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(Archived) Has EN Eliminated (Destroyed) the seperation between business and personal notebooks?


ZZZ

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I am very concerned from watching this short video showing the new Windows Client.  In this EN video it appears that personal and business notebooks are now in the same list.  The first screenshot I have attached below shows how they are with the current version, which works outstanding.  The second screenshot shows how they are with the new beta version.

 

I am further convinced they've been trashed because otherwise there would be no reason for the new "personal notes" and "business notes" section in the second screenshot.  (I don't want to install the beta and lose functionality so I have to go from the video)

 

I want my personal and business notebooks SEPARATE.  EN, please don't trash existing and excellent functionality again!  This is especially important for businesses, we do not want business notebooks and personal notebooks mixed.

 

Video is here.

http://youtu.be/wdljS8skzSY?t=53s

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Mods, feel free to move this to the business forum, as I expect business users are going to care about it more than personal users who don't use the business notebooks anyhow.

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Let's keep it here and see how the discussion goes. I think a lot of business users also frequent the Windows thread. I would also like to see them separated. In my case, it is for ease of navigability / organization. I am afraid I could not tolerate that kind of clutter in an app like this that is so important in daily use.

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Per DLU's request, here is a list of reasons why it is critical that business and personal notebooks be kept separate in the windows Client (and that separation should be added to the Mac client where it has always been missing).
 
1. First off, the very fact that all EN business users also get a personal notebook that they get to "take with them" if they leave the company will eliminate EN from consideration of tons of businesses.  But for those of us who are OK with that, we at least expect a clear demarcation point between business notebooks and personal notebooks.  We don't want our employees accidentally putting business notes in personal folders and visa versa.
 
2. This concerns also exists equally from a personal perspective.  I keep highly personal notes in my personal notebooks.  I don't want to take any chance on putting those notes in business notebooks and I want a visual separation of them that makes me feel comfortable, I don't want to have to constantly be on "high alert" not to make a mistake.
 
3. EN is first and foremost a personal information manager.  The very essence of a PIM such as EN is that it allows users to structure their information (notebooks, tags and notes) in a way and order that is meaningful to them.  Business notebooks on the other hand will be structured in a completely different way, often decided on by an admin*.  Mixing the two destroys BOTH structures!
 
*And if you ever allow business admins to employ/propagate stacks, as many business admins have requested, you can be assured that feature will be further used to employ a consistent business structure, for instance "Opportunities Stack", "Projects Stack".
 
4. Per above, as a business admin, I want to structure our business notebooks in a way that is meaningful to the business.  If my employee has 100 personal notebooks good for them, but I sure as hell don't want them being distracted by those 100 personal notebooks every time they are working in a business notebook.
 
5. People may even have personal notebooks with the same names as business notebooks.  And stacks with the same name.  For instance, a personal stack named "projects" and a business stack named "projects".  As long as the business and personal hierarchies are separate that's a non-issue.  But if they are mixed, now someone once again needs to start adding extra descriptions and workarounds to avoid confusion.  And what happens if EN ever lets admins dictate the name of a notebook and the employee can't rename it (which is another must-have for businesses).  So now the admin needs to hope the employee makes sure all their employees always give their personal notebooks different names to avoid accidents?  See attached screen-shot showing how two notebooks can have the same name, I'm guessing this never even occurred to whoever drove this change!
 
Having listed all these, the big question is why in the world would you want to mix the two?!  What possible benefit is there?!  I'm going to take a wild guess - some GUI person thought it would "cleaner"?  Am I warm?  No need to answer, that's a rhetorical question.  Please note - please don't fix this with some silly UI change such as making personal notebooks a different color. Keep them separate!

 

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Let's keep it here and see how the discussion goes. I think a lot of business users also frequent the Windows thread. I would also like to see them separated. In my case, it is for ease of navigability / organization. I am afraid I could not tolerate that kind of clutter in an app like this that is so important in daily use.

 

Thanks Grumpy.  I just addressed that in point # 3 above.

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In addition to directly signing off to ZZZ's post above, I would like to state an additional key concern with the combining of Business and Personal notebooks: There are no more owner contexts.

Let me explain that (not that the Evernote Team needs this explained): When I'm looking at my own personal notebooks, the tags list on the left pane shows only tags from my personal notebooks. When I'm looking at notebooks shared to me by another Personal user, I see only their tags. When I'm in a Business notebook, sure enough, just Business tags.

 

Now they're all mixed. I'm drowning in tags :(

 

Also, a note to the rock stars at the Evernote Windows team: We complain because we love Evernote. Thanks again for everything.

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Yep, both you and Ed noted the tag issue and that is equally huge.  Under no circumstances should the tags between personal and business notebooks be mixed.

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Thanks for posting!

 

Glad this thread is being read. The answer isn't as reassuring as "Hey, you're right! Let's take a look at that" but it is something.

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Glad this thread is being read. The answer isn't as reassuring as "Hey, you're right! Let's take a look at that" but it is something.

 

Ya, this has me really worried again about the time investment we're making on the business product.  I almost feel like I want to put it on hold until I know what they are going to do here.  Already starting to think about what we're going to move to if this gets forced on business users.

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  • 3 weeks later...

I am wondering how long we have to wait to find out what's going to happen here.  From the looks of the beta it's not even close to being released, or if it is there's going to be a ton of angry users.  We were writing and moving all of our content from our previous knowledge management system so we could roll this out to a bunch of employees.  Now we're afraid to further invest the work and make the switch, if the entire system is going to be bastardized with business and personal notebooks mixed up.  I'm close to just using EN for my personal use, and throwing in the towel on the business product and just moving to a true business product where I don't have to worry about this stuff.

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I was also wondering about the same, especially since the notebook icons have disappeared also. (Which for me was a bigger factor in this identification process)

There is a way to at least change the colour of the notebooks based on whether they are linked/business/shared etc. using the registry, but this option has changed once or twice throughout the beta so I wouldn't be comfortable using/recommending it just yet as it may well change.

(for example, initially it used a 32 bit value, but now it uses a more normal hex code for colour.)

When it does all settle down and sort itself, then I will be messing with this to differentiate my notebooks for sure.

That said, clicking on the Notebooks button itself, you do get a clear indication of who owns what in the notebooks. This works well.

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I am hoping there is a massive change in the next beta, but the silence on this issue is almost as disturbing as the fact they went this direction by commingling the folders in the first place.

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I have to agree, with what has been said here. The Personal and Business notebooks need to be kept seperate. Not only is it professional, but could end up being an ethical one. For my part, I do some ministirial work and just the thought of those notes whitch are highly confidential, accidently being posted in a Business notebook, really scares me. I really hope EN will keep business and personal notes seperate.

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I have to agree, with what has been said here. The Personal and Business notebooks need to be kept seperate. Not only is it professional, but could end up being an ethical one. For my part, I do some ministirial work and just the thought of those notes whitch are highly confidential, accidently being posted in a Business notebook, really scares me. I really hope EN will keep business and personal notes seperate.

