Thoughts on the "Fibery approach to integrations" article?

[B_Sp]

Michael, it’s always good to see you in here, wish you could find a few more minutes a week to jump in like you used to - it’s always so good to see your comments. And @Oshyan as always appreciate your commentary, I have never been able to take issue with any of what you write!

I think this is great to see these items on the roadmap. Really encouraging to see a lot of what I’m looking for in “Green.” And re: your tool for presenting this, I’d go so far as to say you have a really great potential feature of a public roadmap for Product Teams. You should prioritize this! I can easily see with just a few tweaks how this could be right on par with Product Board, Aha, etc. tools that are huge in this space, and highly rely on their “Public-facing Roadmap” feature. But these tools are siloed away from the actual “work” of building a product after Product Managers complete planning. So you guys have them beat. Really impressive!

I did want to provide some additional feedback to your post. I’m probably coming off as the Bad Apple in these conversations, but I hope you will take what I have to say on face value and not consider it criticism:

I do believe most of what I speak of here in the community are key features you will hear requested as you get wider adoption, and in fact many of these features you did address in posts that are now many months to a year since we heard any update. It is really good of you to share this comprehensive list, helps me out a lot! I would like simply like to add two more suggestions:

• There are a few key features I’m interested in that are left off the list.

• It would be great to hear about what you plan directly in the community on a regular basis

I have some examples of each that I hope you will find useful. Before I get to those though, I’d like to make another humble suggestion that you consider a Voting Area here in Discourse. This has been suggested before (and is also a feature not on the list )

Upgrade Discource Features to include voting, tagging

This isn’t actually a feature request for Fibery, it’s for this community forum. A As Fibery grows and this forum gets more users, there are more duplicate posts in the feature request section. I’d love to see the voting feature here, so we can show our support for specific ideas. I’d also be useful to have tags to indicate which topics are planned, in-progress, and complete. At least, until Fibery has public & shareable views.

I think it would help you guys a great deal, while not necessarily being a problem like it can be:

With a voting board like this, the community can:

• we can see as a community support for requests, and support existing ones without repeating, which keeps your board clean

• there is some self-generation of requests, which perhaps can avoid certain requests falling through the cracks if your team isn’t quite able to pick them up here, in twitter, Reddit, etc.

• you will get a ton of SEO benefit, and perhaps draw in users who are looking in Google to see if Fibery has “feature X.” I really believe you may be losing these users now. That’s because they may google “does Fibery do this…,” find the existing requests, see that many are not responded to, get discouraged, and give up interest. I know from my personal experience when I research a tool and find its canny board, such as this post:

it helps me out a ton. And when I see un-responded to posts, it makes a negative impression on me.

I think you guys have a chance to avoid the pitfalls of the other “big” tools, some of which, like ClickUp, are struggling with this now:

• the community seems to be made up of advanced users who I think will make sure these requests are sensible and digestible

• You are not at a scale yet where you are at risk of loads of requests getting votes, and then you get stuck with work to merge them, etc. that you may not have resources for.

Getting back to the two points from above, here are some items I could not find on the list

***If they are on there, sorry I just couldn’t find them:

Comments:

[DONE] Threads in Comments

Hi again, I asked over 6 months ago when you guys updated comments about the return of Threaded Comments. I am really missing that, not really sure why they were shelved and without them I have issues keeping a good flow in my comment streams inside Entities. Here is what I posted back in March: So I’d like to formally request this feature. Also, in that post I asked about another intuitive keyboard functionality - using ctrl + enter to post a comment. That’s how many, many chat apps work…

Send Comments content via Email Notification or Slack

Hi, I’d like to make the request of some obvious Notifications functionality that I truly hope will be built soon: When you get a notification that is triggered by an @mention in a comment, the actual comment comes along in the Notification. This is absolutely key for being able to communicate as a team effectively in a tool. Right now in Fibery, my team gets the regular, frequent notifications when somebody else comments, for example via Email, that just say “Team Member X commented” with a…

Granted, these are new requests, but it is disappointing to see them left off the list.

Requests re: Entity to another Type:

[DONE] Convert entities of one Type to another Type

Indeed the best solution is to implement Convert action that will preserve all possible fields and somehow aggregate data from missing fields into text that will be attached to entity.

[DONE] Convert Entity to another Type

It also occurs to me that this could be handled if you guys were able to implement the excellent “Import Data” dialogue. I just used this now for the first time as I was building my Fibery Instance “clean” up till now. And I notice that it has all the re-mapping functionality already there. [image] So I’m hoping you guys could potentially utilize that more “in-app” in Fibery and with the existing Batch Select feature, there will be an option to simply move Entities to other Types. I could …

Some old requests for Whiteboard:

Auto-Generate linked diagrams in Whiteboard

Hi Guys, I wanted to ask about the ability for Whiteboards to show existing entities in an App, or even Cross-App, as well as relations. In my use of Whiteboards, which is a big reason I’m using Fibery over other solutions, I’d like to be able to both “create” in a whiteboard, then convert to Types and Entities, but also show what I have already set up in my work structure that exists within apps. Thankfully, you have made great strides on the former - it’s possible to do a lot right now to d…

Whiteboard representation of relationships

I have been using whiteboard to show relationships between entities with some success, but so far it has only worked well if the relationship is one-to-many. If the relationship is one-to-one or many-to-many then I don’t see what I would intuitively expect to see. What is the expected behaviour for the whiteboard if I am trying to show entities that are related in these ways?

