Here is the Jacks Chewing Gum Demo (open in coda for better view):
Because the whole ‘Custom Packs’ program itself is in Beta right now, I can’t share it yet – but is anyone interested in getting access as soon as it is possible?
I would also love to get some feedback/insights in how the pack would be used and what features would be absolutely necessary.
Hi @Daniel_Stieber , just curious and posting here since it might help others - what are your main motivations for tackling this within Coda as opposed to existing solutions? Thanks!
Hey @Ed_Liveikis this takes a couple more lines than I first thought, but maybe it is an inspriation for other pack builders as well.
The answer is:
Mostly because I think Coda has the power to be the single source of truth for people, departments or even whole companies.
There are several tools for every solution and everyday new SaaS startups pop up. Thankfully with an API-economoy nowadays, almost every tool offers an API and you can connect your tool-stack. With Zapier & Integromat you can push and pull stuff around, but with Coda Packs you now have a way to create a ‘Homebase’ where all the good things can come together. And thatfor it will need packs for everything.
For marketing APIs, there is the obvious goal of making Dashboards – and there are several great existing solutions like whatagraph, supermetrics …, so this is just another option for people who might use Coda anyway and don’t want to add another tool to the list.
But besides the classic Dashboard there are additional ways to use a pack like this (someday )
You can add buttons to interact with the media channels, e.g. stop, start or change campaigns in FB
You can pull out just a little information and make it useful in different context (see example below)
You can mix & match tools and make docs, pages & controls that no other tool offers right now
It all is a matter of use cases and creative ideas of makers.
Just a little example:
I made a doc for one of my clients: It is a global acting company and the doc is for country managers who overlook many markets. They don’t need to go into every dashboard in whatagraph or access tools like Buffer, all they want is to know if a market is running fine or not and access tools quickly.
The table in the screen helps them to quickly access accounts if they want, but it also has an Ads indicator. It shows on a glance if a market is running Ads right now or not. I don’t now any other tool where I could have built the same ‘control center’ than Coda. For this client this is a helpful tool. For another client it will need something different.
Very cool thanks! I agree we’re using coda for the same types of things! I’m not sure if packs support a readme of some sort, but IMO every pack could benefit from having all this type of motivational info in the pack itself.
Seriously though, each pack has a “Listing”, presumably for the makers marketplace. But strangely, the plain text description field is not what I would expect from Coda. I agree - every pack should be a package much like a Github repository where details, instructions, and documentation could all co-exist as a unit. Hmmm, that sounds like a Coda document.
And it goes a bit further as well - most analytics and business intelligence solutions lack the ability to blend narratives, reports, images, videos, actions, email, conversations and a variety of other data points that elevate the decision-making process. If you try to insert the many aspects of a Coda-like experience into disparate BI systems you’ll find great friction and typically no capacity to meet essential business requirements.
Coda [with custom packs and recent enhancements] has begun to provide a platform where knowledge can thrive and corporate amnesia can be treated.
I also am curious on this, building web apps for my customers in Angular and large databases, that connect to ERP, I’ve found Coda limited - I appreciate for many that is not the use case.
But my first impression was strong and love the UI, so have been playing. I’ve found though if I create to embed in other web apps though, then users/customers must have Coda access and ‘go out’ of that app rather than stay in their own infrastructure or platform. For large companies this means ‘going out’ and logging in repeatedly, 2FA all the way, and it gets frustrating.
And I don’t find for the dashboards i’m using Coda can do that - not just about panels web and html are so customizable and Coda can’t handle any large data sets - even large tables from my point of view.
But it will only get stronger. And use cases depend on customer needs, and simple is best in many cases - design solution always before a technical solution!
So ‘Single source of truth’ has been not possible for me and my customers in Coda, for small teams and for my personal use has been fun.
The sharing here is great thanks all it helps the learning curve and use case knowledge grow
However for larger companies to use this, all users will need logins and ‘embeds’ in existing apps work well from my experience, but to do this requires you to publish first, and the URL can then be accessed by outside viewers if they know where to look.
I don’t see a use case for larger companies yet, except for targetted cases like meetings - but then the actions list that is then connected get’s very large Coda struggles so not functional any more.
Starting a conversation with I agree, however… is a sure sign you don’t agree. And I’m okay with that, but let’s be sure we set the context for this conclusion.
It seems that your primary issue has little to do with Coda itself and everything related to SSO which Coda supports. Embedding ANY apps as frames is not ideal in enterprise solutions which makes me wonder about the other existing technologies in the stack. To really respond with clarity and fairness, one needs to know a little more about the IT climate.
Your other issue involves scale, and this has far greater merit (in my view) than the SSO issue. Almost universally, scale is a function of project complexities and there are certainly some projects I would never want to manage with Coda’s Timeline feature. Setting aside the issue of scale we need to be more concerned with cross-team integration and coordination, the domain of ERP systems designed to wrap around very large projects with multiple teams and business functions. Indeed, Coda is a bad fit as the overarching orchestrator in these climates.
Circling back to my assertion - this still applies to ERP systems; by and large, they lack the ability to allow teams or high-level stakeholders to distill and convey knowledge and conversations concerning the interpretation of results. The high-tech roadway of dashboarding is littered with many failed attempts to provide a tool capable of meeting a new range of requirements in an increasingly loosely-coupled IT climate.
I do see many use cases for Coda in larger companies because every company must make decisions and Coda provides an ideal model for doing that from the mail-room manager trying to assess strategy for workforce optimization, or the CEO of a multi-national QSR franchise business who needs a synopsis of business model impact and the conversational fabric from VPs to make the best decisions.
Just kidding Certainly your first note I replied to I agree with some and not others, and sincerely thank you for the detailed and appropriate reply - my fast rushed inarticulate response didn’t deserve it perhaps.
Will discuss further in the New Year - fast notes are I agree on your notes on analytics solutions inabilities, but don’t agree with Coda being powerful for an entire company as the login issues and ‘another app’ in a large platform of integrated apps is messy, since from my experience it isn’t that easy to get data out and in from Coda as it is in other tools - though this may change as Coda releases and changes with API becomes more consistent.
The no-code movement in general though I think is excellent - though weaknesses as was with Trello is that horizontal software requires a lot of ‘decisions’ to be made but surely this is good thing if not tiring since they are questions that should have been answered already and only highlight weaknesses in a company’s current processes and systems. Too much focus (in my opinion) has been on how ‘cool’ the technology is (it is cool!) but the people I work with only care about final outputs not ‘how’ it has happened - so for now Coda is cool for individuals and smaller groups and teams not interconnecting departments from what I’ve seen.
Apologies if this direct opinion is too direct for some - my experience and frustration so far at first loving and then disssapointment as I explored many avenues 1 by 1 and had to cross off many from the list. Hoping to be proven wrong even high level stories would be great to hear uses cases working well - that would be great and would retain confidentiality - but reading about task management in this community is great if it works for you but the functionality doesn’t work for larger companies.
Agree on your note on ERP’s also Bill my frustration with them as well, and for example PowerBI then integrating is not robust from my experience also - slow syncing (and reduced efficient sync times) and continual optimisation needed as dashboards grow doens’t meet needs of the customers I work with.
oh thanks for noticing!
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Certainly your first note I replied to I agree with some and not others, and sincerely thank you for the detailed and appropriate reply - my fast rushed inarticulate response didn’t deserve it perhaps.