Update — We’ve launched Coda sync pages and shared an update on our broader roadmap, learn more here!
👋🏾 @Bill_French, @Bas_de_Bruijn, @Astha_Parmar and our maker community,
I’m the product manager working on various projects in the content sharing space, including page/sub-doc sharing and full-page embeds. We know how crucial this topic is to many of you, so I wanted to share some of our thoughts and plans.
I want to acknowledge that we clearly hear your frustrations. It’s not lost on us that this is one of our top requests. We’ve discussed this topic deeply, conducted extensive research where many of you have shared feedback, explored, and even prototyped various solutions. Through this we have learned that this is equally challenging, as it is important to solve.
What makes Coda docs so powerful is their interactivity and the interconnectedness of data. This becomes quite challenging when you want to share part of a doc, and have it operate well in isolation. This means ensuring we meet our maker’s expectations on the data boundaries of what people can or can’t access, and building features that have enterprise grade security — it can’t just look secure. While we’re up to the challenge, transparently, it is a large undertaking to meet these expectations without the shortcuts we see in other tools.
While I can’t share specific timelines on feature launches due to the challenges, I thought we’d share a bit more with you about how this latest launch fits into the overall picture, and the progress we’ve been making. We spent the last year conducting extensive research and exploring various solutions. One of our largest learnings is that we have many makers with diverse needs when it comes to better organizing and sharing your content from Coda docs. Sub-doc sharing is just one piece of the puzzle.
Full-page embeds are the first major building block on our path towards sub-doc sharing. On their own, they also enable a variety of use cases we learned about through our research and from customers using it.
- We’ve already learnt from our customers how valuable embedding pages from one Coda doc into others has been to avoid switching tabs and context or duplication, while bringing all their information together.
- In the next few months, we plan to make Coda page embeds editable, so in addition to having all your information together, you’ll also be able to make changes without having to open another doc.
- We eventually plan to allow you to securely embed a single page in such a way that no other parts of the embedded doc are accessible — something some of you raised in the forum as well.
- Finally, building upon all the previous steps, we plan to allow you to share a page of a doc, which uses the full-page embed functionality underneath.
Taking all this together, we see each step as building upon the last. Full-page embeds were a crucial step along the path and it’s certainly not the final stop.
Additionally, I wanted to share some related and exciting news. As we continue to review feedback from the various channels, we also learned that sharing a page isn’t always the end. Sometimes the true destination is about enabling people to see only a certain part of a project tracker or OKRs on that page. While Cross-doc enables this today, we plan to make this much richer, so people can work from any doc they please and all Cross-doc changes are always in sync. In the coming months, we will be working on Two-way Cross-doc to enable a variety of scenarios where you want to share parts of your data with other people, while allowing them to edit what they have access to.
Please know that the feedback you have all shared in the community, surveys, directly with Codans, and more has been incredibly important and one of the many bright spots of the community for me personally. We continue to reference your feedback and ideas as we explore and make decisions in the content sharing space.
We’ll continue to make progress and share updates as we have them. Many thanks again for your thoughtful questions, push, and patience while we lay the foundational building blocks to address feature requests like these.