Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations • Hacker News Board

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#61

Post by dorian-graph » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 8:16 AM UTC

52-6F-62 wrote: post #6

dorian-graph wrote: post #3

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…

Off topic, but FYI -- HN doesn't use Markdown. I make this mistake regularly and have to try to ninja edit each time. https://news.ycombinator.com/formatdoc

Ah that's right, thanks!

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#62

Post by gregmac » Thu, Sep 28, 2017, 4:46 PM UTC

tfjaeckel wrote: post #46

gregmac wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 tho…

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?

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.

Re: Show HN: Shelf – A better way to share knowledge across teams and organizations

#63

Post by calebm » Wed, Oct 04, 2017, 4:14 PM UTC

tfjaeckel wrote: post #24

calebm wrote: post #16

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).