Show HN: OneTool.app – One Tool to rule them all
onetool.app
onetool.app
The idea is to have a business tool that has all the most common tools included in one package.
Current features:
- Team communication: social networking, group chats
- Tasks (and a calendar for them)
- Document editing (with multiuser collaboration)
- Helpdesk/customer support
- Files (encrypted)
- Commenting (threads) throughout the whole app
- Notifications (and @mentions) throughout the whole app
- Tagging throughout the whole app
More features will be added. Next in line would be spreadsheet/database-kind-of-feature and slides. Maybe a CMS too. And I can think of a few others I would like to have.
The app is in beta and has been for a while. When it's proven enough the plan is to make it non-free, but the price should be affordable (I'm thinking about something like $1/month/active user). A free plan for one user may or may not happen, haven't decided yet.
The app is secure in a way that even we[1] can't access your data[2]. It's encrypted with the user's key[3]. The encryption happens on the server though, so it's not as secure as a client side encryption would be. But it's still much more secure than not encrypting at all.
Technical details may interest: it runs on Node.js. The framework is a fork of Derby.js (so there is ShareDB involved also). Shortcomings: no offline support at the moment. I've started to look for a framework that would allow offline support. It probably involves a from OT to CRDT.
More technical details: it runs on 3 servers for fault tolerancy reasons. The database used is ArangoDB.
Note that I haven't looked that much at similar apps, so I can't comment on them. Comparisons are welcome though.
This may seem like a big task for one person, and it is, but it's doable. I started on social networking and it grew from there. At some point the name OneTool came naturally to mind, so I changed the name and the domain. Originally the name was Project5 (for project management) [4].
If someone asks me: "why?", I would tell that "because it's there" -- like a mountain climber would answer. I need to climb this mountain, after having coded all kinds of little things in my life. It also teaches a lot of the "design" part of software making.
Feedback would be very welcome - here (obviously) or on Twitter too: @onetoolapp.
Thank you, Ilkka
[1] It would require some hacking of the codebase (outside of my knowledge) and "stealing" the data before it's encrypted. In a normal operation this should not be possible.
[2] There are some exceptions: for example customer support tickets are not encrypted, because they come from other sources than the team members themselves, so they can't be encypted with the team's key.
[3] The key is the same for the whole team, but it's encrypted for each (team member) user separately with the user's password.
[4] At some point I noticed that there already a project management software named Project5, so the name change had to be done anyway.