Workspace Sharing - Read.me

[Polina_Zenevich]

What is hidden inside here?

• When do you need to Share Workspace?
• What does “Sharing” mean?
• How to Share Workspace
• What you can’t Share now
• How to stop Sharing
• How to update Template
• How to create a human-friendly Shared Workspace?
• Currently Shared Templates

When do you need to Share Workspace?

Lets just come up with some cases, when Workspace Sharing is cool:

• selfish: when you want to move all the connected structures from one of your workspaces to another (this is also a workaround for renaming workspaces!);
• experimental: when you want to play with the current setup, but don’t want to ruin real work
• 👯‍♀️ friendly: give your friends ready-to-go connected templates, don’t make them struggle with Fibery alone
• consultancy: create ready-to-go workspaces for your customers and partners and show them some real magic
• community: share your Ideas with Fibery Community and get some ideas for your business. Friendship is magic!
• backup: please don’t . If there are 200+ entities in the workspace and you share all the entities, there is a chance that creating a new workspace from this template will never happen or take hours to complete.

What does “Sharing” mean?

Well, in Fibery you can share your connected Spaces. Space is a process, as you remember - and usually, processes don’t live in a vacuum. So, you can move all the connected Spaces from one workspace to another.

Sharing allows other people to get all the connected Spaces from your workspace (Databases/Views/Data) and install them using the automatically generated link.

How to Share Workspace

You have to Navigate to the Workspace Map screen and click “Share as Template” button.

Then you choose which Apps are you going to share and decide, whether you want to include data (entities)

Note: Documents, that you’ve created in your App - are Views, not Entities!

Click the Generate shareable link button and copy this URL to the address bar

What you can’t share right now?

Files
Images
Information about Users (assignments, formulas with Users, etc.)

How to stop Sharing Workspace

1. You can Deactivate your Link here:
   
   
2. You can just delete your workspace.

Once you delete your workspace, the sharing link would stop working as well.

How to update the Shared Workspace

If you improve your Workspace structure, add new cool Views, or somehow change it and want everyone to notice that - just Update your Template.

How to create a human-friendly Shared Space?

1. Explanation

A Read.me document inside the Space with an explanation of how to use it and how it can work - would definitely help others get your point. Or even a special Meta Space - that would really help with the Onboarding

2. Data

No need to show others sensitive and private information, but empty Views can look depressing…
Add some dummy data, if possible, and make everyone a bit happier

3. Views

Of course, Views are just the way to visualize Data and there can be no Views in the Shared Space at all. But we are creating a human-friendly Template, remember? So let’s add some helpful ones and name them so that it is clear why they are needed at all.

Ready-to-go Workspaces

• Product Companies
  
  
• Biotech companies
  
  
• Gamedev companies (coming soon)
  
  

If you have any ideas, of:

• how to improve current templates
• which templates to add

Please, share here in the comments and feel free to show your worspaces in this Category - share your vision and be ready for improvements!

[Oshyan]

Appreciate the guide. How do you suggest handling the situation where:

• You have a good existing set of Apps for your workflow that you actually use every day (has many Entities)
• You want to share it like a nice person
• You don’t want to share all your existing “production” Docs (Views) and Entities
• But you want to follow the guidelines above and include 1: A read.me, and 2: Some sample data

Do you have to Share the original (production) workspace without Entities (but with Views), create a new workspace in your account from that template, delete all docs that you don’t want to share, setup the read.me and sample data in the new workspace, and then share that workspace? Maybe I’m missing some way to better handle it that already exists…

[Polina_Zenevich]

Cool question, thanks!
In fact, that is smth we are going to improve in the nearest future. We think that documents must be handled as Entities, not as Views.
But I have another suggestion. As you remember, Fibery is free for personal usage. I would suggest you create an account for experimenting. There you can import templates/set of templates you want to share, or unfinished yet, etc. And another account will be for production.
I think import from real workspace can be too risky if you have valuable data inside

[Oshyan]

Yes, all that makes sense. And I agree Docs should be Entities. I have always thought so.

[B_Sp]

Hey great point, and I couldn’t help but think of this whole convo:

Any plans on making docs have sub-documents?

A lot of good points here. I agree with Docs as they are, would be great to be able to link them more freely and arbitrarily across Fibery. In fact today I just introed a new dev group I’m bringing in and the first comment from one was “is there a Wiki Functionality as it would be great to connect some documentation.” Yes good point re: tabbed Entities. I also think another option would be toggling References like in Roam. However, I do like seeing them all on the page at once, so I hope if…

Where I am suggesting that you can get by in Fibery with your Docs need by just using Entities instead and bypass docs entirely. Wasn’t sure if that came across clearly in that whole discussion, but in reading this, I just had to follow-on re: that point since this is my desire in the end - have Docs function as entities. My team essentially has created a Type called “Doc,” and this allows us to get the benefit of seeing things like references, comments doc-wide, etc. that you can’t do in Docs as they are limited here.

Also, one thing interesting that I wanted to also put into this discussion is right now if you install the Docs extension, you can link to any doc from any entity. Would you say that this, along with the ability to link to Whiteboards in the same way via extension, is basically as close as we have to Polymorphic? By that I mean you can it’s an area where you can link, not reference, to anything? I can see a bunch of uses for this arbitrary-type extension, one I’d really love to see is Dependencies as you’d have some real power in Fibery if you could make any entity dependent on any other. This is a real limitation of the “traditional” work management stuff out there like Asana, Wrike, ClickUp (which you seem well familiar with), and you can’t do stuff like make Projects dependent on each other, or on a task, etc. This is requested of these tools heavily if you look at their communities, but none has it.

Bottom line is I agree 100% you should be able to have what you are using as a “Doc” in Fibery have full Entity capabilities!

[Chr1sG]

I tried sharing my workspace (as a kind of backup of the structure, not the data) but when I came to import it, I got this error:

FYI I have a text field in the User type which is called Initials and which is referenced in at least one entity name formula.
Is this a bug?

[Polina_Zenevich]

Hi!
Sorry for the long reply - took time to check where the problem is.
Good news: fixed some bugs, could you please check your case again?
So-so news: we can’t share info about Users - as they are unique per workspace. So there will be problems with Assignments and Formulas, which has some User syntax. Not sure how to fix that, so will update the documentation.
Many thanks for the report

[Chr1sG]

Tried again and still get the same error message, and the import is only partially completed.
Am I right in understanding that you’re saying that workspace sharing does not support exporting fields that have been added to the user type?

[Polina_Zenevich]

Definitely