For those of us using Fibery heavily, what other software tools do you also use?
I’m especially interested in areas that don’t overlap heavily with Fibery, but are potentially related; generally though I would love to hear any tools you love or hate to use.
Chat and communication are really interesting, and I’m trying to figure this out now. I know the Fibery team uses Slack, and I assume this is a reasonably common choice. Anyone love or hate their current communication tools?
Anyone found a great “virtual HQ” tool? Basecamp seem to do a good job here, but doesn’t seem worth switching just for that. Maybe you just use Slack or similar?
Interesting that you mention Twist. I think it would be amazing if Fibery could come up with some communication capabilities that resemble how Twist works, I’ve spoken to the team about this in fact.
One way to approach this would simply have an Entity called “Talking Point,” “Memo,” or say “Conversation.” You simple create this Entity within your team to start up a convo you might be trying to have unstructured in the likes of Slack, MS Teams, Skype, etc. I have been posting about this so here you go again
I think all Fibery would need to be able to replicate this great functionality is Threaded Comments. So something like this workflow:
You create a “Conversation” Entity as your Thread topic
You fill in some details, just like you would in Email, of what you want to tell the team about
With the advent of Threaded Comments, you can then have a structured conversation about it
And uniquely to Fibery
You can reference anything else in the tool and keep track of that with Highlights - super powerful!
You can relate to anything you want via buildout of Relations
You can resolve via Workflow extension. You can’t resolve anything in Slack it’s just a non-ending discussion in an open-ended Channel!
I have seen that in teams I participate in, these chats in tools like Slack, etc. carry a lot of chatter that is relevant, but gets lost. Slack does have a great search function - which is why I’m pushing for indexing comments in Search:
But otherwise, I think those chat tools can lead to a lot of good content and ideas lost.
Twist, and to a lesser extent Asana, are the only tools I know of that solve this by having a full topic within a “chatting” function. What I think is very key here is this gives a team a real chance to replace not just Slack, but Email.
So I would highly recommend Twist, and if you go that route, perhaps you can join me as an advocate of a similar solution right inside Fibery!!
And I will add in closing that my hope is you will need none of those other tools. Fibery should be able to handle all those needs on its own in due course!!
Looking a bit more at https://carrot.io/ and now also https://threads.com/, I see that they sort of do something like what you describe, and I agree that would be really cool.
Yeah this would be amazing, one of reasons we sometimes “chat” within entities now (sort of a terrible version of the chat memo).
Interesting that both Threads and Carrot are designed as additive to Slack (by the creating teams, and this is how they use them) and not as a replacement. Twist in contrast is supposed to fully replace Slack. Perhaps one advantage of the Threads model is that you can then replicate the Basecamp-esque HQ experience (not that I’m that familiar with Basecamp).
For anyone using Slack, is the Fibery integration a good enough reason to not use another chat app?
I find myself wondering if the team chat/threading/etc. might be something that can be covered with an integration of some existing tool/system. If the eventual full-fledged API allows e.g. an external tool to insert its own types, content, forms, etc. into Fibery and for Fibery to be able to act on that content in the same way it can any other content in Fibery (e.g. highlights, linking, create entity from, etc.), that would be brilliant, and really take some load off the team to implement all these things. After all there do seem to be some good existing tools for this stuff, they’re just not integrated with Fibery and so aren’t as actionable as we need them to be… yet.
Unfortunately, the time spent in the ones I dislike is at least as much as the ones I like
The tools I use in my startup side-hustle are:
Fibery
Notion
Google drive
Outlook
Office
Notion is great for the informal stuff (wiki, discussion pages, etc.) but Fibery is great for the structured stuff. Google drive is in use mostly due to co-founders/legacy and I’d leave it if I could.
Nice @Chr1sG! I appreciate the emoji rating system.
I’ve used Slack myself, also didn’t love it, mostly because of the “always on gotta check everything” nature of it, but part of that is to do with the people who used it. What don’t you like?
What don’t you like about Sharepoint and Google Drive / What do you like about OneDrive?
I’ll have to look at Binders some more… looks interesting!
