New feature : Automation/Integration

[Rokt33r]

Currently, we're preparing a new feature to maximize productivity of users using multiple productivity tools. And prototype of the feature is provided limited users right now for testing purpose.

Technically, you can make automated workflows with integrations in Boost Note. The feature will be highly flexible and extensible so you would feel like doing programming.

(This is a screenshot of the working prototype. The automated workflow in the screenshot creates a Boost Note doc when a GitHub issue is created from a specific repository and continuously updates it when the issue is changed.)

If you're interested, please share your idea in this discussion. Also, if you want to try it earlier, you can request beta access from our app. (Settings -> Beta -> Automations & Integrations)

---

Goal: A tool to resolve, not to compromise.

Problem: Absence of interface across productivity apps

Many companies and teams are using multiple productivity apps with which everyone with different IT literacy can collaborate. Each app provides somewhat complete user experience within their app but when it comes to using multiple apps, the existing integrations, OAuth apps and APIs, only provide very simple functionalities with limited branching and composing strategies. With this in mind, users have not many choices to improve their workspace. To build an app from their integration interfaces, it takes a huge amount of effort to make a complete experience. Without the integrations, teams are required to make strict rules about how to collaborate and ask everyone to comply with them. This can lead to high cost for education, onboarding and communication.

Ideally, every app is integrated completely, so each team member, for any role, can see exactly what they need to see in real-time with no superfluous or extraneous information. This would greatly reduce the necessity for Stakeholders and managers to petition developers every time they need to know development progress allowing developers less time spent on administration tasks and more time spend on development; as all activities are broadcast as they push commits and merge pull requests. But, sadly, it is too expensive to introduce a solution like this while the return of it is pretty subtle. So most teams rely on manual operation to deal with the lack of these sort of interfaces.

However, manual patterns makes improving collaboration very difficult. Even if some members have ideas to improve the workflow of their team, adopting the idea, more often than not, costs too much. Every member is required understand the idea, and even if they understand idea, it is really difficult for most people to change their habits instantaneously. This can often lead to half-implemented and half-followed conventions or long switch over periods, the result of which, regardless of the quality of the original idea, is friction and inefficiency. On top of this the necessity to ensure that everyone is following the correct flow can lead to a feeling of rigidity and micro-management. Consequently most teams just give up bringing new ideas to improve their collaboration.

We think the automation feature of Boost Note could resolve the issue and make improving collaboration much cheaper and enjoyable for developers allowing teams to adopt new ideas more actively regardless how big or small it is.

Potential use case : Trouble shooting

There is an IT company using AWS to provide their services and using Slack to communicate within the team. If their services have an issue, AWS Cloud Watch will detect it and notify to Slack channels via web hook or some chatbots so the team can notice the problem and response fast. This integration itself is really helpful but also bring some problems of Slack. Since the app is messenger app, all information is listed in the app like a log. Therefore, it is really difficult to distinguish which message is important or not. And information will be flushed as time passes. So the solution is good for fast response but not good for retrospective. To deal with this issue, teams should want to bring some wiki service so they can store what they’ve learned from the incident and easily find it again when a similar issue happens. But it means, someone in the team should do the writing after the issue is resolved. So the team need some rules to determine who and how to do it and make everyone comply it. In the real world, it is not easy to adopt. Some people forget to do it or do it incorrectly. The team might give up if they think the cost to introduce the new rules is more expensive. Also we could think it would be nice to have some dashboard displaying the fixing process in real-time so everyone is on the same page, they can prevent misunderstandings, and stake holders and managers can know how much time it would take to fix the issue without bothering developers. But someone still needs to update the dashboard manually. It means they might make mistakes and cause more misunderstandings. So it would not be easy to make the idea work smoothly.

So we are preparing a new feature so teams can improve themselves gradually and sustainably without hustle. Instead of integrating AWS Cloud Watch to Slack directly, users can introduce several automation pipelines to Boost Note. When an event is emitted from AWS Cloud Watch, Boost Note create a summarized doc. Once the doc is created, Boost Note can create a Slack Thread and link to the doc. And all comments in the thread will be updated to the doc so they don’t need to summarize anything manually. At the same time, Boost Note can create a Github Issue for the incident with similar linking. Once PR is submitted for the issue and merged, Boost Note can update the status property of the doc so the team can check how they are dealing with the incident easily. Creating these automated pipelines replaces the need to make rules, ask the team to comply and changing their habits. The only cost would be initial configuration which might take only several minutes. And improvements and additions to the workflow, requires just tweaking the automations.

Pros of Boost Note

Workflow improvement with Boost Note costs much lower. With the conventional way, education cost and maintenance cost are very high. When introducing or modifying a rule to improve team work, every team member need to learn what’s been changed and someone needs to keep their eyes on it to make sure everyone follows the new rule. With Boost Note, you only need to get a consent from your team when setting the automation. Automation will do as the updated settings. No further maintaining is needed unless there is any other issue. If team notice room to improve there is much greater agility and ability to iterate on workflows.
The automation feature provides a developer friendly UI so developers can design delicate pipelines in the configuration. Once they have finished the design from the UI, they can activate it immediately without extra work.
It provides a lot of flexibility and extendibility for a team using various tools. Lots of team are using different tools to maximize their efficiency for different context. But it means they need to deal with information gap between the tools manually. So lots of teams are just cope with the issue while others gave up using multiple apps. Also if developers don’t like tools of their company, they can just make a new pipeline