undefined | Better HN

0 pointsdmitriid8y ago0 comments

> 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".

0 comments

tfjaeckel8y ago

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.

dmitriidOP8y ago

> 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.

tfjaeckel8y ago

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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse

0 comments

tfjaeckel8y ago

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.

dmitriidOP8y ago

> 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

Yeah. Perhaps.

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.

tfjaeckel8y ago

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.

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.

j / k navigate · click thread line to collapse