Nested Documents feedback (internal wiki, etc)

[JoelH]

A little late with my feedback, but here I go. Documents improvements had the most value for me so I’ll focus on that.

(Nested) Documents feedback

Context:

• Not yet paid customer (on Trial)
• 2-3 small team inside a SME company (~1000) trying to find a suitable TKM tool that can scale to more teams if it works out well and to incrementally adopt wider
• Use cases: team and system/domain wikis, product management, project management, task management, process management, external vendor collaboration, inter-departmental communication and collaboration, intranet, as a tool for misc domain-specific stuff

Good things

I’m quite happy with this development on Documents

Let me break down what was good for me. Then I’ve put my improvement requests below that.

Finally an easy way to build out “team pages” and wiki pages

I struggled to find a good way to structure knowledge team hubs with nested docs and wikis in Fibery, that would scale for dozens of Teams and many more knowledge domains: any solution I came up with felt overly complicated.

These Documents improvements seem to mostly resolve my main issues. It doesn’t resolve some major concerns of mine relating to Search and Document sharing/collaboration, but I didn’t expect that (see improvement feedback below for details).

For sure, in their current form Documents as curated knowledge/wiki are rather simple:

• I lose out on advanced features like gardening and categorizing documents
• Automation and workflows are naturally limited

But the tradeoff for increased simplicity and flexibility seems worth it for most of my use cases.

What I especially like about these last 2 releases related to the Documents story:

• I find Documents (e.g. for wiki) are now easy to create in most contexts
• Document contributions now works fine for the Editor role (before we had to structure Documents using Folders, but folder creation requires the Creator role in Space, and that is a role I wish to minimize to a few Space owners where possible) - now we can nest Docs, this works fine for Editor
• Less maintenance since the Nested document approach also resolve a basic navigation story in the left menu, without additional work
  • At least if Document entry is a top-level in a Space, but that works well for most of my use cases
  • Now I don’t have to build special index/navigation Documents like User guide (although they come out very nice if one takes the effort to do so)
  • Or using awkward workarounds like Table, Board or Tree Views…

Simple yet powerful. I dig it

Makes it easier for my non-linear and unstructured work and knowledge

My team and surrounding teams often work on new initiatives, and we’ve found it typically a bit hard to “place the work” at the early stages. Sometimes it’s just a draft and fizzles out. Sometimes, it’s converted into one or multiple piece of work, often through some early collaboration. And for myself, at least half of the time my work starts with an unstructured draft or loose idea.

While I’m not the most structured person, my teammates are perhaps less so, and that’s been a concern to me with Fibery. Often when working for myself, I felt I had no location to add some draft work except in My Space, and it quickly became cluttered.

For myself, Documents fulfills so many use cases at once in Fibery:

• Document is a reference/managed knowledge
• Document is a draft for potentially future structured work
• Document is sometimes just an ephemeral stash
• Document is a communication tool
• Document is an internal collaboration tool (not yet, blocker for us, but I left a feature request below)
• Document is an external collaboration tool (not yet for us)

I still feel Fibery is lacking some important features for us to work for multiple teams, but I feel a slight shift here in the “right direction” for our use cases, thanks to these more powerful Document primitives, that makes it more straightforward to build and maintain Spaces for Teams and for knowledge domains across many Systems.

Infinitely nested docs that can be easily moved between a private space and other domain Spaces is a powerful mechanism; and I’m glad Fibery finally got that.

Or maybe - based on your awesomely honest communication - this was a happy side effect since Fibery wanted to better support Notion and Confluence import? In any case I feel Fibery looks better for our use cases now!

About converting Document to structured work

I see it’s not yet released but that you already are working on enabling this use case:

• I can start with unstructured work in a Document
• Then I can convert document it into structured work (=an entity)

Combined with the super practical two-panel navigation, this workflow seems to promise a very nice workflow that would fit me just right. Looking forward to testing it!

I’ve also put some improvements I’d love related to Documents below.

[JoelH]

Concern for me: Search doesn’t work well when using Documents as wiki/team knowledge

I expect we would have dozens (expect to grow into 50-100) of Spaces for different systems and teams, since we are a larger company. My concerns is how retrieving information from Document search scales, because right now:

• Document search cannot be scoped to a Space, and we will want to refine searches against Docs in particular domain specific spaces
• Document search doesn’t display the document breadcrumbs, so it’s hard to grasp context (it does show Space, which helps)

Up until now I had been using separate databases for product wikis in order to get search to be scoped, so I could find things when search refinement was needed (and to get some basic permissions to work). But that was not fun at all to maintain.

