
Ask HN: Please review my web app, Docley - dawie
I have been working on Docley for about 6 months.<p>As the product sits today it has the following functionality:
- User and Group Management
- Creation of Folders and Uploading of Files
- Versioning
- History
- Document and Folder content searching<p>You have to create an account at: http://docley.com/admin/create_customer (I thought about it, but I can't really get away from account creation.)<p>If you don't want to create an account:<p>url: http://docley.com/demo<p>username: demo<p>pass: demo3
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maxklein
The space is too filled up. You don't stand a chance. Let me give you a
positioning that may work for you:

It's a "Document Management System". Back up your companies documents, and
query and cross-reference them online. Share with your co-workers. See and
reference past versions. Access your documents with our open API, mix and
match.

The space is too crowded for you to try to welcome everyone. Focus strongly on
business - if you can focus on more specific businesses that would even be
better. Offer a compelling reason why they should use you. For my business,
what I would like are:

\- Desktop synchronisation \- "Signing off" on documents (cannot be changed)
\- A way to store paper documents that somehow OCRs it (must not be perfect,
just for search), and that allows me tag them with keywords \- A clear way I
can map the online documents to the locations where they are physically
(shelf3, room 15) \- Some type of category system that paid attention to the
documents - for example, personal contracts of employees should not be mixed
with working design drafts.

Pick a small niche that works with paper a lot and is not online too much
(maybe Law?). Show them how your system improves their life. The start with
that niche, perfect it for them and go capture the next. Having to go out,
walk into a lawyers office and try to sell this to him will be the greatest
feedback you could ever get.

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furtivefelon
The site design looks kind of depressing, and the logo looks weird. It
definitely need some way of differentiating yourself from the competitions. I
currently use dropbox for most of my file sharing/backup needs, and dropbox is
a difficult player to beat.

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gridspy
It seems that you are entering a crowded space with what is currently a weak
offering.

How do you plan to beat

<http://basecamphq.com/>

or Google Docs?

Do you have any paying clients yet?

How do you plan to differentiate yourself?

Why would I use your system rather than a shared folder with controlled FTP
access?

You need to address these questions on your front page.

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evandavid
I think there are small/medium companies out there (similar to the one I've
been working with recently with around 40 employees) that require a really
simple self-hosted document management system. You might say that these
companies should have a full blown CMS implemented, but often times all they
want is document versioning, and CMS solutions like Sharepoint are expensive
and can be confusing. There might be a market there but it would be hard to
identify the individual customers amid a generally well-served market. The
company that I was working with literally used a network share with documents
organised in folders and renamed for each version. _shudder_. They were
looking at Alfresco when I left, but I doubt they'll get the project off the
ground - it's too big. If this was a really really simple SELF-HOSTED package,
I'm sure they would go for it. Note: Self-hosted, not cloud based. It would
need good backup features and the ability for clients to add their own ssl
certificates.

Just an idea, based on observations without research.

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dawie
Clickable Link: <http://docley.com/admin/create_customer>

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matt1
David, glad to see you launched, that's more than most people ever do. As a
few of the other folks have said, this is a tough field and you definitely
have your work cut out for you. And I bet a lot of naysayers would have said
the same thing about Google doing search in 1999.

Your background and drive will go a long way. Keep moving forward and good
luck.

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slay2k
"I have been working on Docley for about 6 months."

<withsalt> Given the technical complexity of a site like this, and the fact
that you aren't yet open to the public, that seems like forever.

Have you talked to your future customers yet ? Do you know who they are ? If I
was in your shoes, I'd implement the absolute minimum number of features to
show the basic concept, and ship that prototype. Then I'd pitch it to just
about everyone I could think of, and see what they say. Chances are, I'd
change the feature set and my target audience in the process, so the faster I
could ship the less time I will have wasted. </withsalt>

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raquo
1) Improve design in all aspects (change logo, colors, ajaxify (esp. simple
things like renaming a file))

2) Differentiate. Don't assume I don't know about dropbox and the like.

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ctb9
the screenshot could use some work. its too small to read or even convey any
info about the app at all, it has an evil twin lurking behind it, the
perspective is way too tilted, and about 75% of the image is an ugly brown
gradient.

also, regarding the general color scheme, i'd start by using the sign-up
button blue instead of the turquoise. brown can be done, but its tough. check
out the nettuts design for a nice example.

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zandorg
No comments for now, but I'd suggest SSL (https) encryption which should be
fairly simple to implement.

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spokey
Hi David.

Congrats on the launch.

As others have said, this is certainly a competitive space, but I imagine
there's still room for innovation.