The way slack is used at my place of work seems to be mostly distracting rather than productive. It seems to be used for various things, like
a wiki where a channel is just a way to share info that will then be referred to for some time in the future
a substitute for email communication
a substitute for instant messaging
It doesn’t really excel at any of these, and it’s not that good to search through later.
For both Sharepoint and Google Drive, I find the way they handle/represent file structure to be unnecessarily confusing. Also, for Google Drive, the integration with the Office apps (Word, Excel etc.) is not good enough, and I’ve never found the Google versions (Docs, Sheets, etc.) to be comparable in functionality. I guess I’ve grown up with Microsoft and I’m comfortable with those apps.
I like Onedrive (for what I use it for) because it seems easy/painless. I’m on Win10 so it’s basically just cloud storage that looks like local storage, which is great. Sharing files with collaborators is easy, and collaborative working on docs is actually quite productive, as long as you can convince people to stop with keeping loads of different named versions 'Summary Report CG comments v0.5 DRAFT final approved with track changes.docx’ !!! and just get people to use the version history in Office 365 (and track changes if absolutely necessary).
Before Fibery came along, Binders was my favourite tool. It has the flexibility of a no-code database, with loads of configurability for lookups, formulas, hiding/showing fields etc. and I found it to be incredibly satisfying to use. The biggest drawback is that it is not really set up for multi-user support - it runs offline and each database is a blob that can only be worked on by one person at a time, and it needs manual syncing to share with others. But for sheer efficiency (assuming you know what you need to do) it’s hard to beat, and it works on mobile just as well (in fact maybe better) as on Windows.
I was referring to any of the more feature-rich, purpose-built sync or a-sync discussion platforms like Carrot, Twist, etc.
Maybe a Twist integration would link to a Type for each “Channel” with “Threads” connecting to individual Entities, for instance. Twist would be an Integration (like an Extension) that you enable (or “install”) at the Type-level, and if a Twist Thread existed for a given Entity, it would appear on that Entity with content in-line, or at least an excerpt and link to Twist for full content. If a Thread did not exist, an option to “Create Twist Thread” would appear there. In Twist, when creating a Channel, you’d get an option to link it to/create from a Fibery Type, and likewise when creating Threads within that channel to link to a Fibery Entity in that type. Then ideally in Fibery you get the ability to link to and create entities from the Twist Threads, etc. That’s the basic idea.
You’d probably want to be able to have a top-level link to Twist channels/threads in the left menu, and ideally to even make links to Channels, if not Threads, anywhere in the menus too, e.g. as a sub-item of a Promoted Entity.
I haven’t thought about any of this super in-depth, so the above may not by the best way to implement it. I’m just noting that some people have a need for much more full-featured sync or a-sync discussion feature than I do (current Comments are mostly enough for me, especially since they can include basic formatting). And wondering if it makes sense for Fibery to actually deal with that natively given that others seem to have potentially solved those challenges already, and Fibery has plenty of its own more unique things to solve and implement. If the API can be used to address these needs and give people more options at the same time (maybe you prefer Carrot, so a Carrot integration might also exist that works similarly).
And of course that’s just one problem domain where solutions already exist. The more the Fibery team can focus on solving the problems unique to their value proposition, the better IMO.
I have thought this through a good deal and what I described above I think could work very well to keep communication within Fibery and out of the likes of Twist, Carrot, Slack, etc. where it may disappear into a blackhole.
Simply, if you created an Type called “Conversation,” and treated it like Email or a Twist Thread, with comments as the “discussion” around the topic that’s the body of the Entity, you get most of the need of using outside apps, but it all stays in Fibery!
This is not a one-to-one messaging type solution granted. But even having this ability in Fibery would be huge. I think stuff like Slack, or Email for that matter, is used for this need I’m trying to solve in Fibery. And I would love to at least get these more comprehensive communications right in Fibery itself!
I think internal conversations (organisation users) should be native in Fibery, otherwise you alsways has this disconnect between entities/subject/tasks being discussed in several threads in several channels.
Or you will need a very deep 2 ways sync, to display the entity in the chat app, and the conversation in Fibery, to a point that they become the same app.
On pure chat app, Quill.chat seems to have an interesting way to solve thread vs linear messages: each channel can be forced to either be only thread (then looking more like a forum/email) or mix of thread and single messages.
