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Sharing notebooks


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Coming from a windows networking world, I thought that in Evernote, I'd simply be able to create a notebook\sub-notebook structure, give people permissions and this would replicate to the others users on our team. Not the case.....It appears that once you create a notebook, you have to go through several steps in order for the other users to be able to see the notebook in there tree. I've used Evernote personally and have loved it, but the option for sharing information isn't very user friendly. Am I missing something? In our case, each of the team (there's 6 of us) has a product(s) that we're the lead on, so we'll have a variety of information like tech notes or procedures that we'd like to be able to share with the rest of the folks. Is there a recommended or better way to share this data?

 

Thanks,

Chris

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Hi.  It's a little overkill for a team of 6,  but have you looked at Evernote Business?  You also might want to investigate public shares or simply sending notes by email.  Evernote wasn't designed specifically for the use case you're applying,  so naturally there are some pinch points.  If one person operated a hub and spoke share system,  it would be relatively easy to manage.  Since the six of you need to be in control of one aspect and need to share with all the others,  it's rather more involved...

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...And you have posted in the Business forum which should have given me a clue - sorry to jump to conclusions,  but the fact you were sharing notebooks rather than using a shared library of notebooks pointed me towards the standard premium account.  Just to complicate matters,  if you have a business account,  there's a central shared suite of business notebooks,  plus - for each employee / member of the group - there's a linked personal premium account.  Plus - if any of you had individual Evernote accounts - they're not automatically linked to the business setup.  You'll need to look for business notebooks in the account you're using,  and one or more people will need to be Admins.

If you walk back on the link in my previous post there are dozens of pages on the Business app,  and how to get started with it,  including the Admin setup.  At its most simplistic it should allow you to create some 'Libraries' (notebooks) for "Jim's Project",  "Fred's Project" etc to which everyone can have access,  but where only Jim can add to his library,  and only Fred can add to his.

If you need more direct support,  Business users (and Premium ones) get support via both email and chat - log in here for that... 

 

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Chris,

It sounds like you're on the right track.  As Gaz pointed out, it is possible to share notebooks without using Evernote Business (EB), and things work a bit differently with and without EB, so for starters let's confirm a few things:

Are you using the Windows or Mac Evernote application (I'm presuming here that you're not 100% mobile)?

Is your team using Evernote Business?  There are paid non-business plans so that fact that you're paying doesn't necessarily mean you're on EB.  You'll know you're on EB if in the Windows client you see Personal and Business tabs at the top of your left-hand panel; and on Mac, in the left-hand panel, if you see Business Notes and Personal Notes listed underneath the Notes section.

Also, one thing to point out that, from what you've written, may be throwing you off: if you create a sub-notebook using the Stacks feature, and you share the parent and sub-notebook with another user (and they accept your sharing request), they will not get the parent-child hierarchy that you set up for yourself.  This is by design - Stacks (i.e. notebook hierarchy) apply only to your own Evernote client application and are not shared (although many people have requested that they be shared).

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Thanks Gaz and Phils. As it turns out, we do have (and our team is using) a business account. Also, we're using Windows and no, we're not 100% mobile. I'm going to review the links that Gaz has shared and do some more research. I think we jumped in before we really had a clue about the differences between Business and Personal.

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Sounds good.  I would also go through the Evernote Business Deployment Guide, especially the part about Sharing.

I'll also give you my own basic explanation of Evernote Business sharing:

  • When a user wants to share a notebook with coworkers, there are two basic choices: Publish it to the Business, or share it with specific individual people. 
    • When you Publish a notebook, it shows up in the "Business Home" which is the screen you get when you click your company's name in the left-hand pane.  (This used to be called the Business Library.)  The notebook and its note contents don't appear in other users' notebook lists in their Evernote accounts.
    • If a user wants to add a published notebook to their own account, they can Join it from the Business Home.  Then it and its note contents do appear in the user's account.  At that point, it acts pretty much like any notebook in the account - it can be fully searched, available offline, etc.
    • While notebooks that are published-but-not-joined aren't fully searchable, they do get checked when you do a search, and if they contain matches to the search, a banner will appear at the bottom of the notes list saying something like "Your company has 46 notes related to [search string], and Susan Smith may know more".
  • Alternatively, a user can share a notebook with one or more specific people.  Those people get invitations to join the notebook in their Work Chat.  If a user accepts the invitation, then that person is joined to that notebook.  Just like with joining a Published notebook, once you join an individually shared notebook it then appears in your account's notebooks list.
  • Note that you can do both of the above - that is, you can publish a notebook so its accessible to everyone, and can also invite specific users to share it if you know the notebook will be especially important to them.
  • You can also share individual notes - these are also shared via Work Chat invitations.  In my experience this is a lot less common than sharing a notebook.

So summarizing the above:

  • If you create a notebook and you know it's important for specific coworkers to pay attention to that notebook, it's best to share it with them specifically, so that it lives in their accounts/notebooks lists, too.  A good example is a notebook for a particular project that you're working on with a team of people.
  • If you create a notebook that's more general - say HR Policies or Company Approval Forms - it's best to publish it to the business.  People can then access it from the Business Home, and if a person really wants it in their account, they can join it from Business Home.

Let me know if any of the above is unclear or if you have any follow-up questions!

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