This is a nice technical foundation. If I were you my next step would be to
get it in front of real users and begin to understand the unique problem you
should be solving. I'd do three things in particular:

1) I'd pursue something like the "customer discovery" process to understand
how your product concept maps to real customer needs. (MaxKlein had a lot of
good advice on that "below" at <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=956354>)

2) I'd look into usability testing (via paper prototyping or even something as
simple as userfly.com) to get a better feel for how users interact with this
interface. I imagine there are areas that users might find confusing and ways
in which you could streamline the workflow.

3) I'd research the words or language you should be using on the website. For
instance, in various places on the site you refer to both "Documents" and
"Files". Are they the same thing? You also use terms like "Groups", "Users",
"Permissions", etc. Are these terms that resonate with your users? (I don't
know that they aren't, I'd just make sure you have the terminology correct.)

I'm sure there are dozens of ways to skin this cat and advantages and
disadvantages to each, but one thing that struck me when going through your
site is that much of the functionality could be provided pretty much out of
the box by other tools. For example, Drupal's free Database File Manager
module (<http://drupal.org/project/dbfm>, demo at <http://dbfm.org/>,
screenshots at <http://drupal.org/node/236711#comment-785302>) offers most of
the same functionality and in places with a little more polish. I've no idea
what your framework is (well, from your blog, I'm guessing Ruby), but you
might be able to find something that does a lot of the grunt work of storing,
serving and moving files for you so that you can focus on the value-add that
Docley provides.

For what is is worth, here's a few specific bits of feedback for you:

1) Until you have it ready, I'd drop the "Coming Soon" video image from the
homepage. Neither you nor users are getting value from the placeholder and
having it there just calls attention to the missing demo.

2) In your grid of benefits ("Save time", "Share safely", "Search documents",
etc.), the images are links that don't go anywhere (they just link to "#"), at
least they are for me. Also, if these really are meant to be links, I'd make
the whole box clickable, not just the images.

3) I'd trim the "Feedback" button out of the screenshots used in your help
section (e.g., <http://www.docley.com/help/createfolder.html>). Personally I
think they are distracting and make it harder to follow the breaks between
screenshots.

4) I find the tiny document icons a little confusing or misleading. I'd test
it with more users than just me, but you might consider adding some text or
tweaking the icons a bit. In particular:

a) The icon you're using for "rename this file" suggests "edit" to me. You
might want something more like these
[http://images.google.com/images?q=rename&imgsz=i](http://images.google.com/images?q=rename&imgsz=i).

b) The icon you're using for "preview" suggests "search" to me. Maybe just
adding a document icon to it might help (e.g.,
[http://images.google.com/images?q=preview&imgsz=i](http://images.google.com/images?q=preview&imgsz=i))
but personally I still see that as search.

c) I'm not sure what the "Usages" icon is supposed to display. From the icon
(a little bar graph) I had expected statistics on the number of times the
document has been viewed or something like that (for instance, what bit.ly
displays for information on a URL). I guess that is what it is displaying, but
it is in a log format that seems inappropriate, especially given the icon
you're using. (And I had to look at this a couple of times to realize that you
had a download history there, it looks like a commit history to me, something
like what I'd expect behind the "Versions" icon.) I'm not sure "usages" is a
real word, maybe just "usage" or "use" (although that's easily confused with
the verb) or "statistics" would be better?

5) A little bug I noticed: From your help pages (e.g.
<http://www.docley.com/help/docleyhelp.html>) and presumably anywhere you have
a subdirectory in the URL your logo link is broken. You probably want to
change <a class="logo" href="index.html"> in your header template to <a
class="logo" href="/index.html">. On a related note, you might tweak your 404
page to be a little more helpful. It's not currently branded, there's no
search or browse suggestions, and there's not even a link back to the
homepage. Non technical users might be confused: The only viable option is to
click the back button and it seems entirely possible that users may be
following a link to your site from an external one so that back takes them off
your site entirely.

Good luck and keep iterating!

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kylebragger
Can't see how this would ever replace dropbox + google docs for me.

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macmac
What does it do that a shared drive does not?

~~~
dawie
Quick Full content searching. You can share with people outside of your
network.

Also you don't need a sysadmin to install and manage a shared drive.

~~~
macmac
Sharing is a plus. If you can do search better than Google Desktop I would be
very surprised.

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macmac
A link would have been clever.

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ThinkWriteMute
Remove 'Username', make username == email.

Remove 'Confirm password'. Instead email the password they entered when
confirming via email.

Remove 'timezone'. Figure it out based on their IP.

Make this into 3 columns.

~~~
TheThomas
Please don't ever e-mail someone their password. It breaks my heart.

~~~
ThinkWriteMute
Why not? It's a document storage site. No company with any real important
information is going to store it here, nor personal information.

~~~
stevejohnson
Because it's good practice, and some users use the same password for more than
one site. If you blame that on the user, you're never going to win, since the
human mind has limited capacity for remembering such trifles as passwords.

Besides, how do you know what information is going to be stored here? Some
people might want to use it for Top Sekrit Files.

~~~
pheon
just use openid

