Shelf

Knowledge automation for the changing workplace

2 followers

Knowledge automation for the changing workplace

2 followers

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Shelf powers answers for customers and contact center teams in any platform, on any device, across every channel.

Launch tags:Web App•Productivity•Storage

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Very excited to come across this post and to have a chance to see what shelf.io can do for my team. Glad to see a fresh approach to team knowledge sharing. At a glance, this seems to tick many of the boxes on the wishlist I’ve been building for several years now. As a cyber security professional working with small businesses, I’m drowning in information and rarely can keep up with the resources I uncover in my research, let alone effectively share it with my team. Shelf seems as promising as anything else I’ve come across in recent years. Maybe I won’t have to build my own knowledge management system after all. 😉 Would love to hear a bit about your security strategy for the product (given the business focus) and curious if there’s a roadmap available for future integrations. I’d love to see Safari browser extension for macOS and an app/share extension for iOS. Maybe an import from Pocket as well? Lastly, I’d like to say thanks for the generous discount for the PH community and your commitment to small teams. We fall nicely into the free tier at the moment, but I hope to be a paying customer in the near future if all goes well! Time to play with the new account ...

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@bitcomfort Thanks for your kind words. Let me try and address your questions. When data is added to Shelf, we encrypt at rest and during transmission. Web security standards apply, i.e. usage of SSL is enforced and we're using signed SSL certificates with industry standard SHA-256 with RSA Encryption as Signature Algorithm and the key size is 2048 bits. All files you add, all private and sensitive information are encrypted as well. We're using the so called Advanced Encryption Standard (AES) algorithm with 256-bit secret keys in Galois/Counter Mode (GCM), known as AES-GCM. As much as I'd like to say a Safari browser extension is coming up (using Safari myself), Apple unfortunately insists on their own technology. So, it's not coming in the near future but we'll continue to support at least Chrome and Firefox. Apps for iOS and Android, at least for easy sharing are definitely on our priority list. Regarding a roadmap for upcoming integrations we currently have Sharepoint and Box at the top of our list for cloud storage platforms. As for communication tools, Gmail and Slack will likely be up next. Apart from Pocket, do you have any specific suggestions for additional integrations?

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9yr ago

@tobias_jaeckel I'll give your question about integrations some thought as I take Shelf for a test drive. Off the top of my head, I'd say Outlook/Teams for Office 365 on the communication tool front (though we are still debating our migration to Teams). I'll also mention one use case that comes to mind, which is using Shelf as a central repository and distribution point for internal policies, processes, and procedures (possibly also sharing outward facing policies with our customers). From this perspective, an integration with process.st could be interesting. The integrations do prompt further questions about security/compliance, since integrating with storage or communication providers opens up another avenue to a wealth of data. I'd love to discuss more in depth with you or your team.

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@bitcomfort Thanks for your additional input. Office 365 is a big one, obviously and plays nicely with Sharepoint as well. Would certainly be happy to discuss with you further.

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9yr ago

Return Saver

I live in so many different tools, it’s often difficult to remember where to go to find the right information. Other solutions always have a configuration problem and the UX is never intuitive so you end up spending more time trying to find what you’re looking for than actually working. I like that Shelf makes it easy to find information quickly without all the other distractions. Particularly love the search functions and SSO. Nice work Shelf team! Have you thought about integrating with (or replacing) a SugarSync? I know our designers used that for their files and it was so difficult to find things.

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@jennifer_fish thanks for the feedback! I'm glad you like the search and SSO. A quick word on SSO for the benefit of everyone else reading this - we have this capability with Google only at this time and are really looking forward to expanding this in the not-too-distant future. RE: SugarSync - we've haven't given any thought to being a replacement to SugarSync; an integration at some point in the future is much more likely. They seem to compete directly with Dropbox, whereas we are really, really excited about how we integrate with Dropbox and help extend its core functionality. Actually, if you wanted to get a feel for what an SS integration w/ Shelf would look like, I suggest you try syncing a few Dropbox files to Shelf to see how that feels. That might help you form your own opinion on if we should compete or integrate w/ SS. If you do take me up on my suggestion, I'd love to know what you think!

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9yr ago

Congrats to Shelf team on the evolution of the product. Y'all have built an incredibly useful tool that's head and shoulders above other curation/bookmarking tools. The product has come a long way in such a short time, too! I can see lots of application for different teams...what are some of the main use cases you are solving with Shelf?

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@ksmithmarketing thanks for the question! Shelf was built to solve what we believe is a universal problem - finding important content that's scattered across a team/department. Bonus points if that team is spread out in a number of different physical locations. But there certainly some business functions that are more inclined to have a need for Shelf. Let me highlight one for you: Shelf sits nicely at the nexus point between sales and marketing and acts as a library of critical information assets. This helps marketing (and marketing/sales ops) from getting bogged down with information requests and allows them to focus on creating the next set of assets. It helps sales because they don't need to rely on someone else to help them put together the best package of compelling content for their specific opportunity. Nor do they have to navigate through the file bloat that exists in your typical shared drive or document repository to do so. In other words, both Marketing and Sales can spend more time focusing on their critical paths to success, because they're not spending as much time sorting through content. Let me know if you find this example to be helpful! And thanks again for the question!

