulspas My usual approach has been to use these priorities:

1. 1 - Highest
2. 2 - High
3. 3 - Medium
4. 4 - Low
5. 5 - Lowest

This has the added benefit that setting the right value is a matter of typing the number.

@Nevil_Hulspas

I think I know where this is coming from. Having been a customer of Fibery for a few years now, the thing I notice is this:

Yeah, it’s a bit of this as well for me… been a happy customer for 2 years, and the development has been tremendous. Why I emphasised the feeling is because it’s a lot of that. If I think of improvements as:

1. Big Items
2. Small Items
3. Refinements
   … there has actuially been plenty of development for all of them. And the list that @mdubakov shared as a screenshot contains mainly Big Items.

I understand that these Big Items make a strategic roadmap and needs to be contolled closely by the company. But with the Small Items and Refinements I think as customers we want to feel heard. The engagement in this forum is generally great but it’s not visible how this flows back into the roadmap.
I’ve run out of my 10 votes for FRQs long ago, but even with those votes it’s not always clear what’s the treshold for the requests to be considered…

Honestly, it’s tricky. Especially for a flexible tool with so much surface like Fibery, as it is essentially an operating system for an organisation. The competitors are usually either massive (Atlassian), highly opinionated (Basecamp) and/or targeted (Asana, Notion, etc.).

As said, didn’t mean to raise a stink, but wanted to flag a potential long-term customer satisfaction risk.

[njyo]

The best example for this are some long-pending rich text table improvements that I also forgot:

• Adding rows to rich text tables faster
• We've improved Docs greatly this year. Do you still REALLY miss something? - #31 by njyo
• Enhancements for "text tables" within Rich Text

[mdubakov]

@Nevil_Hulspas

I think I know where this is coming from. Having been a customer of Fibery for a few years now, the thing I notice is this:

• Experimental feature gets released (about 60% “done”)
• Feature gets improved during experimental phase (about 80% done)
• Feature is now public
• Nothing happens for months / years, feature is still about 80% done

I think you got the gist right. The main problem here is that we were not sure what Fibery is. Building a company operation system is a very, very vast task that demands a large team. Our team is small and pursuing this goal leads to many “almost good” features.

This was one of the main reason why we switched focus last year and narrowed down our mid-term goals. Now we are focusing on 2-3 use cases and will polish them till they will be good. However, maybe these 2-3 use cases are not so important for some of our existing customers (Product feedback accumulation and processing, insights/problems extraction, problems/features prioritization).

Some areas are part of these use cases (like Whiteboard or Feed View), so we are working on them and improving them. Some areas are already good enough for these use cases (like Documents, and it means no major improvements in documents in near future). Whiteboards are getting better, try them now