Show HN: Amium – A better way to collaborate | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Amium – A better way to collaborate

amium.com

168 pointsyurisagalov57 comments

For organizations that require certain documents to remain internal only (no 3rd party server storage), are there any options besides Amium's AWS hosting?

I'd like to know as well. If it can be self-hosted, I'll jump on-board in a heartbeat.

On-Prem is something we're considering on our roadmap (our classic product, AeroFS, is offered on-prem), shoot us an email at feedback@amium.com

Check out https://www.replicated.com

Out of curiosity what type of companies see on prem being more secure still? Do they really have top noch security teams or is the reality akin to stuffing money under your mattress to keep it safe vs a bank?

Security might play into this, but the main factor would be giving internal documents to a third party that didn't have everyone sign a large stack of NDAs.

Not security, compliance.

German companies are generally very cautious, if not just scared of any type of external hosting. I'm not sure in what way is that connected to legislation, but the way the EDV-departments (Elektronischdatenverarbeitung - electronic data processing) work in companies here is mind boggling. It's like the progress was happening here not thanks to IT, but despite its overreaching presence.

A lot. Like nearly all Car manufacturer or Banks.

There are NDA issues, as well as data protection laws in the EU that mean that if you don't store data locally you need to got though a bunch of red tape (and get the person who is storing the data to also get audited). Oh, and good luck if the company is not in the EU (or even in another country).

Not to mention that we should really stop increasing our reliance on "the cloud". It's someone else's computer which you have no control over.

Financial services doesn't like cloud hosting. AWS is approved in most companies, but relying on another company (with access to your data) that builds on top of AWS means a lot of audit and certification for compliance. On prem is often just cheaper and faster to implement.

You might want to have a re-think about the favicon - it's pretty similar to InVision's (https://invisionapp.com) and, while they're not quite in the same space, they're also not worlds apart.

Also, is it just me, or does the logo look like it says "fu"? I bounced it off a few other people and they also all seem to think it says "fu".

(I was looking at https://www.amium.com/img/features/security.png, which has a few of them planted about.)

Not sure if they've updated the favicon in the time since your post, but they do not look remotely similar to me.

They're both pink (a similar but not identical shade); one has "iu" and one has "in", both in white; one is a circle, one is a square. When I clicked the link I was initially confused because I thought it had actually taken me to Invision (which we use a lot), until I squinted and realised it was something else. I'm not saying they're identical, and I'm sure it's just a coincidence, but they are definitely similar to my eye.

Is this a feature that AeroFS customers will also get access to? Or is this meant to be a completely separate product line? Overall, this is amazing. Congratulations on the launch :)

We're launching it standalone so you can run them side by side if you wanted to. It IS built on top of AeroFS, so down the road we may offer a migration path :)

Wow, congratulations. This is what google should have built for Google Drive and Docs. Best Show HN this year.

When I saw this I was actually surprised that there's a need for it. I assumed Office Online has this built in (never used it).

I am seriously excited to give this a try today. I've been frustrated by file sharing between my team (we mostly use google docs or dropbox) and esp file collaboration (currently using slack). If this turns out to be the perfect love child between slack and dropbox, Amium is an answer to my prayers.

This is really slick. Played with it for about 15 minutes and fell in love. Now to just convince people at work to use it... and pay for it.

Seems to be aiming to solve a lot of the problems that Quip solves. @yurisagalov, how do they compare?

"Like Quip, but for any file" (not just doc/spreadhseets), would probably be a fair comparison (and one I was tempted to make :-)

This reminds me of Dropbox Harmony for its business users. https://blogs.dropbox.com/business/tag/project-harmony/

Basically, every MS Office folder in your dropbox gets a chat box. Everyone on the team who has that file open can chat with each other and edit the document together.

I am in academic research. I want to see if this will be good for my work setting. I tried to sign up and got a nginx bad gatewawy error page :(. I'll try again later if I manage to remember.

If you're writing papers in LaTeX, then https://www.overleaf.com should be good for you. Almost all of our department has started using it.

I actually just finished a manuscript with overleaf and published it on biorxiv (shameless plug: http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2016/07/25/065789.1). Unfortunately, latex isn't used that widely in biological sciences. There is a bit of a learning curve that people just aren't willing to invest time in. During preparation of the manuscript, I had to convert latex to word to distribute to collaborators and then manually edit the latex file accordingly afterwards.

