Evernote Business Review

You may think of Evernote as a simple note-taking platform, but it has expanded well beyond that to include document sharing and collaboration tools. It's a great tool for capturing brainstorming sessions, storing documents, and embedding audio and images into notes. However, it's best for small teams with limited needs; larger companies in need of robust collaboration tools will be disappointed.

Evernote Business offers a free 30-day trial that requires a credit card upfront. After that, you'll pay $12 per user per month for up to 25 users; if you need more than that, you can contact sales for a custom plan. Evernote also offers a free Basic plan, a Plus plan ($34.99 per year), and a Premium plan ($69.99 per year). The Business plan adds administrator controls and user management. While it offers collaboration features, document sharing, and offline access of all files across all of your devices, it still can't compete with Zoho Docs Standard , our Editors' Choice in this category.

Getting Started With Evernote for Business

Signing up for Evernote Business is simple. First, you provide contact information and create a password, and then you add billing information and select a payment plan, and finally, agree to the Evernote terms of service. You can pay yearly by credit card ($120 per user), monthly by credit card ($12 per user), or yearly by invoice ($120 per user). Next, you can invite team members one by one or in bulk or save that for later; you can also complete your profile, with a picture, mobile phone number, and your company's size.

Your dashboard sports buttons running down the left-hand side of the screen for adding notes, searching, opening a work chat, creating shortcuts, viewing notes and notebooks, and tags. Below that, you can view your account details and the admin console. Just to the right of these buttons are a list of your notes, which are separated into personal notes (not shared) and business notes (shared with others). You can sort the list by creation date, when it was last updated, or by title. Hovering over a note reveals buttons for sharing, setting reminders, adding shortcuts, or deleting. Click on a note and you can view it on the right console.

Document Sharing and Collaboration

While Evernote may be primarily known as note-taking software, you can also use it to store and share files, though not in the same way as Box for Business ($12.50 Per User Per Month - Editor's Choice. Free 30 Day Trial. at Dropbox Business) , or Dropbox Business . You can create notebooks, which are basically folders, and the notes inside them, but in order to share documents you have to attach them to a note. Then in order to edit the documents, you have to open them from the Evernote desktop app; you can only preview files from the online interface. After you edit a document using the desktop app and save it, the attachment will be updated across all platforms and users, so you don't have to re-upload it. One cool feature: when you embed a file in Evernote, that content becomes fully searchable.

Your Evernote account can now be linked with Google Drive; once you enable it, you can easily embed Google files in your Evernote notebooks and notes. Any edits to the Google file are automatically saved, which serves as a workaround solution to collaborative editing. Likewise, you can link to Evernote notes in your Google Drive account. This enables you to take advantage of the features you like on both platforms. You can also connect Evernote with Dropbox and Box for cloud storage and Basecamp, for project management.

Evernote Business also has an array of templates available, such as a calendar, expense tracker, phone log, and other industry-specific documents.

You can invite users one by one, or in bulk by pasting addresses into a box. Invitees must then either create an account or log into an existing one, and fill out a profile. Then the user is prompted to download the desktop app, with no way to skip unless you open a new window and sign in. That was a bit annoying, even if the desktop app is required to access some functionalities.

Though Evernote is not connected to your domain like Google Drive for Work (Try it Free at Google Store) is, you can specify your domain in the settings and anyone with an email address ending in that domain will be able to automatically join your business account; no invitation or approval required.

To share individual notebooks and notes, you use the built-in work chat, which I found a bit tedious. I had to search Evernote's help section to figure out how to share Notebooks and other content with your entire staff. It turned out that this is another desktop-only feature. There, you click the share button on a notebook and select "publish notebook." Then you can choose permissions: view, edit, or edit and invite.

Team members can collaborate using notes, but users can't simultaneously edit a note. You're alerted if you try to open a note that someone is already editing, however, you can still choose to open it. In that case, if you make any edits, Evernote will create a second copy of the file, which could become confusing. There's no way to lock other users out of a file.

One big bonus is that you can access all of your notebooks and files from any device, even when offline. This is much more convenient than selecting documents one by one for offline access as you have to do with Citrix ShareFile and Dropbox Business.

Within notes, you can create checklists and set reminders for small-scale project management. Evernote has apps for Android, iOS, and Windows, all of which offer offline access to your files.

Evernote Business Gives You Basic Document Management

When you need help, you can access Evernote's learning center, which includes guides for getting started, tutorials, and troubleshooting articles. You can also contact support using a web form; when you provide a specific keyword related to your problem, Evernote provides links to articles that may answer your question. You also receive the Evernote Business User Guide after you sign up.

Evernote's consumer software is very easy to use; its business plan offers more functionality, and, unfortunately, more complication. I love that it offers offline access of all files across all of your devices, but having to rely on a desktop app or Google Drive for document editing is inconvenient. If you need this feature, I recommend looking at Box Business, Google Drive for Work, or our Editors' Choice Zoho Docs Standard.

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