Shelf - A better way for teams to manage & share files, links & more

@ligaze thanks so much for the comment. This is something that we struggled with for years! For us, it's about making sure that information can be easily organized across different groups of people, so the ones who need it can easily find it, and the ones who don't, don't have to see it and be bothered by it. Decluttering someone's information view is just as important as helping people find what they need - so we tried to implement something thoughtful that would consider each perspective.

@ligaze @ng_colinkennedy My whole professional life as a senior international development professional is all about cohering distributed teams and knowledge management. I was lucky enough to get my hands on the program during beta. I’d used a variety of different platforms before and found them all to be either too complicated or unstable. I’ve been using Shelf for about a year now. I’ve found it to be a practical, no nonsense tool that is brilliant for cohering teams, improving knowledge management and supporting team based workgroups as they come and go. Its fast, stable and efficient. A big bonus is that it also comes with an awesome web clipper for capturing information from a whole host of sources. It's proved a pretty game changing piece of kit for me and the teams I lead. I especially appreciate its ease of use and functionalities; especially its findability functions and ability to capture, store and disseminate information on the go.

@rrhover @sedarius7 go go go!

@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 :)

@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.

@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.

@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.

@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 ☺

@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!

@rywalker agreed... always a pain, tough when creating content to weigh what the best tool is for creating vs the best tool for making discoverable.

@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?

@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.

@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.

@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!

@conradegusa Thanks so much all the support. Love what you're doing at Publicize