Fulcrum Wiki
Confluence for GSuite
Finally, I released Fulcrum to the G Suite Marketplace. I got about 30 installations in the first two days. Now I have to see how things will develop.
Looking back I would say, I have released much too late. The market place is the best source of users you have if you develop an app. Even if you risk a bad rating. This is still better than flying blind.
I finally decided on a domain for my GSuite-Wiki: https://www.fulcrum.wiki.
During the last sprint began using TypeScript for Fulcrum. This will be of course an ongoing process. I us the approach to write the type annotations with JSDoc as long as I don't reach critical mass and will then switch to full TypeScript.
During the last sprint I added several features to Fulcrum:
- You can share your work with others to view and collaborate.
- You can now easily see what you read and edited last, and continue at any time.
- You can access all your files on your Google Drive from Fulcrum and vice versa.
I finished sprint 6. The goal was: Publish Fulcrum for the first time and improve React Knowledge.
This sprint went very smooth. I will definitely keep on adding more tests, even if it will slow me down in the short run. Additionally, I will migrate to TypeScript from pure JavaScript.
I wrote in more detail about it in https://www.indiehackers.com/post/fulcrum-sprint-6-review-retrospective-and-planning-748d4e4b61
Today I added Fulcrum to Indie Hackers. I figured, I need to get real feedback from potential customers.
I imagine that a lot of IH users are using Google Drive and Google docs, and that small teams might even use G Suite. My Goal for is to integrate Fulcrum tightly with G Suite. That teams that use it don't need to use Google Docs or Keep for knowledge management.
-
1
As it's very cool product - i think you have a lot of experience to share with other developers. What do you think about sharing some story related to the development of Fulcrum Wiki at Hackernoon? I think it can give you some additional exposure. And you can put a link to your project at profile there
-
1
Can you tell more about Fulcrum?
-
2
My plan is to give Fulcrum the same role in the GSuite ecosystem that Confluence has in the atlassian ecosystem. Where every Shared Drive is lika a Space in Confluence and your own Drive is like your personal space.
Right now this is still an MVP. You can only save data to your own personal drive.
Next Sprint I plan to add collaboration features like sharing and commenting. The Sprint after that I plan to add shared drives.
The idea is that everything is saved in G Drives. Personal or Shared Drives. Fulcrum only supplies the client. G Drive is the backend. So you never leave the GSuite ecosystem.
Do have any other questions?
-
2
got it - looks very cool. I mean it. It'll be a better than a confluence in my opinion.
because I still using GSuite and leave JIRA 3 years ago. Using Github for task tracking
-
-
-
1
Nice to meet u! Tell us more about your startup
-
1
Sure, I created a wiki for Google Drive, that aims to be a Confluence alternative for G Suite users. The idea is, that you don't have to misuse Google Docs or Keep to collaborate on ideas, link, code snippets, etc.
You find it at: http://awiki-245320.appspot.com
I came up with the idea when I was searching for a personal wiki that works well with my Google Drive. After I didn't find anything, I figured that I roll my own.
In my professional career I was a product owner for a Confluence-based intranet solution called Linchpin(https://linchpin-intranet.com/). So I had some background in knowledge management.
-
1
I used Confluence while ago. But when things goes down - we just cannot afford it. I download all data - but it's was not very importable.. Now i'm using GitHub for that kind of information
-
-
Unfortunately the editor I chose (https://slate-editor.bonde.org/) is based on a deprecated version of slatejs, that played very bad with mobiles. To my dismay the current slatejs version had breaking changes. I developed myself into a corner.
I wanted to show people my prototype and usually you do that on your mobile. So I bit the bullet and rewrote the editor, which took more than double the time I expected.
I made the (Scrum) rookie mistake of not splitting up my user stories for the update. I figured the update would be 24 story points, usually my sprint velocity was about 28 story points => I thought the update would be 1 sprint max. Yeah, right :)
But at the end I am pleased with the result of the rewrite. I can use newer plugins and add new features faster now.
-
1
Slate has a whole slew (slate?) of problems. Language support being the major one ... after many months of working with it across multiple teams, we've had to go back to the drawing board.
-
1
Yeah, I feel you.
What do you use now? Remirror (https://remirror.io, https://github.com/remirror/remirror) looks very promising. It is based on ProseMirror (https://prosemirror.net).
Totally different datamodel though.
Atlaskit (https://bitbucket.org/atlassian/atlaskit/src/master/) has an editor component based on ProseMirror, too.
-
-
0
I think it's a great idea. I've been looking for a new editor for a long time. I've tried different ones, but none of them have been good. I've also tried to make an own one, but it always fails. Try this Cloud Managed Network Switch for best ideas. So if you are looking for a new one, please consider me as a candidate. I just wish I could be as enthusiastic about it as you are. The old one was not very good and it had some problems.
After a while I had my first prototype. I had great focus on the editing experience. Thus I experimented with several editor components for React.
A problem with rich text editors is they are not very well documented. After a while I settled on a slatejs based component.
I was searching for a personal wiki that works well with my Google Drive. After I didn't find anything, I figured that I roll my own.
In my professional career I was a product owner for a Confluence-based intranet solution called Linchpin(https://linchpin-intranet.com/). So I had some background in knowledge management.
8 Comments
Hey, just stumbled upon this project after doing some research into the idea of using a wiki format for cities to use for their zoning codes. Do you think Fulcrum (or an iteration of it) would work for something like this?
Hi Austin,
Fulcrum is not meant as a public wiki. A wiki would probably work very well for laws. What information architecture do you have in mind?
I see. I discovered that a lot of zoning codes are still shared as large PDFs or hosted on extremely outdated web apps. Most zoning codes are set up like a traditional textbook (more or less) with large sections, sub-sections, appendices, etc. This isn't overly complicated, however, the part that does become a bit more complicated is version control and admin/edit access. If a zoning code is hosted on a web app, it most likely isn't the original version that they use - instead they have their own version in-house that they edit then re-upload online. There are a few exceptions to this but in general, urban planning tech is outdated.
So ideally, this idea would be a complete tool kit for maintaining zoning codes.
Some features I thought would be useful:
That was a brain dump, but that's the general idea of how it would work. MediaWiki might be good for this but it would take some time to configure to work with the above uses.
To me, it seems a public wiki would be best for that.
You would need one, that has user roles, but that's basically it.
Hey! Very cool product. I tried guessing an email address to contact you -- since the only one listed on the site is privacy@fulcrum.wiki.
I really like it. Honestly, it amazes me that google hasn't done something like that themselves. I have my own startup I'm running, so I'm not looking to join/start another business. But if you want to chat ideas, get customer feedback, or whatever, give me a shout!
Hi Ben,
I would be happy to get feedback and chat ideas.
You can always mail me at marco@rockiger.com
Hi guys, we've just started using FulcrumWiki... is there anywhere we can search a Help of FAQs?
No, not right now. This would probably a good idea.
What is your question?