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

shelf.io

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

#41

Post by KGIII »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #15
jasode wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>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 h…

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…

You needn't be all that specific, but how do you securely search the encrypted data?

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

#42

Post by jph »

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.

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

#43

Post by mverwijs »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #36
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?

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.

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

#44

Post by gregmac »

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…

> 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.

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

#45

Post by bigblind »

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.

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

#46

Post by tfjaeckel »

gregmac wrote: post #44
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…

> 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?

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

#47

Post by tfjaeckel »

KGIII wrote: post #41
tfjaeckel wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#48

Post by tfjaeckel »

mverwijs wrote: post #43
tfjaeckel wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

#49

Post by grantlmiller »

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?

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.

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

#50

Post by KGIII »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #47
KGIII wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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