 

I agree. I have actually posted personal information (of my own) into a notebook I had shared with a bunch of people. It wasn't a business notebook, but the effect was the same. It is easy to make accidents like that when notes are mixed in with one another. I was one of the people requesting that we mix notes (owned, joined, shared, and business), and I was glad to see that they finally began doing this last summer, so I support Evernote in this. I think it is a great idea if implemented a little better. I would like to see some kind of safeguards put in place. 

 

For example, what about the ability to ask for a dialogue box to popup if I am about to post in a public place or move a note into a public place (shared notebook, joined notebook, or business notebook). I despise popup dialogue boxes, but this is one place where it would make sense -- to protect me from doing something stupid :) When the notebooks are all gathered so close together, sometimes it is all too easy to drag stuff into the wrong place. I wouldn't be surprised if Evernote developers came up with a better idea. The point is that I want some way to juggle personal and professional stuff in a single account.

 

One workaround that I currently use is to have one account that has shared stuff in it (shared notebooks, joined notebooks, etc.) and the other that shares nothing. This ensures that I don't make any more embarrassing mistakes. It also means I largely lose out on the benefits of mixing shared, joined, and business notebooks. However, in my particular case, the risk isn't worth it mixing things. Your mileage may vary. One great thing about the Mac (I haven't tested this out on Windows yet) is that you can have multiple accounts on the same machine, and all it takes is a click to switch them. You can log into a Premium account for the sharing and a Free one for your stuff. It is far from ideal, but it is one solution that might work for some people. Again, your mileage may vary.

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I'll tell you what bothers me most about this is the lack of feedback from Evernote. I don't expect to be kept in the know on every decision, or asked my opinion of every possible change.
 
However, this is a beta and in general, betas are 2 way streets, at least with every other software I've beta tested. Most of it is user->company as we give feedback on what does/doesn't work or what workflows are improved/disrupted with any given change. We spend time gathering this information and forwarding it to the company.
 
The other way is company->user, and it is rational for things that are changing that causes problems, or questions asking "ok, I see that. What if we did this instead of that?"
 
With this issue, which as a business user, I see as a major deal, here is what we've received so far:
 

Thanks for posting!


Thanks for the continued interest


That appears to me to be a major brush-off, whether it is or not. I'd like to think it isn't, but I first brought this issue up on July 1 as a big deal and it has always been "thanks for the feedback" with no indication of change, understanding, or interest.

 

Very discouraging.

 

My 2¢

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Just an FYI to those following this thread, the latest beta out today doesn't address any of these issues that I can tell. Not sure if others may have seen some changes that address concerns in this thread, but I didn't. If you did, please point them out because I'd love to see these issues addressed.

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Just an FYI to those following this thread, the latest beta out today doesn't address any of these issues that I can tell. Not sure if others may have seen some changes that address concerns in this thread, but I didn't. If you did, please point them out because I'd love to see these issues addressed.

Still keeping track of the registry, and so far nothing has changed. There are currently 4 different colour options for your notebooks to differentiate them if you wanted to:

- Business

- Linked

- Shared

- Local

An example, my linked notebooks:

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s26/sh/f36923a0-78ef-47bf-9a14-38da6a12494e/ea7f1bdeaca96a738edaf55d3b47b688

Like I said, this may change before it gets released, but I would be happy to write up a tutorial (possibly even a quick AHK app if I can) that would show how to do this when EN is properly released.

It is just simply changing some registry values. (Yes, I know that is daunting for some ;))

This is still open to change though so I am inclined to wait until the full release.

Scott

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Thanks Scott. That is at least something. However, colors aren;t the best option. I could go with red, blue, green and black but then I'd need a sticky next to my monitor to remind me which is which. Certainly better than nothing, but I'd prefer to see intuitive things like the briefcase, a folder with people in it, and something designating offline. 

 

Also, the thought of updating the registry for 30+ machines here (business users) isn't appealing.

 

Thanks though. I wasn't aware this was an option!

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Ed, I think that currently your best option for selecting tags notebooks (in the V5 beta) is to use the Jump to Notebooks option:

Alt + Shift + N

or

View - Jump to notebooks

or

Click on "All notes" at the top of the note list (Or if you are in a specific notebook it will show the name of the notebook)

Not only is this searchable, but I have just noticed that it differentiates better the different types of notebooks. (Still monochrome, but has icons at least)

Also, regarding the colours, this could be automated on the machines with (if I was to write it) an ahk script that would change the registry entries, to save you doing multiple changes manually.

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I wrote tags, but meant notebooks, sorry :P

 

Well, having only 30 notebooks (only!) that is feasible to manage. Having easily over 600 personal and business tags, it is a total mess. I simply cannot manage with EN5 as it stands right now. Some of my tags show up 3 times, and I know not why.

 

But it is all in gray-scale, so it's cool. 

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I wrote tags, but meant notebooks, sorry :P

 

Well, having only 30 notebooks (only!) that is feasible to manage. Having easily over 600 personal and business tags, it is a total mess. I simply cannot manage with EN5 as it stands right now. Some of my tags show up 3 times, and I know not why.

 

But it is all in gray-scale, so it's cool. 

 

 

Don't forget, EN5 is meant to "simplify things" and make it easier for you to "get to the information you want".  Evidently mixing all the notebooks and tags up helps you do that, and you just haven't figured out how.

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

 

I've mentioned a few things in the past year about this "problem":

 

(1) When selecting multiple notes and moving them (or doing anything else with them), the action begins as soon as you select something, and you do not have (for example) a button for applying the action. There are several problems that can occur here, but one of them is that you can mistakenly put something in the wrong notebook, especially if they have similar names. 

 

(2) If you are not paying attention and do not exit a notebook and go to All Notes before creating a note, you can inadvertently create a private note in a public notebook. I have done this. It is embarrassing. 

 

(3) When dragging notes into a notebook, you can inadvertently put them into the wrong one.

 

(4) When moving a note to a notebook using the drop-down selector in the note pane, you can inadvertently pick the wrong one.

 

(5) When emailing a note into your account, you can inadvertently put it into the wrong notebook.

 

(6) When clipping, the notes often (really, on a regular basis) go into the wrong notebook. Sometimes, I think this is because there is some kind of lag going on (Safari on the Mac) and the notebook I see when I move my cursor is not the notebook that actually ends up in the box when I click the button. I also think there may be a "smart" thing going on here.

 

Anyhow, in all of the cases above, it is really my fault for not paying close attention, being patient, and double-checking. In my workflow, though, this just isn't the kind of thing that I want to worry about, so I split up my accounts. It has saved me a lot of stress (I cannot tell you how stressful the Mac update in the fall was for me, but if you go back and read my posts, you'll get a sense of it). Ideally, I want to see a firewall of some kind (as I have suggested in different forms in the past). The idea would be that I could not inadvertently do these things because I have (for example) settings in my account that prevent me from moving notes into a shared / joined notebook or creating them there without clicking through a dialogue box. Of course, this would have to be a choice. If there was an annoying pop-up for everyone, then that would be no good. In other words, customizability  :)

 

Personally, if I were in a Business, I would be terribly concerned about this kind of thing, because you cannot delete Business notes. One inadvertent click and your private note is forever the company's property. That sounds like a recipe for disaster to me. 

