Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
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Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#2Hi, 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.
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#3First, 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).
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#4I 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.
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#5To be clear: Shelf is a webapp (though at least not Electron-based).
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#6First, 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…
Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time.
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#7To 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.
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#8Half of the IT world seems to be trying to solve this problem :)
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#9Hi, 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 primar…
>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?
Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations
#10First, 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…
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