
Show HN: Share company announcements in your coworkers' new tab - anacleto
https://sametab.com
======
edent
Homepage. You've re-invented the homepage.

I've worked in companies where the default homepage was the announcements feed
on the Intranet. Didn't make people actually read them though!

~~~
kevinjoling
A homepage which you will see every time you open a new tab, instead of once a
day.

I think it's pretty useful and will make the chance of people actually reading
them a lot higher, right?

~~~
vthallam
wait homepage is something you see on every new tab, isn't it?

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sp332
Nope, for Chrome you have to use an extension, and Firefox needs an extension
or some about:config changes.

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blacksmith_tb
Firefox > Preferences > New Windows and Tabs

"Choose what you want to see when you open your homepage, new windows, and
tabs"

You then have the choice of what the default is for new windows (and
'homepage' which I assume means clicks on the Home icon in the toolbar, which
I always remove...) and for what appears in new tabs. No about:config needed!

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nichochar
There is an extra danger with this (we built this at my previous company, and
then deleted it), where users end up not seeing the messages anymore, but when
they go to internet cafes / planes / public areas they leak very critical
information (typically quarterly goals and how we're doing).

Leads to really bad media leaks.

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andciufo
Sounds like a smart way to replace emails with no replies and avoid useless
overhead in having your employees using/learning a new product.

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anacleto
Last week we had some fun building a lightweight (mostly to see how chrome
extensions work) tool to let companies send company announcements in all their
coworkers' new tab.

If this sounds a little odd, here's how it works:

1\. Install the Chrome extension [0], open a new tab and you'll see sample
content. Hit the signup button and create a new account.

2\. Now that you have an account, configure your company's page and invite
your coworkers (they have to signup with their work email).

3\. You're ready to create and publish announcements from the admin area.
Everyone in your company will see them when opening a new tab.

[0]
[https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sametab/glmeidaaam...](https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/sametab/glmeidaaambjhneppgaalmcjmcjpedeb)

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readhn
A lot of people ignore their work announcements because "they dont really
care" about their jobs/companies (except for the paycheck to cover
health/mortgage).. Why should an employee be fully engaged at work when she/he
is just a "disposable" part of a machine and can be let go at any time (and
should be ok with it because this is how it always was done)?

Ummm they really think company wide emails (that are often pushed to personal
cell phones) are not enough? Now lets see it in the browser tab as well?
Really? Whats next? Automatically engraved announcements on coworkers
foreheads?

The problem is NOT that people "dont have an opportunity to see the
announcements" \- the problem is that people are not really interested in
their jobs. Make job interesting to an employee and truly care about an
employee (prove it by action) then people will be more engaged at work!

"Of the country’s approximately 100 million full-time employees, 51 percent
aren’t engaged at work -- meaning they feel no real connection to their jobs,
and thus they tend to do the bare minimum...Another 16 percent are “actively
disengaged” ... feel their needs aren’t being met at work etc."

[https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-so-many-americans-hate-
thei...](https://www.cbsnews.com/news/why-so-many-americans-hate-their-jobs/)

~~~
C4stor
Even if 10% of employees like their jobs, that's still a market of 10 million
people. If somehow this extension could reach them all and bring 1 cent a
month per user to it's creator, that's still 1M$ a year for what's probably a
week-end project. Not too bad.

And if it end up reaching 1% of this market that's still 10k$ a year.

So, hey, good job doing this !

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nathan_f77
That's a great idea!

Some feedback: It would be great if this could be used as a widget on top of
an existing new tab page. I really like
[https://tabliss.io](https://tabliss.io), which shows the time, weather, and a
nice photo from unsplash. If I was working somewhere that used this for
company announcements, I would prefer to continue using tabliss, and show
company announcements as a small widget on the bottom right.

But yeah, I like using the new tab page as a dashboard for this kind of thing.
Email and slack notifications are too disruptive, and this is more like a
notice board where you can casually glance at it when you have some time.

EDIT: Tabliss supports custom CSS and JS, so I could add this myself. Or could
even contribute an official widget, because it's open source:
[https://github.com/joelshepherd/tabliss](https://github.com/joelshepherd/tabliss)

EDIT 2: This is unrelated, but I just saw that Tabliss added a "literature
clock" widget. That's really cool! Here's my new tab:
[https://imgur.com/gallery/99hL1Ei](https://imgur.com/gallery/99hL1Ei)

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tyingq
It mentions _" they have to signup with their work email"_, so there's some
notion of the page data being private.

I'm curious how well protected it really is.

Also, is the first email from domain X to sign up the default admin for that
domain? How do you resolve disputes?

~~~
antoangelino
Hi,

Antonio from Sametab. You need to signup w/ Google or validate your working
email before being able to read the announcements. This security rule is
enforced into the database (it's Firebase Firestore).

> I'm curious how well protected it really is.

Feel free to ask questions!

> Also, is the first email from domain X to sign up the default admin for that
> domain?

The first one becomes the admin. We already implemented a RBAC system for
managing users' permissions. You'll be able assign admin permissions from the
webapp soon.

> How do you resolve disputes?

Drop us an email and we will re-assign the permissions!

~~~
eat_veggies
Are you able to defend against this type of thing?:
[https://medium.com/intigriti/how-i-hacked-hundreds-of-
compan...](https://medium.com/intigriti/how-i-hacked-hundreds-of-companies-
through-their-helpdesk-b7680ddc2d4c)

~~~
antoangelino
Interesting article, thanks for the link! If a company uses its main domain in
the same way gitlab does, SSO is the only way to avoid security flaws. We do
not support SSO now, but implementing it is feasible. Feel free to send us an
email if you have a company IdP and you want to use Sametab.

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tomjen3
I can maybe see some companies having actual use for them, and the discipline
to only include emergency/super important info.

I can't see that being more than 10% of the companies, and the rest will just
post really useless garbage.

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stevekemp
Cute idea, though I did spot a minor spelling mistake "openening" should
probably be "opening".

~~~
anacleto
Fixed, thank you.

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amoitnga
or slack channel, or email.

~~~
craftyguy
Yea I prefer email for these things, so I can filter it appropriately (e.g.
only show when I am interested) and refer to past announcements. You cannot do
either of those, especially the second, easily with a browser tab thing or
homepage.

