
Show HN: Amium – A better way to collaborate - yurisagalov
https://www.amium.com/
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glitcher
For organizations that require certain documents to remain internal only (no
3rd party server storage), are there any options besides Amium's AWS hosting?

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xir78
Out of curiosity what type of companies see on prem being more secure still?
Do they really have top noch security teams or is the reality akin to stuffing
money under your mattress to keep it safe vs a bank?

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cyphar
There are NDA issues, as well as data protection laws in the EU that mean that
if you don't store data locally you need to got though a bunch of red tape
(and get the person who is storing the data to also get audited). Oh, and good
luck if the company is not in the EU (or even in another country).

Not to mention that we should really stop increasing our reliance on "the
cloud". It's someone else's computer which you have no control over.

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bshimmin
You might want to have a re-think about the favicon - it's pretty similar to
InVision's ([https://invisionapp.com](https://invisionapp.com)) and, while
they're not quite in the same space, they're also not worlds apart.

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thoughtpalette
Not sure if they've updated the favicon in the time since your post, but they
do not look remotely similar to me.

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bshimmin
They're both pink (a similar but not identical shade); one has "iu" and one
has "in", both in white; one is a circle, one is a square. When I clicked the
link I was initially confused because I thought it had actually taken me to
Invision (which we use a lot), until I squinted and realised it was something
else. I'm not saying they're identical, and I'm sure it's just a coincidence,
but they are definitely similar to my eye.

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pencildiver
Is this a feature that AeroFS customers will also get access to? Or is this
meant to be a completely separate product line? Overall, this is amazing.
Congratulations on the launch :)

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yurisagalov
We're launching it standalone so you can run them side by side if you wanted
to. It IS built on top of AeroFS, so down the road we may offer a migration
path :)

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danielpal
Wow, congratulations. This is what google should have built for Google Drive
and Docs. Best Show HN this year.

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dx034
When I saw this I was actually surprised that there's a need for it. I assumed
Office Online has this built in (never used it).

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Anisa_Mirza
I am seriously excited to give this a try today. I've been frustrated by file
sharing between my team (we mostly use google docs or dropbox) and esp file
collaboration (currently using slack). If this turns out to be the perfect
love child between slack and dropbox, Amium is an answer to my prayers.

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thenipper
This is really slick. Played with it for about 15 minutes and fell in love.
Now to just convince people at work to use it... and pay for it.

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nathancahill
Seems to be aiming to solve a lot of the problems that Quip solves.
@yurisagalov, how do they compare?

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yurisagalov
"Like Quip, but for any file" (not just doc/spreadhseets), would probably be a
fair comparison (and one I was tempted to make :-)

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gcr
This reminds me of Dropbox Harmony for its business users.
[https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/tag/project-
harmony/](https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/tag/project-harmony/)

Basically, every MS Office folder in your dropbox gets a chat box. Everyone on
the team who has that file open can chat with each other and edit the document
together.

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daemonk
I am in academic research. I want to see if this will be good for my work
setting. I tried to sign up and got a nginx bad gatewawy error page :(. I'll
try again later if I manage to remember.

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loarake
If you're writing papers in LaTeX, then
[https://www.overleaf.com](https://www.overleaf.com) should be good for you.
Almost all of our department has started using it.

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daemonk
I actually just finished a manuscript with overleaf and published it on
biorxiv (shameless plug:
[http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/25/065789.1](http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/25/065789.1)).
Unfortunately, latex isn't used that widely in biological sciences. There is a
bit of a learning curve that people just aren't willing to invest time in.
During preparation of the manuscript, I had to convert latex to word to
distribute to collaborators and then manually edit the latex file accordingly
afterwards.

Maybe this type of service where it is more microsoft office based will be
better when collaborating with non-computational inclined people.

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loarake
I've had a similar experience. I'm in a hybrid field (medical physics) where
half of the people are from pure physics and the other half from a more
biomedical engineering background.

It's pretty funny to see the culture clash between the two when it comes to
writing articles. We had to learn latex in our first year of undergrad to
write lab reports whereas the biomed people really don't see any value in
using latex over word (especially for collaborating).

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dban
Try Authorea! (Disclosure: I work there)

Authorea is for researchers to write and collaborate online. Multiple users
can write across formats in the same document (including LaTeX, markdown, rich
text) and you can push a button to export to different file formats, journal
styles, or publish to the web.

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adora
just tried it. so basically this makes microsoft office usable again?
hallelujah.

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newy
Discussing files "in-line" is a pretty natural way to collaborate. This should
have existed a long time ago, and is a natural evolution of workplace
collaboration tools. Bravo, Amium team.

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andreygrehov
Is it an add-on for Slack?

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yurisagalov
Hey Andrey,

It's not. We looked into that, but we needed the ability to create nested
channels (e.g. threads) since any file can be a thread/feed.

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seagreen
Can you share a file that's anywhere on your computer, or does it have to be
in a shared folder?

Also, how does Amium handle file renames? This is a tricky one so I wouldn't
judge the product if it has trouble here.

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yurisagalov
File needs to be in the Amium shared folder right now :)

File renames shouldn't be a problem. We'll also show you a message in the
chatroom if the file is renamed :)

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ironghost
Curious if this will have the same issue that Google Wave had; attempting to
change a paradigm that is well understood.

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yurisagalov
Hopefully not! We've tried fairly hard to make it fit into existing workflows
so that the learning curve is not too difficult.

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azpoliak1
Are there any plans to support batch upload from other services (like Google
drive, Dropbox, etc)? It would be nice to be able to migrate lots of folders
and files in one click instead of having to download every file and then
upload each file directly to Amium.

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yurisagalov
actually, yes! Can you ping us at hello@amium.com and mention that? It'll help
us prioritize and make sure we reach out when it's ready.

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rekoros
Should we add it to [https://sameroom.io/chat-
timeline.pdf](https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf) ?

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a1sauce
Huge potential if you nail this. Congrats! Buggy to the point of being hard to
even play with as of right now though.

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yurisagalov
can you shoot me an email at yuri@amium.com? Would like to follow up

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sidcool
Very good product. Thoroughly impressed

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rdl
Super excited about this, especially for a future on-prem version.

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sidcool
What is your tech stack? The UI is gorgeous.

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lukasm
Do I really need to login to try it out?

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dang
We changed the url to the site from the blog post, but anyone who wants the
background can read it here: [https://blog.amium.com/a-better-way-to-
collaborate-b33d9dc4c...](https://blog.amium.com/a-better-way-to-
collaborate-b33d9dc4cb86).

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fizzbatter
Appreciated, especially since the site is quite unusable atm.

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yurisagalov
fixed! our fault for doing anything live today

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56k
TL;DR Amium vs. Google Docs (and others)..?

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yurisagalov
Google Docs is a reasonable comparison, but, a couple of things:

First, we do discrete versions/snapshots, so you can revert back to a
particular version in time (along with seeing the associated conversation).
Thing something like Github but for non developers.

Second, we support literally any file type. We integrated with Microsoft
Office Online to support co-editing live in browser (which is the "like Google
docs" portion), but we also support literally any other file type for
conversation and activity feed: Photoshop, InDesign, PDF, etc. For many of
these files types we also provide live previews and so on.

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basch
so how does it compare to just Office.com/WordOnline/OneDrive/SharePoint

it has full versioncontrol for all filetypes and provides your coediting in
the browser. Why would I use you as my version control over sharepoint, the
thing built into Word Online?