 

However, I have to admit that I have been the most vocal about this for the longest time, and it really doesn't seem like other people are as careless as I am. I don't want to needlessly cause Evernote to invest resources in addressing this "problem," because it may just be something I have to figure out on my own (and, I have, by using multiple accounts). 

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By the way, the notebooks on the Mac are totally non-descript. It is (in my opinion) a bizarre concept. There are no icons. There are no colors. Just gray words. And, worst of all (in my opinion) is that notebooks with the same name are totally indistinguishable. Is it a joined one with that name, a shared one, or my own? It's been a problem for a year (for me, at least) and I cannot say that I am keen to see this replicated in the Windows beta.

On the Mac I have put them into "joined" and "shared" stacks to try and prevent myself from posting into the wrong notebooks (in my account for sharing stuff), but I have found it safer to just completely avoid dragging and dropping anything, and to avoid moving multiple notes whenever possible. It is just not worth the risk.

You know, you really ought to run this by us a few months before you start writing code. I think I could have detected this as a problem (at least for myself) if I'd seen it drawn on a napkin. I'm that sensitive (intolerant) to change :)

[Edit:] That last part is not a jab at the developers. It really is simply a case of people using Evernote 24/7 in different workflows and having very different use cases -- it would be impossible for developers to predict all of the issues ahead of time.

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For me, it is more a case of identification. Before, pretty much anywhere I looked, if I wanted to select a notebook, I could use the coloured identifiers to help me find the notebook in the list.

Now, I find myself scanning the notebook list and being a little lost. Everything is all jumbled together and there is no real identification of what notebook is what type.

The way the notebooks are depicted in various places is a little inconsistent too. We have the left panel, which is just text. Then the Alt + Shift + N menu, which has greyscale icons (still useful, but colour is always nice)

So far, I have managed to put two things into business that I didn't want to. (1 was due to the clipper and smart filing so isn't exactly relevant here, the other one was Grumpy's example 2)

I have always found that lines of text are the most difficult to scan over and I found the notebook icons very useful.

I was not a huge user of the left panel before, but now I feel it has pretty much no use to me in the default state. Simply because quick identification is not possible.

I guess the way that I use the current beta is a good indication of my feelings on it right now. Here is a subset of my notebooks, including the different types. (When the left panel is enabled that is...)

http://www.evernote.com/shard/s26/sh/b7ab2ac6-19c4-4229-9121-2d8c06c3d3c0/4ad31001ad314f0e7bf5879b12284d48

Scott

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Overall, I am pretty keen on the design, but I think that even if I messed with the colors (as Scott has done), I'd still have pretty much the same difficulties. At least I could distinguish between my notebooks and those of others, but beyond that, the fear (well-founded, I am afraid) of putting notes in the wrong place will still be there.

To restate the issue: last year we gained a powerful new feature (the mixing of notebooks into our accounts instead of having them existing independently) but did not gain the corresponding organizational tools that would enable us to incorporate it effectively into our respective use cases.

Basically, the app is still being designed as if it was our external brain when, in fact, it has actually become more of a borg-like hive mind. In order for things to function well, I think the app has to be adapted better to the new reality, and part of that (for me, at least) is putting up some kind of firewall.

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I can just tell from the questioning that EN is bound and determined to shove this down our throats.  It's not just about putting a note in the wrong place accidentally, it's about allowing an individual to have their personal notebook structure and a business to have theirs, so the two aren't ***** each other up.  As has been explained by several people here repeatedly.

 

And I am so sick of this forum filtering out words such as s c r e w i n g.  It makes it look like people are swearing when they are not.

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

 

DLU, the overwhelming majority of notes here are created by email clipping or file import via the Import Folders setting. These typically go into a standard folder (email and web clipping usually personal and file import usually directly into a main business notebook.) Then those folders are cleaned up - think of them as an inbox. If someone moves it via the folder dropdown, there isn't usually an issue as personal/business are still separate. If they drag-n-drop though, with 5.x, it is too easy to get it into a personal notebook. Sometimes when I drag/drop the folder listing will scroll and I can get it in the wrong folder, but with 4.x, that just means the wrong business folder, which isn't a biggie and is easily fixed. With 5x, it can go into a personal notebook, and it can stay there until I find it, which might be never. Same with others.

 

We don't have an issue with company data originating in a personal notebook (email, clipping, etc.) It just must get ultimately to a business notebook where it is accessible to all, and the company if that person leaves. 5.x makes that harder to guarantee the way the notebooks are all together, and even worse with no visual indicators.

 

Not really an issue of being in a notebook and creating a new note. But as I said, that is rare. We use EN to hold supporting documentation (scans, emails, etc.) Not a lot of original content beyond my system and process documentation.

 

My preference would be to both split personal from business and bring back icons designating the 4 folder types (personal sync'd, personal shared, business, personal local). If only one was done though, I'd  much prefer the split so personal and business are not commingled. That has the biggest chance of ensuring data makes it into a business folder, even if not the right business folder.

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By the way, the notebooks on the Mac are totally non-descript. It is (in my opinion) a bizarre concept. There are no icons. There are no colors. Just gray words. And, worst of all (in my opinion) is that notebooks with the same name are totally indistinguishable. Is it a joined one with that name, a shared one, or my own? It's been a problem for a year (for me, at least) and I cannot say that I am keen to see this replicated in the Windows beta.

 

This is, IMHO, a huge step backwards in functionality in favor of aesthetics. I assume that is why it was done, though I don't think it looks better, I cannot imagine another reason.

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By the way, the notebooks on the Mac are totally non-descript. It is (in my opinion) a bizarre concept. There are no icons. There are no colors. Just gray words. And, worst of all (in my opinion) is that notebooks with the same name are totally indistinguishable. Is it a joined one with that name, a shared one, or my own? It's been a problem for a year (for me, at least) and I cannot say that I am keen to see this replicated in the Windows beta.

 

I run mostly Macs with a Windows VMs, and the above is actually why I have to work in EN in Windows and won't use the Mac version.  It blows my mind that they are trying to destroy the Windows client and make it look like the Mac client instead of visa versa.  Right now I'm getting the strong vibe EN5 is the Windows 8 of EN.  MS was bound and determined to force 8 on everyone in spite of endless feedback from users who didn't like it and didn't want it.  I personally don't mind the lack of icons on Mac BTW, but the complete mixing of notebooks which destroys the notebook structure I've created for myself as well as for our business, along with the white on dark grey background which makes it difficult to read, and it's not enjoyable to use.

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It's difficult for me to gauge the merits of the new Windows beta. On the one hand, it looks quite a bit better to me, and I think it could potentially be easier for some users to navigate. On the other, it seems to undermine the very functionality Evernote has built into the service; namely, a wide range of sharing options, many organizational tools, and a certain limited amount of customizability. The sharing, tools, and customizability are quite complex, but the UI doesn't reflect it. I guess you want to simplify things in order to have a clean interface, but this seems like over-simplification. I'm not sure why. Is it really so confusing to have colors or user-defined behaviors (a popup warning of note creation / movement into a shared / joined notebook)?

