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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

#51

Post by dmitriid »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #31
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…

> 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".

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

#52

Post by tfjaeckel »

grantlmiller wrote: post #49
tfjaeckel wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 a…

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.

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

#53

Post by tfjaeckel »

dmitriid wrote: post #51
tfjaeckel wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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…

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.

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

#54

Post by dmitriid »

tfjaeckel wrote: post #53
dmitriid wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

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, vid…

> 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.

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

#55

Post by tfjaeckel »

dmitriid wrote: post #54
tfjaeckel wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, vid…

> 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 pe…

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.

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

#56

Post by codegladiator »

bigblind wrote: post #45

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.

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

#57

Post by lobster_johnson »

codegladiator wrote: post #56
bigblind wrote: post #45

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.

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

#58

Post by codegladiator »

lobster_johnson wrote: post #57
codegladiator wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#59

Post by lobster_johnson »

codegladiator wrote: post #58
lobster_johnson wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

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.

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

#60

Post by srinathrajaram »

codegladiator wrote: post #56
bigblind wrote: post #45

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.

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?
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