
Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations - tfjaeckel
https://shelf.io
======
michaelmcdonald
I don't see any mention of the ability to self-host. That's a deal breaker for
many people. I trust that my internal network is going to stay up; however
external connections can be severed and I'm dependent upon you as a company to
keep your resources online. If you're down, my knowledge access is down. That
destroys productivity. I appreciate the idea and the execution looks good;
however for the product itself I wouldn't trust SaaS since I can't control
whether it's up or down.

~~~
gregmac
> If you're down, my knowledge access is down.

Even for companies that want to cloud host, there's a concern about if
something happens to Shelf itself (eg: the service suffers a major multi-day
outage or goes out of business). There needs to be a contingency plan (which
is probably some form of self-host).

If usage of a product like this is successful, it both becomes a critical
operational system and represents thousands of hours of time invested
populating it. There needs to be assurance that investment is not lost and the
business is not 'down' in case something happens. I work at an SMB and we use
quite a few cloud-hosted services, but whenever we do we discuss the balance
of how critical a service it is and what our contingency plan would be.
Sometimes it's switching to a competitor (and maybe importing history),
sometimes it's pulling the open source version and hosting ourselves.

The product looks great, but all I can see is "Data backup and recovery" as a
feature. I don't know what that means or what happens if shelf.io disappears,
so that's a huge red flag for me, unfortunately.

~~~
tfjaeckel
Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this topic. It's a challenge for all SaaS
products I believe but yes, the more business critical the product the more
important to address.

Apart from self-host and open source, do you have other suggestions on how to
address this on a product level? Would you feel comfortable with structured
exports for example?

~~~
grantlmiller
Check out www.enterpriseready.io to get a deep understanding of the standard
features that enterprises require (ie SSO, RBAC, audit logs, on-prem
deployment, reporting etc). Happy to talk through any of the features, I
contributed about 80% of the content. We also built Replicated.com which
powers the on-prem delivery for other applications like Travis CI, npm,
CodeClimate, Circle CI and a bunch of others. We think about these problems
all the time and how we can best help solve them. Happy to share what we've
learned there as well.

~~~
tfjaeckel
Enterpriseready is a good site, agreed. I'll also check Replicated to see how
you support on-prem and would gladly take your offer to hear more about your
learnings.

------
bigblind
After browsing the home page for ~30 seconds, I had a popup pushed in my face
asking me to enter my e-mail address. I understand that building an e-mail
list is important, but please don't do this. I'm taking the time to check out
your product, don't bug me while I'm doing that.

~~~
codegladiator
People don't want ads, don't want crypto-currency mining and not not even
"popups" asking for emails, want free trials.

Frankly, you just have to click the "x". How hard it is ? I do not understand
why does it bug you so much.

~~~
lobster_johnson
Every damn site does this. I'm in the middle of reading an article and boom, I
get a popup in my face asking for something. If it were just one site, that'd
be fine. It's not -- it's an epidemic. News sites, shopping sites, blogs,
charities, tech articles, they all nag and nag.

The nagging and attention-stealing is everywhere. Every time I buy something
online that's not Amazon or Apple, I get signed up for an email newsletter. I
get spam in the mail, often from, say, furniture companies because they have
some kind of sneaky thing that gets leads from pages I visit. I've never
bought anything from Flos, Design Within Reach or Bonobos, but in my mailbox
the crap goes.

These things add up. It's just a never-ending deluge of materialistic
effluent.

~~~
codegladiator
And probably you dislike

\- ads

\- mining inside your browser

\- paying

I dislike all of these too. But complaining about a "modal window asking for
email which you can close" seems mean. The nagging and attention stealing is
everywhere and you can easily ignore them or at least tell an alternative
solution to these guys.

~~~
lobster_johnson
As I said, if it were only this site, it'd be fine. But it's the entire
frickin' Internet at this point. Almost every single browser experience is
entering a world of nagging or shameless selling.

------
tfjaeckel
Hi, I'm one of the founders of Shelf. We think teams and organizations are
wasting too much time locating and sharing knowledge.

Been working on helping solve this this issue for quite a while now keeping
things in more of a closed circle of beta users until recently. Why? Because
we wanted to build a well rounded product based on customer feedback before
opening this thing up.

Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack making heavy use
of microservices and recently more and more Lambdas with (and sometimes
without) the Serverless framework. And we built a web clipper as browser
extension for Chrome and Firefox to make it easier to clip and share web
content.

Would love to get your feedback on if and how you experience the pain point.
Of course feedback on the product itself would be great, too, if you want to
give it a spin.

~~~
Terretta
I want what you’re offering, but I do need real security assurances, beyond
“secure hosting”.

> _Enterprise-level security: Single Sign-On (SSO), Data backup and recovery,
> Role-based permissions, Secure hosting, AES encryption_

Ok but that’s “consumer level” for SaaS.

For Enterprise, you need to prove to me that a malicious insider at your
organization can not access the enterprise’s data. Dealing with insiders and
RBAC models is particularly interesting when offering search.

You need to provide full access and full change audits trails.

You need to provide a business continuity plan, as noted in a sibling comment.

You can make a more trusted claim by getting your solution HIPAA certified. If
you are compliant for storing personal medical information, you’re basically
there for “enterprise-level security”.