Using Documents for wiki, team docs and and collaboration docs, I’m on the other hand concerned we will have a hard time retrieving what we input into the system as content grows with time and more teams and more docs. When the search results are buried in a large result list and results cannot be refined if needed, it will be a slow and boring process to try to find content, and that’s a killer (one of many) for collaborative and reference documentation, in my experience

I.e. if I make a search, and it’s not obvious from the first results what Document is relevant to me, e.g. when using common search term like “roadmap” or “ip address” or “wifi”, myself and our users might need to further refine the search scope to filter out the relevant content.

In my use case, I expect that filtering would be on the Space, most of the time, since we will have a Space per major System as well as per Team. (That setup seems to be the best way to separate concerns and domains to me, in Fibery and in our organization.)

[JoelH]

Edit: discord is blocking more than 3 posts, so I’ll put all the other stuff in the single post below.

Nice to have for me: Create a Document from selected text

I often don’t know that I want to create a manual/wiki until after I have written some text.

I create entities this way all the time:

• I write something in text
• I realize it’s a little bit important, so I highlight it and create an entity of it
• I flesh out some task/job description/or other thoughts
• Then I resume writing the main content
• Fibery is nice to me and lets me work this way

In this venue, I’d like to create Documents from selected text, just as I can for entities.

It doesn’t seem I can create a Document from selected text yet though. It would be nice if it was possible.

I would expect if I created documents this way, it would be a nested page in whatever context I invoked the command from.

Nice to have: See location of Document, and moving Document

If I’m looking at a Document and want to move it, I find it’s currently a bit tricky to do so in some situations. Many times it’s fine, but not always. When it’s not so easy, it’s situations like this:

• I’ve found a Document using search or I have a Document somewhere as a Favorite, and I want to move it
• I need to find it in the Sidebar
• Then I can drag and drop it somewhere else

Or it can be when it’s a nested Document inside an entity, and I just want to “promote it” up a level, e.g. to better organize a project.

As a reference, Notion has a move Document (page) command that is quite handy.

Still, I haven’t found this to be a major issue, yet.

Nice to have for me: Navigation story feels incomplete

For the wiki/reference document context, I feel I’m still missing something (not very helpful, sorry ) around a navigation story when I have the Document open in front of me, around it’s relationship to other related Document.

Breadcrumbs would be nice, but I think there is something more in line with your hidden Table of contents that I’m after, something that makes me get a sense of where the Document is in a hierarchy?

Nice to have for me: exclude search results

Related to (Document) search, sometimes a search term hits a database which “pollutes” the search result quite a lot as well, and it would be nice to remove both search terms and exclude hits from specific databases (or Spaces, when that’s supported) from search result.

Blocker for me: Haven’t found any way to use Documents for internal or external ad hoc collaboration with non-paid Fibery users

It’s a blocker for us that it seems we cannot share Documents directly between individuals (most often added as individual users, but in some cases users might be pulled from Fibery user groups).

This applies to entities as well, but documents are more commonly used for cross-department collaboration and to me, key to success for our organization to successfully incrementally adopt Fibery.

Our most most common use cases here:

• 1-1 shares (collaborations or one-to-one meetings)
• Working on a feature spec across teams, that is not ready to be shared widely
• Quick feedback for a project or a task in an early stage
• Our teams in Fibery collaborating with employees that don’t use Fibery within our company for a specific spec or project
• Collaborating with external contributing parties

Notion let’s us do this with page sharing:

• Ad hoc share a page to an individual (an existing Notion user, an email guest if not a user, or an existing group in Notion)
• Invited users can get read, comment or edit permissions so we can structure the collaboration as needed for the situation

As long as we cannot ad hoc collaborate with shared Documents for those of our contacts not yet using Fibery, I have a hard time seeing how we would incrementally adopt to more teams, and how to collaborate with some external vendors of ours.

(Public sharing is sharing to the world, I’m talking about internal collaborations within our company or with invited external user, all behind auth. Creating a Space for each possible share combination is a no-go for me, this doesn’t scale to our number of employees.)

[antoniokov]

@JoelH

Related to (Document) search, sometimes a search term hits a database which “pollutes” the search result quite a lot as well, and it would be nice to remove both search terms and exclude hits from specific databases (or Spaces, when that’s supported) from search result.

What would be the examples of such Databases? Is it ever useful for someone from your team to search within them?

While we don’t have a proper neat solution, there is a (not so) secret API command to exclude DBs from search:

[
    {
        "command": "fibery.schema/batch",
        "args": {
            "commands": [
                {
                    "command": "schema.type/set-meta",
                    "args": {
                        "name": "APP_NAME/TYPE_NAME",
                        "key": "search/disabled",
                        "value": true
                    }
                }
            ]
        }
    }
]

Don’t forget to perform a re-index to see the results: /api/search/reindex

[JoelH]

In my case, some imported CSV files, that are likely short-lived in the system but imported for some processing. Yes, I think that might help, thanks.

