Merge Comments and References in one common Stream for better flow

Hi, as my team moves along in Fibery, we continue to find References probably the most unique and useful feature. It is amazingly easy to simply type “ctrl” + K, then start typing out the name of any existing entity, or similarly create inline a new entity, while writing in Fibery. The fact that these mentioned entities then pick up the whole context of what’s written in their references area is huge.

A big way this can provide flexibility and save time when navigating in Fibery is if you want to essentially comment on more than one entity at once. You can simply mention the entity while composing your comment. This makes it seamless to update two or more entities at once.

Using the mentions around Fibery extensively, our team now has many DB’s that we have significant entities that both contain a lot of comments, and references. Things such as:

  • DB’s of long-term projects
  • Company objectives
  • Internal systems we track in Fibery

and so on.

With this flexibility to use references, what happens is in order to see the most recent activity in an entity, the reader of the entity on our team must be sure to both read through comments and references. Sometimes however the most recent discussion may be in a reference, not the actual comments area. So we have found that it would be great if you had the flexibility to merge both comments and references, and have the freedom to sort them per your preference. Sometimes we might have the most recent comment in an actual Project entity that is a month old, but the project was references in two meetings the last few days. However, the natural tendency is to read the comments, so the reader might think there was no update to the project without being able to see the references that are more recent ahead of the older comment.

This is also closely related to Index comments in search as we continue to build very relevant content around Fibery in both comments and References.

Thanks for considering this!

This is clever!

Overall we are thinking about communication in Fibery more and more, but it seems we will go for something big later this year, and ditch small improvements. We have to completely re-think communication flows and try to replace chats solutions as well. You may check some flows here

In your case some kind of unified activity thread with filters and good representation in a panel might help, we will take this into consideration, but please don’t expect anything soon here…

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Hi Michael, I have been meaning to respond to you here, thank you very much for taking the time to post your thoughts and provide the clip with some insights into where you guys might be going with this!

I just added some more commentary about this need over here, and what you suggest looks great. I look forward to a comprehensive solution down the road and I know you guys have been serious about solving how communication works in Fibery from day one, and I know that this takes a lot of thought to get right.

In looking at your clip, I can tell you I particularly like the “decision” element you are featuring. My team has been in productivity apps for years, and we always had trouble figuring out ways to document decisions in them. Most productivity apps are set up with “tasks” as the atomic unit, so you could try to make a “task” a “decision,” but that’s very awkward in every app we tried it in. I can tell you that Fibery actually is working better for this than anything else we’ve ever used! We have a db called “discussions” and these work like internal memos, with requisite workflows to show where the discussions are within a given team. I once saw a Confluence example where there was a tag attached to a doc of “Decision Needed” and another of “Decision Made.” In Confluence those were simple tags so you couldn’t do anything with them like sort them, count them, etc. So I transferred that concept to a workflow on these “Discussion” entities, and now we have a great system in Fibery! To give you an example of how easy this is, if we are in a meeting and somebody is taking notes in one of these “Discussions,” and there is a decision, for example we are going to use Vendor X for SEO vs. Vendor Y, I can simple start typing “in this meeting we chose Vendor X,” create a Discussion entity inline, then choose the status from this workflow of “decision made,” and this decision lives for us to look back on. Extremely quick, extremely useful, and extremely needed in apps like Fibery! I hope this process we use around tracking decisions might be useful to your thinking about implementing something like that in the future, as you displayed above.

Thanks again for your post!

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