Maybe so. Evernote developers are the experts here. Still, I'm the expert on me, and I know this doesn't fit my workflow well.

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Still, I'm the expert on me, and I know this doesn't fit my workflow well.

 

This is a powerful statement from a seasoned professional who knows Evernote inside and out.

Please, consider his comments very carefully.

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

This is not a workflow per se but it's an example which I already explained earlier.  The names of my personal notebooks are often going to be close or in many situations even identical to the names of my business notebooks.  So it's entirely possible that I'm going to have a business notebook named receipts and a personal notebook names receipts.

 

As long as the notebooks are under different hierarchies (i.e. personal OR business), I know where I am and don't even have to concern myself whether I'm in the wrong one, I don't have to think about it.  But ANY other solution where they are mixed up is going to cause me to have to think about it, to have to constantly concern myself with whether I'm using the right notebook.  Even if you make them different colors, let's say bright green for personal and bright red for business, I'm going to have to constantly pay attention, "am I putting this in the notebook I mean to".

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

This is not a workflow per se but it's an example which I already explained earlier.  The names of my personal notebooks are often going to be close or in many situations even identical to the names of my business notebooks.  So it's entirely possible that I'm going to have a business notebook named receipts and a personal notebook names receipts.

 

As long as the notebooks are under different hierarchies (i.e. personal OR business), I know where I am and don't even have to concern myself whether I'm in the wrong one, I don't have to think about it.  But ANY other solution where they are mixed up is going to cause me to have to think about it, to have to constantly concern myself with whether I'm using the right notebook.  Even if you make them different colors, let's say bright green for personal and bright red for business, I'm going to have to constantly pay attention, "am I putting this in the notebook I mean to".

 

 

That's fair, just wanted to make sure I wasn't missing any specific use cases.

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

 

DLU, the overwhelming majority of notes here are created by email clipping or file import via the Import Folders setting. These typically go into a standard folder (email and web clipping usually personal and file import usually directly into a main business notebook.) Then those folders are cleaned up - think of them as an inbox. If someone moves it via the folder dropdown, there isn't usually an issue as personal/business are still separate. If they drag-n-drop though, with 5.x, it is too easy to get it into a personal notebook. Sometimes when I drag/drop the folder listing will scroll and I can get it in the wrong folder, but with 4.x, that just means the wrong business folder, which isn't a biggie and is easily fixed. With 5x, it can go into a personal notebook, and it can stay there until I find it, which might be never. Same with others.

 

We don't have an issue with company data originating in a personal notebook (email, clipping, etc.) It just must get ultimately to a business notebook where it is accessible to all, and the company if that person leaves. 5.x makes that harder to guarantee the way the notebooks are all together, and even worse with no visual indicators.

 

Not really an issue of being in a notebook and creating a new note. But as I said, that is rare. We use EN to hold supporting documentation (scans, emails, etc.) Not a lot of original content beyond my system and process documentation.

 

My preference would be to both split personal from business and bring back icons designating the 4 folder types (personal sync'd, personal shared, business, personal local). If only one was done though, I'd  much prefer the split so personal and business are not commingled. That has the biggest chance of ensuring data makes it into a business folder, even if not the right business folder.

 

 

Thanks for this example. You can direct import folders & the clipper to go into business notebooks. Is there still a preference to have both personal & business incoming notes pointed to a single "Inbox" and then file them away?

 

*edit* To clarify I'm not suggesting this as a workaround, I'm just asking to see what workflows people are using and should be aware of.

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Question for folks. It's been mentioned a few times that there is a concern someone may accidentally put a note in a personal notebook instead of a business notebook (or vice versa). I wanted to ask about the specific events. Is it that folks are going to click on Hobbies101 instead of Hotel Receipts and then create a note in the wrong notebook? Or are folks dragging and dropping notes onto notebooks as they file away? Are there any other specific work flows? (I'm mainly interested in the last question).

 

thanks

 

DLU, the overwhelming majority of notes here are created by email clipping or file import via the Import Folders setting. These typically go into a standard folder (email and web clipping usually personal and file import usually directly into a main business notebook.) Then those folders are cleaned up - think of them as an inbox. If someone moves it via the folder dropdown, there isn't usually an issue as personal/business are still separate. If they drag-n-drop though, with 5.x, it is too easy to get it into a personal notebook. Sometimes when I drag/drop the folder listing will scroll and I can get it in the wrong folder, but with 4.x, that just means the wrong business folder, which isn't a biggie and is easily fixed. With 5x, it can go into a personal notebook, and it can stay there until I find it, which might be never. Same with others.

 

We don't have an issue with company data originating in a personal notebook (email, clipping, etc.) It just must get ultimately to a business notebook where it is accessible to all, and the company if that person leaves. 5.x makes that harder to guarantee the way the notebooks are all together, and even worse with no visual indicators.

 

Not really an issue of being in a notebook and creating a new note. But as I said, that is rare. We use EN to hold supporting documentation (scans, emails, etc.) Not a lot of original content beyond my system and process documentation.

 

My preference would be to both split personal from business and bring back icons designating the 4 folder types (personal sync'd, personal shared, business, personal local). If only one was done though, I'd  much prefer the split so personal and business are not commingled. That has the biggest chance of ensuring data makes it into a business folder, even if not the right business folder.

 

 

Thanks for this example. You can direct import folders & the clipper to go into business notebooks. Is there still a preference to have both personal & business incoming notes pointed to a single "Inbox" and then file them away?

 

*edit* To clarify I'm not suggesting this as a workaround, I'm just asking to see what workflows people are using and should be aware of.

 

 

DLU, the imports do go into a business "inbox" but has to get cleaned out, and it is too easy to drag to the wrong folder. With Personal and Business being commingled, too easy to get into a personal folder.

 

The clipper goes wherever they want. I prefer to have it go to an inbox, a personal folder. The reason is with the clipper you cannot set a default. It always goes where you last told it. This would be less of an issue (but still an issue) if I could set @inbox (Personal) to be the default and then clip an email to a business notebook when I press the button and select a folder, as long as the next clip went back to @inbox. It doesn't though. If you picked BusinessNotebookX, the next clip will automatically go there. (This is on Chrome). That is worse since that means personal things easily wind up in business notebooks and are not delete-able by anyone but an admin. So 100% of my clips go to my personal @inbox for sorting. A few others do this too.

 

Make sense?

 

Now that I've talked through that, a nice enhancement to the clipper would be to set a default personal notebook and a default business notebook, then instead of a Save button, there is a Personal and Business button in the clipper. Doesn't fix fundamental issues in this thread, but would be nice and help prevent accidentally putting stuff in the wrong place on import. Once in EN of course, it can still go awry by dragging and dropping.

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For the clipper on Chrome, I still have Smart Filing turned on for clippings but I turned off Smart Filing into business notebooks. This way the worst case is that it ends up in a Personal Notebook that I have to move over later. Most of the time the Smart Filing is perfect. But I also do more clipping for personal than business.

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For the clipper on Chrome, I still have Smart Filing turned on for clippings but I turned off Smart Filing into business notebooks. This way the worst case is that it ends up in a Personal Notebook that I have to move over later. Most of the time the Smart Filing is perfect. But I also do more clipping for personal than business.

