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Shelf — A better way for teams to manage & share files, links & more
Shelf is a content sharing platform that helps distributed teams organize, declutter, and find their most important resources in one place.
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Kathleen Smith
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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@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!
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.
@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 ☺
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!
@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.
Great product! Very intuitive approach to the UX, which in my opinion is the key to success. Will definitely recommend to my colleagues who, like me, suffer from the information cluttering.
@yurij_riphyak thanks so much for the kind words. If you have any questions that relate to your specific info clutter pain points, let me know and I'll do my best to offer a few suggestions.
i know you need to pay the bills. but i work with groups of cheapskates who would think that US $49/mo is too much.
Pros:UI is clean and modern
Cons:too expensive
Hey Jason, thanks for sharing and we understand your perspective. I get that making the leap from "free for up to 4 users" to "$49/month for up to 8 users" can seem like a bit of a jump.
On a semi-related note: I haven't forgotten about your suggestion from a while ago to create bonus incentives for sharing Shelf, that would, in turn, help bring new users onto the platform. We're not there yet, but your idea is still on the drawing board.
Thanks for checking in!
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?
@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.
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.
@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!
Much better alternative to Google Docs
Pros:Great UX. Smooth and convenient
Cons:None
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 ...
@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.
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.
One of the things we struggle with is being able to hunt down information because our team is spread out across the world and do different roles. Great to see a better solution for that!
@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.
I love Shelf! I've been using it for a while now and it really helps me find and organize my cloud content. As storage of information and ideas gets messier and messier, Shelf helps me feel organized, knowing I can get to anything I need with ease. I can't wait for the future integrations that will make accessing my information in the cloud even easier.
Pros:Helps me find my stuff that is scattered all over the cloud
Cons:Looking forward to the future integrations
just keep it up!!!!
Pros:It solved a lot of problems - searching for docs was made so easy; collaboration with the team members a strength; super easy to handle!
Cons:phone app?
It's been a great organizational tool for my own use, and it makes it easy to distribute specific items to different groups of other folks. Very effective and flexible overall.
Pros:Great interface, easy to use, I've found the tagging, search, and organizational tools are vastly better than other tools I've tried
Cons:A dedicated phone app would be ideal, it I have found it pretty simple to use on my mobile devices in its current form
Used as a part of beta. Even dough we are a small team Shelf helped us to be more organize and find what we need in whole bunch of docs.
Pros:Easy to use, straight forward, boosts productivity and kills time you loose while trying to find that something
Cons:More integrations
This is much needed and wanted product, our team use it very much
Pros:great organizing tool and simple to onboard, reliable
Cons:not sure if there is an app for mobile phone and it would be awesome to introduce "siri" like function - to search by voice stored files
I am a fan of this product and this type of products
Pros:Easy to use
Cons:Not sure
I really enjoy using Shelf, what I really like about the product is the fact that I can add any types of file into my shelf, from emails, attachments, LinkedIn posts, articles. As someone who works in marketing, I am always collecting information that will help with projects later on. Sharing it with the rest of the team is super easy, and best of all it takes away the frustration of finding files.
Pros:The find feature is beyond amazing, its fast, and it just works. I can never find anything in Google Drive.
Cons:I'd love to see it integrate with more of the products I use everyday.