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.
It is strange, why ArangoDB isn't mentioned often on HN, or in this thread. It is multi-model (KV, document, graph) database (with transactions) and I have been happily using it for a while now.
Haven't scaled it yet to any large installations, so I can speak about how well it does that.
Could you elaborate on the weirdness issue? I'm not a designer but but would like to learn about the flaws these may have. The active state doesn't look so good though, agreed.
It's not the odds X out of 2M (not 1, those were "nights", and this probably isn't the only incident either?) that worries me, it's the whole procedure that they use to do business.
This sounds very much the type of company/guys that I worked for a period of time. I wouldn't be surprised if they were actually the same people. I regret the time deeply.
In the end I didn't even get paid as the company got bankrupt. Of course it didn't come as a surprise to them, and they could have paid me earlier, but they decided to spend the money on their company instead. So, they were dishonest too.
Leave and work for some who know what they are doing.
Ok, well, at least you are now saying something. But it may very well fix/improve the situation. We will have to wait and see. I think it's an interesting trial at least.
I don't partner, that's for sure. Email is not hard to do. It will be there.