 

I tried Smart Filing for a day and turned it off. I was doing more to correct than anything else. If it goes in @inbox with no tags, I know it has to be dealt with. Otherwise, they vanish into other folders or get tags that are wrong and have to be cleared. It may work for some, but I couldn't see the logic of it and ran the risk of missing something.

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I see EN5 was officially released today.  It's going to be entertaining reading the posts from business users who upgrade and discover all their notebooks are now mixed up.  Should make a lot of business admins thrilled too.  I am sure when it happens EN can pretend shock that anyone is upset.

 

Well I'm certainly not ignoring you folks

 

I guess the problem is I don't think any of us knows what that means, since you won't/can't commit to making any statement at all that EN is going to reverse course based on the feedback here.  And now here it's been officially released with no changes.

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We don't publish roadmaps, ETAs or anything like that. So I can't quite comment on what we're going to do. I apologize for that, I know it can be frustrating. Anyways, I encourage EB users to upgrade at their own pace. We'll be fielding feedback from other EB folks as well

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To be honest I'm less frustrated by your inability to comment, than I am by the fact that this ever made it past the design team in the first place, or that anyone thought it was a good idea.  Seems to represent a fundamental disconnect from both personal and business users.  Anyhow, like I said, should now be entertaining to see the storm when business users start upgrading.  Which they'll do, because most users will just upgrade as soon as they get an automated message to do so.

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To be honest I'm less frustrated by your inability to comment, than I am by the fact that this ever made it past the design team in the first place, or that anyone thought it was a good idea.  Seems to represent a fundamental disconnect from both personal and business users.  Anyhow, like I said, should now be entertaining to see the storm when business users start upgrading.  Which they'll do, because most users will just upgrade as soon as they get an automated message to do so.

 

I sent out an email blast to our EN users (about 30 right now) to not upgrade and to disable the "check for updates" box yesterday. It is frustrating to invest so much time in getting the ENB process up and working well, and paying $300 a month, and have it totally wrecked by a design change that seems more suited to someone that adds about 10 notes a month and has 3 total notebooks and 10 tags.

 

We have 11 business notebooks right now (not including the 30 individual business user notebooks) with just under 20,000 notes, hundreds of tags, and 60GB of data, growing every day. 

 

EN5 is for us like taking away Microsoft Excel and saying Google Docs is good enough for spreadsheets, or taking away Evernote for the casual user and saying Google Keep does enough for you.

 

Maybe we are unique here and have overused Evernote, but it works so well for us. Maybe all of the other companies will love the new UI and lower information density and usability of the side bar, the duplicated and triplicated tags in the massively commingled tag listing, and the thrill of the mystery of figuring out ff the notebook you are dragging a note to is local, personal, shared or business.

 

I hold out hope 5.x will be fixed, but if not, praying for a long lifespan of 4.x support, which sucks, because reminders are a must have feature, and I hate to have to sync notes to my iPhone just to set and get reminders.  :angry:

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Hi Dlu,

 

The importance of having Business and Personal Notebooks separated as they are in V4 is, in my opinion, critical to using Evernote.

 

Mixing up my 31 Personal Notebooks and 34 Business Notebook, fills me with dread!

 

Are you able to confirm that the differentiation between the two will be coming back in V5 at some point?

 

Best regards

 

 

Chris

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I can't believe this is still a problem. I just upgraded to EN5 and it's certainly a HUGE PITA to not have the notebooks separated.. Now I have at least 3-5 notebooks which have identical names in both business and personal.. --> definately pita to try to pick the right one. Also as they are not separated I can't easily scan through my notebooks and see which are business/personal if I'm trying to decide which notebook is best.

Definately have to ask all of our employees to turn off the auto update until this is fixed. I'm the sysadmin and some are already having hard time using evernote... Don't even want to imagine the amount of support requests should they update to EN5... 

 

And no this is not just resistance to change.. If it takes me 5-10 minutes more per day to use evernote (just that I can be sure everything goes to right places) your UI design can't be called succesfull. 

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I have notebooks that are shared to me that have the same names as those in my own account, and I do *not* want them separated. In fact, I want to be able to stack them together (or any any mixture of shared and owned notebooks), so that I can search them together. This works today, and I wish it to continue to work. Separating them -- as is done on the Android and web clients -- is a pain. Using stacks is the only way to be able to search a subset of notebooks currently, and is very useful (even to he point of creating ad-hoc stacks just for purposes of searching).

On the other hand, I do want them more easily distinguishable, wherever they appear -- right now, I can only tell them apart by looking at their note counts in the notebook list, and not at all in a note header. The icons used in the Notebook dropdown that appears over search explanation would probably be sufficient (my notebooks use a notebook icon, shared notebooks use a special share-y icon, not sure what business notebooks use as I don't have any of those here at my work computer).

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I have notebooks that are shared to me that have the same names as those in my own account, and I do *not* want them separated. In fact, I want to be able to stack them together (or any any mixture of shared and owned notebooks), so that I can search them together. This works today, and I wish it to continue to work. Separating them -- as is done on the Android and web clients -- is a pain. Using stacks is the only way to be able to search a subset of notebooks currently, and is very useful (even to he point of creating ad-hoc stacks just for purposes of searching).

Jefito, there is a world of difference between a personal shared notebook and a business notebook. For the privilege of $10/user/month, business accounts are managed by an admin and the admin, and therefor the company, have access to the notes which are company property. They need to be visually separated out so company data doesn't inadvertently wind up in a personal notebook.

 

If you are using premium sharing for business documents, you are on your own. We aren't. We are paying to have this separate and locked down, and 5.x really hurts that.

 

Please don't commingle the issue. Arguing that business shouldn't be separated because you like out personal notebooks aren't exhibits the same flaw that went into the design of 5.x to begin with, and why a growing list of companies in this thread are sticking with 4.x and turning off auto-update notifications.

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Jefito, there is a world of difference between a personal shared notebook and a business notebook.

 

 

I was just about to point this out when the little "there is a new post" notifications popped up, and you saved me the time.  Although personally, I do not want shared notebooks being mixed in with my personal notebooks either, I like the way in 4.7 they show up under the name of the person who shared it with me.  Regardless, it's not remotely the same, so I'd prefer any discussion about commingling shared notebooks takes place in another thread.

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I can't believe this is still a problem. I just upgraded to EN5 and it's certainly a HUGE PITA to not have the notebooks separated.. Now I have at least 3-5 notebooks which have identical names in both business and personal.. --> definately pita to try to pick the right one.

 

You know in fairness, EN worked on this update for a year, so how could they have foreseen that would happen?  Oh wait....

 

 

5. People may even have personal notebooks with the same names as business notebooks.  And stacks with the same name.
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I have notebooks that are shared to me that have the same names as those in my own account, and I do *not* want them separated. In fact, I want to be able to stack them together (or any any mixture of shared and owned notebooks), so that I can search them together. This works today, and I wish it to continue to work. Separating them -- as is done on the Android and web clients -- is a pain. Using stacks is the only way to be able to search a subset of notebooks currently, and is very useful (even to he point of creating ad-hoc stacks just for purposes of searching).

