Updates to Comments: Reactions, Threads, and Comment Watching

[Rosalind_Lutsky]

Hi there! I’m Rosalind – a product marketing manager at Airtable focused on helping teams build powerful, custom applications that make work more efficient. Today I’m happy to share more about some of our latest updates to comments in Airtable.

Now, you can quickly react to comments & keep up with async conversations with your team through Airtable.

What’s new?

Reactions. With comment reactions, you can quickly share feedback and show support with an emoji reaction.

Threading. With threaded record comments, you can add a comment in reply to another comment to help keep async discussions organized.

 

 

Comment watching. Comment watching allows you to monitor specific comment threads and get notifications when new comments are made.

Our three new commenting features are available for all users. Sign into Airtable to give it a try and let us know what you’d like to see next! 

[anton-vatech-io]

Wow, so cool!

[Ben_Crouch]

OK... but (elephant in the room)

Don't you need to sort out the comments inbox. Ensure good integrations with day to day messaging tools like Slack etc. in order to make commenting on records useful in the first place?

[Rosalind_Lutsky]

@Ben_Crouch that's a great point, and we've been actively thinking about improvements on this. Are there specific features or changes you'd like to see? Would love to share with the team to incorporate into development plans.

[Ben_Crouch]

@Rosalind_Lutsky Thanks for reaching out.

If you want people to use the airtable inbox as a destination I guess there is a whole heap of stuff you would need to consider which I wouldn't start articulating here but the list is kind of endless on what makes a good inbox work well.

FYI we have slack channels setup for each of our customers (we're a marketing agency) and every time things happen in AT to do with the customers we have notifications ping to those channels so our guys can discuss them.

I would prefer people discuss around the specific records ('tasks'), but that would mean a more sophisticated integration whereby someone could create messages in AT and they be reflected as threads in Slack or people write messages in slack and they be updated within the card. it would need to be quite sophisticated I guess so not easy!

in all these CRM/Project Management platforms though where I see in-app collaboration fail is businesses usually have a core method of comms (email, teams, slack0 and no matter how much you fight it, comms will always happen there - so you've got to somehow work out how to extend your collab functionality into those platforms. 

tough one. Lucky I'm an agency founder and not a PM/Dev 😄

[matt_stewart1]

@Rosalind_Lutsky i have mostly abandoned any hope on my inbox, as every time i clear it it quickly gets to the 99+ unread in a blink.

Things needed to better manage:

1. Remind Me feature to remind me to circle back on a comment in X days
2. Sent filter to see things i recently sent
3. Flag/Pin feature to flag comments for future reference
   1. as such, i think pinning comments to top of a comment history like slack does it would be astounding so teams can pin critical messages so they dont get lost

[MIG]

Hi, can't we send a voice message in the comments field?

also, can't we send a direct video recording to the attachments field or even to the comments field?

Thanks..

[omf]

I agree with updating the inbox. My company currently discusses things in slack as well as comments on records - but the conversations sometimes overlap so we'd prefer to have all discussions on the record itself in AT. However, the current inbox has a few limitations which make it impossible for us to switch over at the moment:

- No way to separate out comment notifications from other (failed automations, etc)

- No way to filter comments we're tagged in vs not

- Clicking on a notification immediately marks it as read and takes the user to the record, which means they've lost their place in their notification list (would like the option to always open in new tab without having to right click)

- Doesn't have full information available from inbox or ability to comment from inbox. It would be incredibly helpful to be able to see the comment and answer directly from the inbox instead of needing to go into each record. 

- Unable to group / filter / sort in order to prioritize or work on responding to comments in a methodical manner

I think a way to open up the inbox / notifications as a full page and integrate being able to read / comment directly from there + grouping, sorting, and filtering would be the most useful.