~~~
tfjaeckel
Thanks for that input. Totally agree that HIPAA certification is a good
approach to prove full coverage of what you've mentioned.

~~~
didgeoridoo
Is "HIPAA certification" an actual thing? As far as I know, the various HIPAA
"certificates" offered by private companies are not universally recognized,
nor do they have clear legal relevance. See TrueVault's FAQ:
[https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-
compliance.html](https://www.truevault.com/hipaa-compliance.html)

~~~
mbesto
It's not. You typically sign whats a called a BAA[0] with an entity that is
covered by HIPAA compliance. In other words, if a hospital wants to use the
software they would make the SaaS provider sign a BAA. This then subjects both
the hospital to HIPAA as well as the BAA. The best you can do is basically get
audited by an external firm, not dissimilar to how PCI compliance works (which
also doesn't have a certification, but has QSA certifications).

[0] - [https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-
entities...](https://www.hhs.gov/hipaa/for-professionals/covered-
entities/sample-business-associate-agreement-provisions/index.html)

------
leon_sbt
The site looks great and good job on shipping it out!

I probably don't fit as your target customer, so please take my feedback with
a grain of salt.

After digging around your site for a bit, it seems like your "special sauce"
is to bring incredibly powerful search features for multiple data
types/sources all from a single authoritative place (Shelf.io)

Based on your YouTube videos, I really like the ability to parse rich data on
the internet and input it for my team to see. Seems like a great product
marketing/engineering folks during the high level brainstorming phase.

Use case: 1.Software Engineer: Reads a cool article on Medium about some
software technique and wants their team to consider it for their their new
beta project.

2.Marketing person: Gets inspired by a video/image for a new ad campaign that
they are designing and wants to share it with their team.

Also as an end user, I really like being able to see your actual product and
how it works without needing to signup or give out my information. If the
product seems like it can solve my pain point within 45 seconds of an intro
video and 5 mins of playing with a demo site, then I'll commit to a email
signup. Basecamp's "How it works" tab does a great job of this.

On the flip side, I feel that Salesforce doesn't need to do this, since they
already have market share and a great reputation for their products.

I would take your "Intro to Shelf" YouTube video, cut the first 25 seconds out
and embed it somewhere convenient on your website.

Highlight an example use case through a short video. I think Grammarly does a
great job with this in their "new social media manager video" FWD TO :15
seconds
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ak-Y56SfkS0)

Also for your voiceovers in the Youtube videos, I would invest in a good audio
recording mic. The audio seems a little distant,and hollow. I use a Zoom H5
recorder, it is a decent product for what I need/require.As a lay audio
person, This is my reference point for good voice audio.
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw&t=15s](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hUhisi2FBuw&t=15s).

I know you guys are in start up mode, and need to ship. But as random end
user, this is what I'm perceiving. Hope this helps! Good Luck!

~~~
tfjaeckel
Thank you, great detailed feedback on what we can do to make it easier and
more pleasant to get the gist of Shelf right away. It's really appreciated.

------
mverwijs
When tagging an item during editing it is unclear how to seperate tags. Semi-
colon? Colon? Space?

When you use the wrong seperation an error is shown _after_ you switch focus
to the next input field. Worse: the (appearently badly formatted) tags are
wiped instead of giving me the option to replace the bad characters it found.

The number of tags allowed is unclear too.

It turns out that tag-field is completely whacked. At a 30(?) characters it
assumes you've meant that set of characters as a tag. Unless your previous tag
(delimited by an [enter] as it turns out) has a 10 or so characters too. Then
it cuts of your next 30 character tag and deletes it.

Feature request: expiration dates on items.

~~~
tfjaeckel
Thanks for taking time to try out Shelf! And for providing your feedback as
well.

Tags: delimiters are [comma], [enter] and [tab]. 50 tags are the max. 30
characters are the max. We'll see how we can make tagging a better experience.
Including suggested tags based on content/previous behavior.

Can you explain what you mean exactly by: expiration on items?

~~~
mverwijs
Nothing goes stale faster than documentation. What I'd like to see is that
when someone adds documentation he/she also adds an 'use before' or 'expires
on' date.

So that folks coming after them know that the docs are probably no longer
valid.

~~~
tfjaeckel
Got it. I first thought you wanted that content to disappear altogether.
Thanks for clarifying.

------
jph
Kudos to the product team that wrote the various "Shelf vs. X" posts. These
are well done and very useful for quickly understanding the Shelf product
value.

IMHO more companies should do these kinds of posts because they emphasize fast
product-market matching, using decently-informed decisions.

------
beeskneecaps
Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!

~~~
bluesnowmonkey
Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try
squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.

------
j2bax
I think there is a typo on the Why Shelf? page. "Important information is
buried in email inboxes, cloud storage platforms, communication tools, project
management tools and the list goes on. _platforms and more._ "

'platforms and more.' seems like it was supposed to get edited out or
something.

