I’ve recently been hired as a project manager for a company that’s just starting up… The founder suggested using Notion, but that’s not an ideal choice, for reasons listed below.
After a pretty exhaustive search of the current knowledge management systems out there, I keep coming back to Obsidian. Since I’m an Obsidian user myself, I like this idea, in theory. However, I have some uncertainties about using it collaboratively and how it will scale to work for larger teams.
I’d really like it if Obsidian could be an all-in-one solution for wiki, knowledge management, tasks, and calendars. I know it’s a big ask, and I’ve seen Redditors comment before that Obsidian is meant for individuals more than collaboration, but since the Obsidian Team is now advertising Sync as a collaborative platform, I wonder if things have shifted?
I’m curious if other folks have experience using Obsidian with small teams, and scaling up to larger teams. I feel like what I’m helping to create could be an interesting test case… I’d also really like it to be successful, since it’s my first big contribution to the company.
A few notes:
-
t’s a small team now (4 of us ) and will be expanding to 10 or more over the coming six months. Eventually it could be much larger than that, 50 or more people.
-
The company is very protective of its IP, so data security and permissions / privileged access to certain data is critical.
-
At this point, the organization’s files are all on Dropbox. Ideally they can be left there, for the time being, until we reach a point where we can set up our own server. So Obsidian would link to dropbox for most attachments.
-
I’m not an IT person at all. I know my way around a Mac and have recently been using ChatGPT to help me write some basic CSS for Obsidian tweaks.
-
I’ve been perusing this subreddit and the Obsidian forum for answers to my questions. Asking here for more up-to-date answers…
Key reasons I like Obsidian:
-
Data Sovereignty:
-
Local First
-
Direct Access to Notes
-
Self Hosting
-
Local LLM integration (the org doesn’t want to send data out to paid LLMs)
Customizable
-
Custom CSS
-
Plugins
Features
-
Canvas View
-
Great Community
-
API access
-
OCR search in attachments
-
Publish to URL (for public-facing content)
-
Offline access to notes
Things I’m uncertain about:
Team Collaboration
-
I use Obsidian Sync for my personal vault. Haven’t used it yet for collaborating with a team. Curious about real-time collaborative editing… I know there are several plug-ins for this as well.
-
Sync / Conflicts - how is this handled?
-
Version History - how does this work / how is it accessed?
-
How do permissions work? Can I limit access to some notes/folders?
Plug-ins
-
Plugin Security - Love my plugins. Now that I’m dealing with someone else’s data I feel I have to be much more cautious with plugins, which limits Obsidian.
-
Also, syncing plugins so that vaults work similarly for all team members seems like a bit of a headache.
Task Management
- Research is pointing me towards using Todoist as a task manager, and integrating that into Obsidian.
Calendars
-I haven’t used Obsidian for calendars yet. Ideally I need an integration with Google Cal / Apple Cal.
Thanks for any thoughts my fellows!