Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
shelf.ioI 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.
> 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.
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?
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.
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.
Structured exports are certainly better than nothing, but it doesn't address having to find and import to another system (which won't have all the same features) and retrain all staff.
Honestly this is a hard problem and something of a catch-22: the more useful the product is, the more it gets used, so the more critical it becomes, and as a result the pain goes higher.
A long track record of business, knowing if the company is profitable vs burning through VC cash, and some type of SLA and guarantee of minimum shut down notification time could all help lower risk. I don't really have any other product suggestions, unfortunately. My feeling is this is not really a technical problem and so probably doesn't have a purely technical solution.
I'm actually at a large-ish enterprise that needs a new knowledge system ASAP. I wouldn't really consider Shelf as I can't self-host (security concerns, BCP concerns etc), and even if I were to pay for something cloud hosted, Confluence looks more professional.
May I ask what makes Confluence look more professional from your perspective?
Like I mentioned somewhere else, I actually like using Confluence depending on the use case. It tends to require much more attention in making sure things stay organized and well structured. Shelf has this built-in by being more opinionated (for better or worse, depending on what you need).
Totally understand this perspective. I guess it depends on the type of organization and what you're willing to put in the cloud vs. what you want to manage yourself.
Our architecture is generally built in a way with self-hosted in mind but it's somewhere down the road and not something we'll have in the short to mid-term.
Hi Tobias -- looks like your team has put an incredible amount of work into this, and it looks wonderful.
For my own part I struggle to find data that's strewn across frequently deprecated PDF's, salesforce, one-drive / sharepoint, mailing list archives, a home-spun knowledge base, yammer, an aging twiki instance, and possibly a few more information repositories. And I work in a relatively small and tech-savvy organisation. So I definitely feel the pain you're trying to cure. :)
'Cloud' is tricky. No two people agree what that word means for starters. In terms of a knowledge repository / index / retrieval system -- for many enterprises, when talking about core institutional knowledge, 'manage yourself' is not the opposite of 'in the cloud'.
Thanks Jedd for your kind words! We have a great Team that made this happen and is working hard to keep making Shelf better every day. And help cure that pain you share. :)
My use of 'cloud' wasn't very exact, you're right. I suppose most enterprises have or will have their 'own' infrastructure in the cloud and manage it there themselves. I really meant cloud in the way of a SaaS-model.
Yup, if you're looking to target enterprise this is going to be a non-starter for many organizations.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I can understand having to pay (in any of the ways you mention) if you are going to use the product. The question is, should I have to pay to even learn about the product?
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.
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”.
Thanks for that input. Totally agree that HIPAA certification is a good approach to prove full coverage of what you've mentioned.
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
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...
These suggestions are very sound, and I'd suggest the same, but they are overly pedantic for a contract value at a maximum of $2.4k/year. I've seen a number of healthcare providers bound by HIPAA who don't have any of these features (and way less) and are still very competitive in the market. It's not to say you shouldn't do these things, but they are not what will win you contracts for your suggested pricing tiers. More importantly they will probably burden your business from a cost perspective (assuming you're still relatively new to the market).
TL;DR - Put them on the list, but don't let them burden you from making money.
Thanks for that perspective. Put on the list. Won't let them keep us from making money along the journey.
>Anyway, so far we've built Shelf primarily on a NodeJs stack [...] And we built a web clipper as browser extension for Chrome and Firefox [...]
Thanks for providing extra technical detail. However, I'm more curious with what's happening on the backend.
As far as I can tell, the your differentiation from something like MS Sharepoint or DropBox is an integrated OCR to extract keywords, and Artificial Intelligence to help filter (or "screen" as your landing pages call it). Is there more to your special sauce that I have overlooked?
Also, where are you storing customers' data? Amazon S3? In house servers? Are you using something like ElasticSearch or did you build your own search engine?
Dropbox is really great for storing and syncing files across devices. It doesn't have a rich set of pre-built filters, you can only store files, not mixed content including links, contacts, etc. So, Shelf is really a complementary solution for Dropbox and can sit on top of it, combining the Dropbox content with other content from a single interface.
Sharepoint is of course very powerful. And that means you typically need a project to make it work. Shelf works out of the box, is opinionated and let's you get started with minimal to no configuration setup.
Yes, we use Amazon S3 for content uploaded to Shelf (encrypted of course) and we utilize ElasticSearch as well.
You needn't be all that specific, but how do you securely search the encrypted data?
Data is secured at rest and in transmission. We take every measure available in Elastic to secure the search indexes themselves.
Ah, so the indexes are secured - but are they encrypted?
You don't need to answer. It's okay. I'm largely asking because I've been thinking about writing an series of essays on the subject of security and one of the topics I have taken some notes about is searching encrypted data.
If the index isn't secure, it kind of defeats the idea of encryption - someone need only make off with the index and be able to draw some conclusions. More so if it's relational.
There are different ways that some go about this, one is the hash with individual words with a unique salt and search for the hashes, but that has its own set of problems, like the ability to eliminate words like 'the' and 'it' from search queries. Well, at least computationally easy.
So, it's purely for my own curiosity that I ask. I imagine it might be doable to load it into RAM, the whole DB - if it's small enough or you have enough RAM, and then do the searches there in an encrypted environment?
I am not so concerned with exfiltration by 'hackers' so much as I'm concerned with exfiltration by employees. Should I get to writing the essays, that's going to be a central theme - protecting data from rogue employees with the increased use of cloud services in today's business environment.
Again, I'd not want you to feel obligated to release anything proprietary or anything that would compromise your security.
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
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.
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!
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.
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.
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?
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.
Got it. I first thought you wanted that content to disappear altogether. Thanks for clarifying.
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.
Interested? ENDURE WAVES OF POPUPS BEFORE UNDERSTANDING THE PRODUCT!
Want to know what it does? A picture is worth a thousand words, so try squinting at these tiny screenshots on your mobile phone.
I couldn't tell what it was at all, and 'Everything that matters' isn't enough for me not to click away.
Ouch! Is it really that many?
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.
Great pickup. Will make changes shortly. Thanks!
Thanks! Fixed. :)
Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)
Nice validation that the pain really does exist! :)
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.
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
> 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".
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.
> 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.
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.
Looks like "Evernote for teams"? Evernote does have some of those features, but I think a team-focused app like this makes sense.
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?
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).
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/) ;) 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).
Thanks for all your feedback, doesn't sound that critical to me at all and really is straight to the core of the challenge. :)
Of course you're right in a way. Tools are only as helpful as the people using them. So, we want to build a platform that makes it as easy and intuitive as possible, to add and organize things in a way that's accessible to others. And as a next step, build in more intelligence that assists in doing this automatically, including connecting and enriching content.
Content is usually already there, it's just often "locked" in different silos like a Dropbox, Email, CRM systems. We see Shelf connecting with the different content providers and pulling the most important content (not all of it).
There are a couple of comparisons with other platforms, the links are (hidden) in the footer of the homepage, here is one of them: https://shelf.io/shelf-vs-confluence-comparison
Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time.
Ah that's right, thanks!
To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).
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.