~~~
sedarius7
Great pickup. Will make changes shortly. Thanks!

------
amelius
Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)

~~~
tfjaeckel
Nice validation that the pain really does exist! :)

------
dmitriid
So. Confluence. At least that's what it looks like form available tiny
screenshots on the landing page.

Or Confluence with cards. That's what it looks like on Product page.

~~~
tfjaeckel
I see how you could come to that conclusion. At first glance, yes similar.
However, Confluence really is a Wiki on steroids. Great to link with Jira,
collaborate on Specs or the like. You can use it for document storage but not
what it's built for. We use Confluence internally in the Dev Team ourselves
and for that it's great.

Shelf is for curated content, not direct collaboration or Wiki. For that, we
integrate with what was built for it, such as Google Docs.

Here is a comparison with Confluence, hope that helps:
[https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison](https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-
confluence-comparison)

~~~
dmitriid
> Find, organize, and share your distributed team's most valuable content

...

> Compared to Confluence: cannot create editable wiki pages, cannot "Build an
> Internal Wikipedia of company knowledge" etc.

Erm. How is this tool helping to "Find, organize, and share your distributed
team's most valuable content"?

I currently work at an organization with over 2000 programmers and engineers.
They would laugh at your face if you told them they cannot write free text in
the "Knowledge management tool".

~~~
tfjaeckel
All good. That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final
versions of deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in-
progress.

Just to share a different perspective, not even to disagree with your view:
Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to be
used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate different
types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal. Enrich each of
those with meta data. These are different use cases, that's where Shelf
shines.

~~~
dmitriid
> That's not really the use case for Shelf. You'd publish final versions of
> deliverables on Shelf, not necessarily your whole work-in-progress.

Hint: It's not just work-in-progress.

Hint 2: Everything changes

> Think of a marketing team that wants to publish and share presentations to
> be used by sales reps. Or a team of researchers that wants to curate
> different types of information (docs, links, videos) for later perusal.
> Enrich each of those with meta data.

Yeah. Perhaps.

Still there are plenty documents which are not "work-in-progress". Onboarding
instructions. Delivery checklists. Descriptions of system and organization
components. Policies. Roadmaps. Guidelines. Manuals. etc. etc. etc.

I see great value in a "manage all your things in various accounts" tool. I
wouldn't go as far as call it "manage knowledge of your distributed teams".
You need to be able to also create knowledge inside the tool.

Because if you need to drop out of your management tool all the time to create
anything, you will end up using Google Drive if all your docs are in Google
Drive, etc.

Also note: the only reason I know that you manage content from various sources
is that someone mentioned an intro video and I managed to find it by going to
the footer of the page and clicking on tutorials.

~~~
tfjaeckel
It's great feedback, definitely more food for thought. Thank you! It's a fine
line between cutting features vs. trying to solve too many things at once.

Our current approach to the collaboration part can be seen when you link a
Google Drive account. When you want to edit a Google Doc it takes you right
there, no need for the GDrive UI. You can actually create a Google Doc from
within Shelf.

Also, "good" to hear what you wanted to know but didn't learn immediately from
the website. We'll surely be working on making the use cases and
functionalities more clear.

------
calebm
Looks like "Evernote for teams"? Evernote does have some of those features,
but I think a team-focused app like this makes sense.

~~~
tfjaeckel
You're right, Shelf does have some of the Evernote functionality, I guess most
notably the web clipper. What we focussed on is more of where Evernote falls
short. Which in my opinion is good and easy collaboration across teams.

An advantage of Evernote for now is that Shelf doesn't have offline note-
taking. What do you think, is this something hugely important to have?

~~~
calebm
I definitely like offline note taking, but I don't know if it's a deal-
breaker. I agree that Evernote's collaboration is weak (which is fine,
Evernote's focus is personal notes - and I think it makes sense to have a note
app that is team focused).

------
dorian-graph
First, before I sound too critical, congratulations on launching your product.

> The average organization uses over 20 different platforms to manage their
> content and the problem is only getting worse.

[[https://xkcd.com/927/](https://xkcd.com/927/)](https://xkcd.com/927/\]\(https://xkcd.com/927/\))
;) From experience, the problem usually isn't with the technology/physical
tools, but with people's behaviour. Things like screening content so people
have more trust in it is good, but people still need to at least begin to
input content.

Though as far as being something that sits between lots of different tools and
platforms, the comic still applies, and I've seen a few of those products come
and go over the last couple of years.

I found the comparisons on the 'Why Shelf?' page odd. You mention SharePoint,
Confluence and Bloomfire at the top, yet don't do any comparisons to them,
only to things which are obviously different (e.g. communications platforms).

~~~
52-6F-62
Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly
and have to try to ninja edit each time.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc](https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc)

~~~
dorian-graph
Ah that's right, thanks!

------
dotancohen
To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).

~~~
tfjaeckel
Yes, that's right. At the moment it's a web app. Adding an installable
version, possibly via Electron is something we've thought about and probably
makes sense to unlock some functionality a web app just doesn't have
permissions to do (such as file system access). You can also install our web
clipper which is a browser extension but that's not needed to use Shelf.

