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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

#31

Post by tfjaeckel »

dmitriid wrote: post #28

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

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

#32

Post by mbesto »

Terretta wrote: post #12
tfjaeckel wrote: post #2

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 primar…

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 RBA…

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.

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

#33

Post by mverwijs »

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.

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

#34

Post by mbesto »

didgeoridoo wrote: post #18
tfjaeckel wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

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

#35

Post by tfjaeckel »

Jedd wrote: post #30
tfjaeckel wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 organi…

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.

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

#36

Post by tfjaeckel »

mverwijs wrote: post #33

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…

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?

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

#37

Post by tfjaeckel »

j2bax wrote: post #19

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.

Thanks! Fixed. :)

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

#38

Post by iDemonix »

michaelmcdonald wrote: post #4

I 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 w…

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.

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

#39

Post by tfjaeckel »

mbesto wrote: post #32
Terretta wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 RBA…

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.…

Thanks for that perspective. Put on the list. Won't let them keep us from making money along the journey.

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

#40

Post by tfjaeckel »

iDemonix wrote: post #38
michaelmcdonald wrote: post #4

I 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 w…

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).

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