Jefito, there is a world of difference between a personal shared notebook and a business notebook. For the privilege of $10/user/month, business accounts are managed by an admin and the admin, and therefor the company, have access to the notes which are company property. They need to be visually separated out so company data doesn't inadvertently wind up in a personal notebook.

 

If you are using premium sharing for business documents, you are on your own. We aren't. We are paying to have this separate and locked down, and 5.x really hurts that.

 

Please don't commingle the issue. Arguing that business shouldn't be separated because you like out personal notebooks aren't exhibits the same flaw that went into the design of 5.x to begin with, and why a growing list of companies in this thread are sticking with 4.x and turning off auto-update notifications.

While I will concede that there are certainly differences between business and joined notebooks, I think the similarities make them worth considering together when revising the app. As I mentioned earlier in the thread (http://discussion.evernote.com/topic/39957-has-en-eliminated-destroyed-the-seperation-between-business-and-personal-notebooks/?p=223357), there are (for me, at least) huge issues involved with the co-mingling of notebook types, even though I requested the feature long ago. I still very much want the feature, but I really think it needs a much better implementation.

The point of similarity, it seems to me, is that the public and private worlds are getting indiscriminately mixed up in Evernote. Once you post something in a shared notebook, you have lost control of your property. Once you post something in a joined notebook, you have not only lost control of your property, but you can't even delete it (I think it goes into the other person's trash, like it does with Evernote Business). This may seem insignificant compared to businesses, but as my work involves intellectual property of my own, it doesn't look so different from where I am sitting.

The fix (in my opinion) addresses the needs of Free, Premium, and Business users. We ought to have MORE clear visual cues on both platforms to help us deal with the more complex features (the mixing of notebooks and notes) that Evernote has given us and MORE granular control over a more complex process that are involved (for example, the ability to block notes from getting moved into one or another kind of notebook in order to prevent fools like me from making embarrassing mistakes). I am adamantly opposed to the general trend, especially with major updates, to strip out all of that "unnecessary" customizability.

Daniel tasks me! He tasks me and I shall have him! I'll chase him round the Moons of Nibia, and round the Antares Maelstrom, and round the Antares maelstrom and round perdition's flames before I give him up! Give me customizability and options!

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We ought to have MORE clear visual cues

 

You mean like having them separate like in 4.7 ;).  I argue against "visual cues" in this instance.  Visual cues are very useful in some instances.  For instance if I want to identify high priority by red, medium priority by blue and low priority with black, that's a good visual cue system.

 

But when the very thing you want to do is separate items, then the best way to achieve that is by...separating them.  And again, this is much more than just accidentally putting a note in the wrong place, which seems to be the facet you're focusing on.  It's about the fact that the business admin wants to implement a consistent notebook structure, just as many individual users will want to choose their personal notebook structure.  Mix the two together, and you've destroyed both.

 

This is what my business folder structure looks like (vastly simplified for the example purposes):

 

Accounts

Competitors

Forms

Projects

Vendor Information

 

This is what my personal folder structure looks like ;), which because it's for me and me alone, I don't really have to worry about it making sense to anyone but me:

Architecture

Diary of Famous Actresses I've Bedded

House

Humor

Insurance, Will, Legal etc.

My Pictures

Revenge Will Be Mine

Projects

Records

 

Mix those two together and you're in bizarroland, and no amount of visual cues is going to change the fact that you've just created a ridiculous hodgepodge that doesn't make sense for individuals, and doesn't make sense for businesses.

 

Accounts

Architecture

Competitors

Diary of Famous Actresses I've Bedded

Forms

House

Humor

Insurance, Will, Legal etc.

My Pictures

Revenge Will Be Mine

Projects

Projects

Records

Vendor Information

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I have notebooks that are shared to me that have the same names as those in my own account, and I do *not* want them separated. In fact, I want to be able to stack them together (or any any mixture of shared and owned notebooks), so that I can search them together. This works today, and I wish it to continue to work. Separating them -- as is done on the Android and web clients -- is a pain. Using stacks is the only way to be able to search a subset of notebooks currently, and is very useful (even to he point of creating ad-hoc stacks just for purposes of searching).

Jefito, there is a world of difference between a personal shared notebook and a business notebook. For the privilege of $10/user/month, business accounts are managed by an admin and the admin, and therefor the company, have access to the notes which are company property. They need to be visually separated out so company data doesn't inadvertently wind up in a personal notebook.

If you are using premium sharing for business documents, you are on your own. We aren't. We are paying to have this separate and locked down, and 5.x really hurts that.

I don't think that the world of difference is all that large, but let's ask this question: are you actually protected, via real security, from having company data winding up in a personal notebook, or are you just relying on visual cues so that people don't make mistakes? If the latter, then in no sense can you say that things are "locked down". If the former, then it doesn't matter -- it's a user's choice to organize their notebooks as they want, but they cannot violate the security.

 

Please don't commingle the issue. Arguing that business shouldn't be separated because you like out personal notebooks aren't exhibits the same flaw that went into the design of 5.x to begin with, and why a growing list of companies in this thread are sticking with 4.x and turning off auto-update notifications.

The issue is already commingled as far as I can tell. Sharing is sharing in a real sense. Do Business notebooks give you real security over your shares, or do they not? Real security would allow your users to view their notes any way that they want within the capabilities of the Evernote client without needing to make special cases, but prevent you from circumventing the rules of the organization.

I can 't testify as to how large the "growing list" is, or what their rationales might be. Most smart companies wait until a technology is proven before rolling it out. That's just common sense. I have plenty of problems with this release (as you probably know already), and I'm not sure it's at a stage where I'd recommend anything more that "try it, but be cautious about it" to any individual -- I'd be a lot more reticent if it were my job to manage things for an organization.

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We're wandering dangerously close to bickering. Jefito has a good point, many of our users find value in having "mixed stacks" that can include personal and business.

 

On the other hand, if you'd like a firm separation between work and play I can fully understand that as well.

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We're wandering dangerously close to bickering. Jefito has a good point, many of our users find value in having "mixed stacks" that can include personal and business.

 

On the other hand, if you'd like a firm separation between work and play I can fully understand that as well.

Just to re-iterate my point: I definitely agree with dlu here, and I think bringing all of the notebooks into play is an important step forward from the old days of laboriously searching through one joined notebook at a time to find anything. As I said when it began around this time last year, though, the implementation doesn't work well for me. There simply has to be a way for me to visually distinguish among notebook types and some kind of failsafe in place to keep me from misfiling private stuff into public places. There are other gripes (having to view a billion tags that aren't mine), but the lack of distinctions and a firewall stand out the most for me.

How to do that firewall? I don't know. I've made many suggestions in the past. You guys are the experts, though! Whatever you do, I hope you keep the ability to access everything with a single search going forward, and just tweak the app to deal with these issues.