Maybe this type of service where it is more microsoft office based will be better when collaborating with non-computational inclined people.

I've had a similar experience. I'm in a hybrid field (medical physics) where half of the people are from pure physics and the other half from a more biomedical engineering background.

It's pretty funny to see the culture clash between the two when it comes to writing articles. We had to learn latex in our first year of undergrad to write lab reports whereas the biomed people really don't see any value in using latex over word (especially for collaborating).

Try Authorea! (Disclosure: I work there)

Authorea is for researchers to write and collaborate online. Multiple users can write across formats in the same document (including LaTeX, markdown, rich text) and you can push a button to export to different file formats, journal styles, or publish to the web.

Thanks for the mention - glad you like it! (I'm one of the founders).

Given that you've been helping to spread the word, would you like to join our advisors programme? Details at https://wwww.overleaf.com/advisors

Sorry, we were having load issues -- just increased capacity. Go ahead and try again :)

I got to the create a team name step and got an error page trying to submit the team name. I guess your servers are getting the hug of death from hackernews.

edit

Got in after trying couple more times.

HackerNews and ProductHunt, yeah. Busy morning!

just tried it. so basically this makes microsoft office usable again? hallelujah.

Discussing files "in-line" is a pretty natural way to collaborate. This should have existed a long time ago, and is a natural evolution of workplace collaboration tools. Bravo, Amium team.

Is it an add-on for Slack?

Hey Andrey,

It's not. We looked into that, but we needed the ability to create nested channels (e.g. threads) since any file can be a thread/feed.

https://www.amium.com/img/homepage/product-shot.png

Seems heavily inspired by / very similar to Slack though. A lot of features in common. Slack allows you to post and comment on files but doesn't support versioning yet.

Are you trying to be a Slack replacement with better file handling or is it meant to be used alongside apps like slack?

Can you share a file that's anywhere on your computer, or does it have to be in a shared folder?

Also, how does Amium handle file renames? This is a tricky one so I wouldn't judge the product if it has trouble here.

File needs to be in the Amium shared folder right now :)

File renames shouldn't be a problem. We'll also show you a message in the chatroom if the file is renamed :)

Curious if this will have the same issue that Google Wave had; attempting to change a paradigm that is well understood.

Hopefully not! We've tried fairly hard to make it fit into existing workflows so that the learning curve is not too difficult.

Are there any plans to support batch upload from other services (like Google drive, Dropbox, etc)? It would be nice to be able to migrate lots of folders and files in one click instead of having to download every file and then upload each file directly to Amium.

actually, yes! Can you ping us at hello@amium.com and mention that? It'll help us prioritize and make sure we reach out when it's ready.

Should we add it to https://sameroom.io/chat-timeline.pdf ?

Huge potential if you nail this. Congrats! Buggy to the point of being hard to even play with as of right now though.

can you shoot me an email at yuri@amium.com? Would like to follow up

Very good product. Thoroughly impressed

Super excited about this, especially for a future on-prem version.

What is your tech stack? The UI is gorgeous.

Do I really need to login to try it out?

We changed the url to the site from the blog post, but anyone who wants the background can read it here: https://blog.amium.com/a-better-way-to-collaborate-b33d9dc4c....

Appreciated, especially since the site is quite unusable atm.

fixed! our fault for doing anything live today

TL;DR Amium vs. Google Docs (and others)..?

Google Docs is a reasonable comparison, but, a couple of things:

First, we do discrete versions/snapshots, so you can revert back to a particular version in time (along with seeing the associated conversation). Thing something like Github but for non developers.

Second, we support literally any file type. We integrated with Microsoft Office Online to support co-editing live in browser (which is the "like Google docs" portion), but we also support literally any other file type for conversation and activity feed: Photoshop, InDesign, PDF, etc. For many of these files types we also provide live previews and so on.

so how does it compare to just Office.com/WordOnline/OneDrive/SharePoint

it has full versioncontrol for all filetypes and provides your coediting in the browser. Why would I use you as my version control over sharepoint, the thing built into Word Online?

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