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9yr ago

It seems there has been a glut of curation/boomarking tools making their way to the web this year. I am a curation addict so I have tried most if not all. Shelf is definitely one of the best. It is becoming my first choice when collecting anything from the web and I have started dropping in other offline content as well. I really love the intuitive design and speed, but the search is what has me jazzed the most. I hated when Google bought and killed Kifi and Shelf is the first tool I have found that is as good and maybe better than Kifi. I can't wait to see where Shelf goes next. UPDATE: One wishlist item would be a freelancer level subscription. Something between the Free tier and the Team tier for those of us who work solo or with a partner and still want some of the advanced options such as view-only users, OCR and more storage. The $49/mo is steep for freelancers and provides more than I need, but the free tier is also limiting. Just some food for thought.

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@just_s I'm glad to hear that your experience with our product has been a good one thus far! I agree that there have been a bunch of bookmarking tools recently...given the amount of important content that appears on the web, I'm not surprised. But I'm really glad to hear that you've started to use Shelf to combine your web content with your offline content. I'm my opinion, that's where you really start to see what makes us different. Web content and traditional documents in living together in perfect harmony :)

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@just_s thanks for the update! When we started building Shelf, we really set out to focus on the knowledge sharing issues that are cropping up more and more as distributed teams become more prevalent. So we're really built for a group of people, as opposed to the individual. Hence the pricing. With that said, we're trying to include as much as we can in the free tier to accommodate for your particular use case, because you're certainly not alone. I'd love to know what you think the most limiting aspect of the free tier is, so we can take that into consideration.

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9yr ago

@ng_colinkennedy thank you for the followup question. I would say without a doubt the storage capacity would be the limiting factor. I collect a great deal of information (8000 notes in Evernote, 400 items in Milanote for example) so I imagine that it won't take long to fill 5GB. If I migrate all of my collections from various services today I'd be well over the 5GB already. I'd love OCR too, but in fairness, it makes sense as a point of differentiation and paid feature. If there were an option to use my own storage (cloud or local) in conjunction with my Shelf account that would be ideal and perhaps limit the costs/burden on Shelf. I understand that this is likely beyond your core strategy. It would be a great addition to an already stellar product. When I look at your pricing model, it is the features that stand out in terms of choosing a paid plan. The storage is more of a commodity than a differentiating factor otherwise I'd be driven to upgrade based on storage. Not sure if good PR and evangelism are enough to cover the time investment for developing a BYOS feature but I know I'd be a grateful and active evangelist.

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@just_s thanks so much for breaking this down. We've had plenty of discussions over here about how the interplay between storage and pricing should work. I agree with your perspective that storage is more of a commodity and it certainly isn't a differentiating factor (in a good way) for Shelf. We ARE thinking about how we might be able to better leverage our integrations with some of the big storage solutions to allow us to make storage a non-issue in the future. If/when we make headway on this, I'll do my best to make sure you know about it.

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9yr ago

@ng_colinkennedy that would be great. BYOS might even be a great add-on for a small fee at all tiers. Maybe a way to get some free users to contribute something to the cause ☺

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9yr ago

Suto

I've seen a few of these platforms, but for something that asks to house your company's content they almost never address any security concerns. Any difference here?

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@kelrabiey Hey Karim, We understand that security is very important for a solution that stores important content. So, we do include security considerations in all of the functionality we built. I added a some further details in my reply just above. Please let me know if you have any additional questions that you'd like answered.

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

Hello Product Hunt, and thanks @rrhover from PH for helping us out! We started Shelf with the vision of helping distributed teams to instantly find the exact information they need so they can save time and prevent costly mistakes. We currently offer integrations for Dropbox, Google Drive and OneDrive that enables files and folders to be synced to a centralized place. We also built a really cool web clipper for Chrome and Firefox that enables people to capture youtube videos, articles, LinkedIn profiles, online images, and more. But Shelf’s true power is in it’s search. We designed our platform to go beyond keywords, making findability our greatest value add. Some highlights include; - Search inside of documents, PDF’s and presentations - Search inside images, graphs (OCR) - Tagging & Tag Library - Badges & Customized Badges - Meta Data layer + auto-categorization - 8 search filters, including; added by, date, content type, location, group, etc. - Content connections - Content Dashboard with most popular, most recent and favorites - We will soon launch a suggestion engine and additional integrations.

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9yr ago

Startup Stash

@rrhover @sedarius7 go go go!

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9yr ago

Tembo Cloud

Was just talking about this yesterday in our office - with so many information silos, I often remember that I saw a piece of content, but can't remember which silo I saw it in - so end up searching in multiple interfaces. This idea has great potential - hard problem tho, glad someone is going after it!

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9yr ago

Shelf

Maker

@rywalker thanks for the feedback, it's definitely not an easy problem to solve, but we're trying! That is one of the reasons why our application has faceted search. Your can run keyword queries (which will pull info from inside docs and on images) but you can also use filters to sort across different places where your content resides. You can can say "show me everything Tobias has synced from his Dropbox account on AWS" for example, and you can drill down into that really easily. So if you get a chance to check out the product, I encourage you to poke around our Filters...thanks again for the comment!

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9yr ago