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I'm trying not to bicker, but I do have questions, and I do have issues with the idea that I would be enjoined from organizing my notebooks the way that I want to in the name of what seems to me to be false security (if that's the actual case -- I am not an expert on the Business notebook end of things, though I do have them; all of the moderators do or at least had the opportunity to join in early testing). I'm not interested in arguing about this endlessly, but I (apparently) have a different viewpoint on things, and as this is a user forum, it's not out of bounds to state it. I'm willing to be convinced, but I'm just not seeing this one yet.

As it stands, my take on this is that security is independent of organizational concerns.

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We're wandering dangerously close to bickering. Jefito has a good point, many of our users find value in having "mixed stacks" that can include personal and business.

 

Unless you've done metrics to determine what percentage of users want notebooks mixed and what percentage of users want them separate (which we both know hasn't been done), that statement bears 0 weight.  Furthermore, if you want to cater to business users, you'd want to also get metrics from business admins/decision makers.  Whatever the case is, this is now my last post on this matter, and I'm not waiting around hoping it'll be fixed.  We had set up a test account set up and were hoping to roll it out to 70 users, now we're running away as fast as we can.  We have to do business with a company that has a clue about the needs of business users.  The only proper response here should have been "we understand, we've requested this be corrected and we'll try to do so as quickly as possible".

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I don't think that the world of difference is all that large, but let's ask this question: are you actually protected, via real security, from having company data winding up in a personal notebook, or are you just relying on visual cues so that people don't make mistakes? If the latter, then in no sense can you say that things are "locked down". If the former, then it doesn't matter -- it's a user's choice to organize their notebooks as they want, but they cannot violate the security.

I am not going to get philosophical with you. I trust our employees to not intentionally store corporate data in a personal notebook. EN5 makes this too easy to do.

 

If you want to go get a business account, set 20-50 people up on it, populate it with about 20,000 notes and 20GB of data, set up a a dozen notebooks and a few hundred tags and then see how it works with it all in one big commingled mess, please do so and then we can discuss. If you don't want to do that, then the separation of business and personal won't affect you at all.

 

I am not going to pontificate this based on how someone things this could work with no real world experience in it.

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I don't think that the world of difference is all that large, but let's ask this question: are you actually protected, via real security, from having company data winding up in a personal notebook, or are you just relying on visual cues so that people don't make mistakes? If the latter, then in no sense can you say that things are "locked down". If the former, then it doesn't matter -- it's a user's choice to organize their notebooks as they want, but they cannot violate the security.

I am not going to get philosophical with you. I trust our employees to not intentionally store corporate data in a personal notebook. EN5 makes this too easy to do.

 

If you want to go get a business account, set 20-50 people up on it, populate it with about 20,000 notes and 20GB of data, set up a a dozen notebooks and a few hundred tags and then see how it works with it all in one big commingled mess, please do so and then we can discuss. If you don't want to do that, then the separation of business and personal won't affect you at all.

 

I am not going to pontificate this based on how someone things this could work with no real world experience in it.

 

So I guess the answer is that there is no actual security, then. This is not philosophical, this is a matter of fact. Sounds like you're just hoping that your users won't make any mistakes (much less outright acts against corporate interests), and you want to enforce it via the Evernote's UI since you don't have actual control.

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So I guess the answer is that there is no actual security, then. This is not philosophical, this is a matter of fact. Sounds like you're just hoping that your users won't make any mistakes (much less outright acts against corporate interests), and you want to enforce it via the Evernote's UI since you don't have actual control.

Cool. Now you understand a bit more about Evernote Business. That wasn't the point of this thread however. It is about usability. Thanks.
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My prior comments *were* about usability, i.e., letting a user determine what organizational scheme works best for their own workflow.

 

I do agree with you that Business account admins should have more control over security. My point on that end is that a robust security system should be able to accommodate the Business user case, as well as normal (free or premium) accounts that share notebooks with others. I didn't get the objections about what seemed to be security related issues (a user might accidentally misfile a company note into a personal notebook) when I was interested in usability all along. I was really surprised to find that the answer to what I thought would be a security problem was to restrict usability. But maybe that's the next best thing in your mind, because you don't have the tools you really need?

 

Anyways, my simple straw man on the usability side of things would be to use an existing facility of Evernote's: the lowly stack. Every notebook that's shared to a user would wind up initially in a stack that identifies where the notebook came from. After that, it's up to the individual user to manage things so that their use of a shared notebook, whatever its source, works well for them, even if it leads them into the land of the dreaded commingulation (there are reasonable use cases for commingling, as I see it) -- probably most users wouldn't shift things around, anyways, would be my bet. Part and parcel of that would be that notebooks be easily identifiable as shared, business, or personal (there are icons for each of these, at a minimum), something that doesn't occur today, at least in the left notebook pane. That should make any commingling less confusing.

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I am voicing my concern as well for having personal and business notebooks intermingled.  The notebooks could be taken care of by us renaming them so they could group together.  My larger concern is for the tags being mixed.  I have a certain taxonomy that works for me however it is crowded with noise from business and shared notebooks.  I cannot expect everyone to have the same rigor with tagging and what notebook information is placed into.

 

As this point I have advised our 30 business users to not upgrade to version 5 of the windows client.

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I am voicing my concern as well for having personal and business notebooks intermingled.  The notebooks could be taken care of by us renaming them so they could group together.  My larger concern is for the tags being mixed.  I have a certain taxonomy that works for me however it is crowded with noise from business and shared notebooks.  I cannot expect everyone to have the same rigor with tagging and what notebook information is placed into.

 

As this point I have advised our 30 business users to not upgrade to version 5 of the windows client.

Notebooks can also be stacked, on, the Windows client, at least (maybe Mac, but not Android or Web; don't know about iOS). I like these as organizing tools because they're flexible and, importantly, already implemented.

Have been thinking about the problems/benefits of shared tags for awhile. Nothing concrete yet, though I tend to want to be able to mix them easily (shared taxonomy is important for shared endeavors), though I also want more control over them, mainly in the areas of improvements to the search grammar (want to be able to search on my tags/notebooks, which I cannot do when there are name collisions) and view options (show/hide specific sets of tags, or at least isolate to my own, or have a separate tag pane view that shows tag trees by source).

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I am voicing my concern as well for having personal and business notebooks intermingled.  The notebooks could be taken care of by us renaming them so they could group together.  My larger concern is for the tags being mixed.  I have a certain taxonomy that works for me however it is crowded with noise from business and shared notebooks.  I cannot expect everyone to have the same rigor with tagging and what notebook information is placed into.

 

As this point I have advised our 30 business users to not upgrade to version 5 of the windows client.

 

Kurt, you are exactly right. The notebooks might be managable with stacks, but in EN4, they are in a separate section and don't need to be stacked. Even stacked, you have to hack the stack name to get them to be separate. Visually, there is still no distinction! Be careful about renaming business notebooks. Names are only propogated one time - at creation and share. If you rename them, you have to manually rename them on all 30 machines. Otherwise, yours are renamed and the other 29 users have the old name. This has been submitted on these forums as a wish too.

 

The tags though are an absolute abomination. My left panel in EN5 is about 30-50 screens long. It is absurd. And my tags are a total jumbled mess with some being duplicated and even triplicated.