In Whiteboard, "Transparent" or "Empty" to represent Parent Entities

Hi guys, I’d like to ask if you could consider a aspect of Whiteboard where a parent entity could be viewed as an “empty block” or group around its children. Something like this: [image] This is an image I did in reference to another work management app, but the point is that the “grouping” block would be the parent entity, with the “task” blocks the children. This is very useful for expressing software systems - tiers of development for example, or Master Features that contain many sub fe…

To my second point of hearing from you guys more in the community:

First, many of those above requests have “likes” and multiple comments, but most have no response from the Fibery team. So that’s discouraging.

Here are some other quick examples of requests with no response:

The request “Activity Stream”, which I’m not sure is on your list as this is about an area where you can see @mentions and user activity:

[APPROVED] Activity Stream

A dedicated page for all key user activities aggregated from user selectable “spaces”. What type of activities get listed can be configurable. Any @mentions should be highlighted too in this activity feed.

has a lot of support for it, but not one response from the Fibery team at all! So as a Fibery user, up till you showed this roadmap today, I couldn’t be sure you would develop it, ever.

and this re: calculated columns:

@Shafqat_Ullah

A table view showing aggregate totals on some numeric fields will be good!

Or Time Tracking:

Time estimation and tracking?

Hi, I am sure you have something planned for time estimation and tracking. A simple implementation could be the following: Record Time: User can enter any time spent on that entity in terms of hh:mm or from-time to to-time. These records create a Time Log for the entity and also gets added to the Timesheet for the respective users. Time Spent: Always shows the total duration of time spent on the entity (like task). This is calculated from the logged time. Time Log: Shows an expandable list o…

the last official comment we have is in March 2019.

Another re: Due Dates:

"Due Date" type of Date option - perhaps Extension?

Hi Guys, As I move forward in Fibery, I am realizing more and more that unlike some of the other “nocode” stuff like Airtable, Notion, Coda, etc., Fibery shines in that it is built for Work Management, unlike those tools. You guys have some features here that are geared towards that, such as Workflows. In those other tools, there is no such concept. But this is a big benefit with Fibery as Workflow is such an essential piece of Work Management I have found that I can see a need again and aga…

Some requests say “Approved” but there is no communication from the Fibery team, or very old communication, about them, which is confusing for those of us eagerly anticipating them.

Versioning in Rich Text Fields (and entities as a whole, too)

Hi, I think versioning in general is an important feature and versioning of each entity as a whole is not only useful, it is a requirement in certain compliance context. To begin with, the rich text fields should have versioning (and afterwards diff view between versions, revert back to a specific version, etc. too). In general, using an event-sourced architecture greatly helps with features like versioning, undo-redo, etc. Thanks!

Improvement to Tab order? (keyboard field navigation)

Although I am not a keyboard shortcut zealot, I do like to keep hands on the keyboard when possible as it speeds interaction in many cases. I am finding that, in trying to fill out information in Entity forms (Fields), it is taking a lot longer than it needs to as there appear to be functions of each Field that are being “selected” by tabbing, but are not actually operable, nor what I want to be moving to next. In my opinion tab should move consecutively between data entry mode for each field, l…

[DONE] Right Click Menu Functionality?

Hi guys, You probably saw this getting requested sooner or later, assuming you don’t have many requests already directly not here in the community. I am a big fan of the right click functionality around a lot of apps for all desktop platforms, and I find myself frequently out of habit “right-clicking” in Fibery. Was curious if you had any insights into your thoughts about this feature, and when you might bring it in. I’m not sure what’s involved technically as it’s way outside my limited fro…

[Approved] Ability to add in-line dates w/notifications (rich text, documents, comments)

I would very much like the ability to add in-line dates with reminders in as many places as possible. The major examples that come to mind are any Rich Text Field, Documents, and in Comments (both Extension-type, i.e. Entity-level comments, and highlight comments). This is a feature that many other systems have, including Notion, Quip, and tools like Roam, and it’s very useful for when you want to be reminded of something specific to a document (or section of a document), or where creating a ful…

So I hope you guys will consider adding votes to these Feature Requests on Discourse. I really think it would solve just about all my frustration, now that I’ve seen the detail of the features planned - thank you again for surfacing that @mdubakov!

I know this is already very long, but finally, I wanted to address @Oshyan your point here:

@Oshyan

That said, @B_Sp aren’t you running a software dev process? If I recalled that correctly, it’s odd to me then that there seems to be such misalignment with your priorities in what you need to do work, and how the Fibery team sees the priorities for the same kind of work. Presumably their plan is based on broader feedback from multiple teams doing such work, and if that’s the case it’s hard to argue with really.

I think we are in fact not misaligned at all. I think I’d describe my issues mainly around “day-to-day” use of Fibery, and how a rank and file Product Team will respond to some of the stuff I am looking for that is missing. These are folks who have used at times Asana, Trello, Jira, Monday, Notion, ClickUp, Wrike, Github Projects, etc.

No tool we used before did not have, off the top of my head:

• actual Entity-level comments that didn’t get sent in Email
• no native mobile apps or phone-friendly site
• No history of Entities
• Search that does not index any content aside from Entity titles
• an easily configurable “home” area where you can see some of everything going on in the app.

A lot of this is around team visibility and communication. It is hard to do software development without some basic communication functionality in a tool. It’s good to see that most of this seems to have found its way into Michael’s board. However from my point of view, it is hard to commit to Fibery without knowing if we can get any of this stuff in the next year. As I was pointing out, much of the commentary I interpreted here in the community from Michael directly, from year and early this year, led me to believe these basics would be coming sooner. But for months there was really no timeline on any of this stuff. And I can’t see an argument that says any of this stuff isn’t complementary to Fibery and Michael would not expect to have ultimately in the app. So on the one hand I’m pretty sure this stuff will come to Fibery, but on the other the guidance about when has been getting more and more vague. The roadmap we got to see today really helps. But there are still questions I have, and I’m hoping we can get them answered by either the Voting Board, or another way.

Thanks!