[antoniokov]

@JoelH

Blocker for me: Haven’t found any way to use Documents for internal or external ad hoc collaboration with non-paid Fibery users

We are working on this right now with Entity-level permissions, although it’ll take a while.

@JoelH

As long as we cannot ad hoc collaborate with shared Documents for those of our contacts not yet using Fibery, I have a hard time seeing how we would incrementally adopt to more teams, and how to collaborate with some external vendors of ours.

As a part of our current plan, we’ll introduce a new kind of Users in addition to Admins, Members, and Guests — specifically to accommodate external collaborators. Inviting an outsider to work on a doc or a task should become frictionless. Notion and Google Docs do this well, we’ll take a page out of their book and put some Fibery sauce on it (not sure if the result will be edible ).

Retrospectively, labelling the current read-only users “Guests” has led to some confusion. However, the proper Guests are coming

[mdubakov]

@JoelH

• Document search cannot be scoped to a Space, and we will want to refine searches against Docs in particular domain specific spaces
• Document search doesn’t display the document breadcrumbs, so it’s hard to grasp context (it does show Space, which helps)

I think we should address these issues really soon. We’re having a discussion about it right now. All valid problems.

[mdubakov]

@JoelH

Create a Document from selected text

This is in scope for next week, so we will add it soon.

[JoelH]

Thank you.

[JoelH]

@antoniokov

Inviting an outsider to work on a doc or a task should become frictionless.

I want to add that “outsiders” in our use cases can be also be “within” our company (since we have a larger workforce) but not otherwise working in Fibery. That would be users that are invited to collaborate on a Document or an entity like a Project by a Fibery full user.

This is possible in Notion, and would be needed for us to incrementally adopt Fibery within our company.

If Fibery users cannot collaborate (edit on shared content, comment is not enough) with other users within our company that are not Fibery full members, the Fibery full users would have to move the collaborations (and communication) outside of Fibery.

Then the Fibery user’s would not be able to stay in Fibery as single collaboration tool, and most importantly it not be a smooth ride on either side (and the invited users would not get to try out Fibery either or see the benefits of such collaboration, I guess).

The invited inside collaborators would authenticate the same way as our regular full paid Fibery users, using our company login, e.g. SAML. They only see and can use what has been shared, and cannot create whole new contexts of work or new Spaces or databases, etc, to encourage them to get own Fibery licenses for their teams.

In the ideal world we could make a decision as a company, and everybody would understand the benefits of a new TKM tool over existing tools, and we would get 1000+ licenses at once. It’s is not possible to get buy-in for that however. The tool will have to prove itself to work and be gradually adopted through smooth collaboration experience and word of mouth. Life is hard…

[Chr1sG]

The new permissions model will accommodate users (internal or external) as ‘guests’ who can collaborate on specific items (docs/entities) in Fibery.
They can be company employees or outsiders, but will have limited access beyond what has been shared with them.
Your use case is very much within scope

[JoelH]

Your use case is very much within scope

If so, that’s great

[tpaktop]

This has been a major roadblock in many use cases for me too. Excited to see what Fibery team come up with.

[antoniokov]

@JoelH

The invited inside collaborators would authenticate the same way as our regular full paid Fibery users, using our company login, e.g. SAML. They only see and can use what has been shared, and cannot create whole new contexts of work or new Spaces or databases, etc, to encourage them to get own Fibery licenses for their teams.

This matches our thinking close to 100%
Stay tuned!

[mdubakov]

Fibery roadmap for Feb-April 2023

We are going to improve search and add breadcrumbs in the next few weeks. Some other minor search improvements we will add next weeks are: Exclude a Database from search results Filter by View kind in DB selector in search Filter by Space for all Views (including Docs) Mark Done entities grey in search result (or some quick filter?)

[YvetteLans]

We would really want to build our internal and external wiki in Fibery. The nested documents are awesome. Only problem for our workflow is that we often create ‘Scribes’, example.

By using scribes we can:

• Very quickly explain the user or team member (SOP’s) where to click and what to do. You click on record and the scribe will automatically create the screenshots and flows
• Blur sensitive information in the screenshots
• Add additional screenshots or change existing screenshots

We embed those scribes in our documentation. That’s possible via /embed URL or iFrame, see example in Notion.

Would be great if it’s possible to embed a link or iFrame in a document

[mdubakov]

iFrame block is in scope of docs improvements till May, so I hope we will deliver it in near future.

[YvetteLans]

That’s awesome

[mdubakov]

Some new features released today

March 23, 2023 / CSV Import 2.0, Views nested within Documents, and tons of other things

Views nested within Documents Now you can create local Views that are nested into Documents (and rich text fields). They can be useful for many cases, like: Create some temporary report and not complicate space with temporary views. Create a rich document with dynamic data. You may even now use Documents instead of Folders and describe what is inside in a much better way. You can create nested Views in two ways so far: via + action in left menu for a Document. via…