 

I know Jefito is trying to help above, but he doesn't have a business account with 30 users on it - coincidentally we also have exactly 30 right now! He is intent on philosophizing away some of the problems EN5 has created for business users that worked so well in EN 4.x.

 

I really wish this thread was kept to business users with experience with the business account so real informed discussion could happen to effect change where necessary. 

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I really wish this thread was kept to business users with experience with the business account so real informed discussion could happen to effect change where necessary.

Feel free to make your case for the changes you want to see in the client (Business or otherwise), but this is an open forum, and we encourage everyone to contribute to the discussions regardless of their perceived proficiency/knowledge about the clients.

In fact, I think it is probably safe to say that very few of the developers have experience managing thirty employees using Evernote Business. It wouldn't help your case to exclude them from the conversation.

And, after all, why would they (or many other users) have that experience? You are a relatively rare individual with a unique viewpoint. Please do express it, but when doing so, I encourage you to address the points raised (by Jefito and others) not the person raising them (otherwise known as ad hominem attacks).

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With respect, Ed, I believe that I am able to reason about Business account usage without being an admin. You may have 30 users, but I have 30 years of being a full-time software developer. As it is, I *am* a business account user, though not an expert, which I noted before, and I have a fair amount of experience with Evernote. If you want to have a private thread, then there are other venues, and feel free; otherwise the only price of admission here is keeping things topical, constructive, and respectful. If I haven't been any of those, then please point out where that happened. As for "philosophizing", that's what any of us here are doing here: proposing solutions by trying to reason about them, given a number of potential use cases.

Back to the topic...

Re stacking shared/business notebooks along with personal: seems a valid use case, for those who want to organize that way, with little loss of any security as far as I can tell. Haven't heard any opinions as to why this would be a bad idea. I'm not sure what the objection to "hacking" the stack name is -- as I proposed before, the stack name would be auto-created by Evernote on notebook publication. Beyond that, anyone capable of restacking will probably not worry to much about a simple rename.

Re the tag mess: yes, it is a mess (I have a lot as well, not only from my business notebooks but also from other shared notebooks). Whereas V4 had a use case for notebooks that the non-comminglers seem to like, there wasn't any similar analogue for tags (or did I miss that?). I've proposed a potential solution to that -- making different views available. The shared account-rooted approach might work for the business case. The flip side is that sometimes I'd want them to be in an all-inclusive tree with no indication of where they came from (and with duplicates removed).

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I really wish this thread was kept to business users with experience with the business account so real informed discussion could happen to effect change where necessary.

Feel free to make your case for the changes you want to see in the client (Business or otherwise), but this is an open forum, and we encourage everyone to contribute to the discussions regardless of their perceived proficiency/knowledge about the clients.

In fact, I think it is probably safe to say that very few of the developers have experience managing thirty employees using Evernote Business. It wouldn't help your case to exclude them from the conversation.

And, after all, why would they (or many other users) have that experience? You are a relatively rare individual with a unique viewpoint. Please do express it, but when doing so, I encourage you to address the points raised (by Jefito and others) not the person raising them (otherwise known as ad hominem attacks).

 

 

It isn't an ad hominem. I didn't attack the user. There are some real and serious issues with EN5 for ENB users, and while I often respects Jeff's opinion on many matters related to EN, he has no idea what he is talking about when it comes to business usage. He doesn't have 50 screens of tags that are a mess. he doesn't have users that can inadvertently drag corporate data to personal notebooks, which may be shared with friends and family. Who knows what is going on in EN5 notebooks? They all look the same!

 

I do all sorts of workarounds to overcome deficiencies in all sorts of programs, Evernote 4 included. There are no workarounds though that fix what En5 broke. If there were, I'd use them. I don't think apologetics will help here. What we need is a real discussion with PMs or developers to fix the issues. I'm not telling anyone how to fix them, though it is easy to say "make it like EN4 was." I am open to new ideas. But I'd appreciate it if those ideas came from someone that has experience on what does and doesn't work. I took Jeff's initial post a few days ago as just that. After that though, once he started arguing on what does and doesn't work, having not actually used it, it really ceased to move the conversation forward.

 

If these issues don't affect you, great! Stop apologizing and offering workarounds that don't offer a solution though. I and other EnB users don't want Evernote the company to think thinks are ok. They are NOT.

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Wow, this conversation has degenerated.  Let's keep focused on communicating our use cases, not debating which use case is better.  I know for myself, I am comfortable with the EN4 interface, in fact, the web interface still groups notebooks like EN4.  I have not checked the tag operation.

 

My suggestion is this.  By default, leave the notebooks mixed up, however add the icon next to the notebook to show what type it is.  The "Jump to notebook" does this so it already represents a solution for the problem seen by a developer at some point.  Bravo!  Then, allow me to set a parameter to revert to grouping notebooks by type.  ie. Personal, Business, Shared, etc.  As for the tags...  Just go back to the way it was.  What ever notebook is active, those are the tags that are displayed and have the total number of notes.  If Evernote people really want mixed tags, then at the very least, when I uncheck "Show Unassigned Tags", don't display the tag if it is not used in the current notebook.  That would give users options.

 

Heather, thank you for the link to that post.  That does seem to at least mitigate some of the notebook issues.  Now onto the tags!

 

Cheers!

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Wow, this conversation has degenerated.  Let's keep focused on communicating our use cases, not debating which use case is better.  I know for myself, I am comfortable with the EN4 interface, in fact, the web interface still groups notebooks like EN4.  I have not checked the tag operation.

Yeah, the difference between the various clients aren't helping matters any.

 

My suggestion is this.  By default, leave the notebooks mixed up, however add the icon next to the notebook to show what type it is.  The "Jump to notebook" does this so it already represents a solution for the problem seen by a developer at some point.  Bravo!  Then, allow me to set a parameter to revert to grouping notebooks by type.  ie. Personal, Business, Shared, etc.

Definitely something I'm in favor of, and similar to what I'e proposed (I suggested using stacks as the organizational unit). That would be a pretty good step.

As for the tags...  Just go back to the way it was.  What ever notebook is active, those are the tags that are displayed and have the total number of notes.  If Evernote people really want mixed tags, then at the very least, when I uncheck "Show Unassigned Tags", don't display the tag if it is not used in the current notebook.  That would give users options.

Show Unassigned Tags isn't working in the current version of V5. It's in the menus, so I can only guess that it's an oversight. At least that's what I hope. We have mixed tags right now, but I'm not super keen on the way that they're displayed. Hence the suggestion to have a view where the top-level branches are the sources of the tags, whether personal, joined or business. Just one more facility to help users reduce clutter in the tag tree.
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Anyways, I encourage EB users to upgrade at their own pace. We'll be fielding feedback from other EB folks as well

Unfortunately, your business support team is encouraging business users to upgrade to EN5 as a possible fix to issues, just like Microsoft tells you to reboot. That would GREATLY exacerbate the issue here (upgrading, not rebooting  ;) )

 

Support ticket 167118 has nothing to do with versions. It has to do with some other corruption. "Delete your database, upgrade to 5, redownload" won't help. We'll lose over 1GB of data that hasn't been sync'd.

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