Use of Evernote as document management in small business

[Yosh01 0]

How practical is it for a small business to use Evernote as a document sharing platform? We're using dropbox now for much of this, but I can see many advantages of using the front end features of the Mac client of Evernote to create documents. What concerns me is what I think is Evernote's limited ability to manage sharing for many notebooks and multiple users.

I'd like to organize notebooks into stacks and share these notebooks with a small group of 4-5 people. From another post I learned that I cannot share the whole stack, but need to share each notebook separately and enter the email address for each person. With a few hundred notebooks in 3-4 stacks, this verges on unmanageable. If we add another person do I have to then re-share all 300 notebooks? One suggested workaround is to abandon the stack level of organization, have very few notebooks, and use tags to organize the notes. This does not seem workable to me.

Ideally, I'd like to be able to create a group and share access at the stack level.

What are other organizations doing? Is Evernote used for more than casual or simple notebook sharing applications?

Thanks,

Tom

[GrumpyMonkey 4,314]

Hi Tom. Welcome to the forums!

One of the benefits of sharing via Evernote is what you get with the application: easily edited, easily browsed, and ubiquitous access to content. In general, I think the system works best with completed materials (a PDF explaining best practices to new-hires, for example) or notes/materials that the notebook owner is changing and editing. The more cooks in the kitchen, the more messy things get, especially because Evernote syncs at intervals. If you want simultaneous collaboration by dozens or hundreds of people, specialized software might be the best option. I have a list of shared notebooks here that will give you some idea of how people are using them. See, in particular, the small business ambassador Lindsey's work. You should also feel free to contact her for advice. http://www.princeton.edu/~cmayo/sharednotebooks.html

More specifically, Evernote only allows 250 notebooks. It would not even be possible for you to create 300 of them. I strongly recommend looking into tags as your organizing tool, but since tags cannot be shared like notebooks, there is a limit to the number of different groups you can share with using one account. If you could tell us what does not seem workable to me (many of us get along just fine with the tags), then we could offer advice, or clarify for the developers use-cases that do not work under the current system.

[JMichaelTX 4,105]

How practical is it for a small business to use Evernote as a document sharing platform? We're using dropbox now for much of this, but I can see many advantages of using the front end features of the Mac client of Evernote to create documents. What concerns me is what I think is Evernote's limited ability to manage sharing for many notebooks and multiple users.

If your primary purpose is document/file management, then DropBox may be the best solution for you.

See Evernote vs DropBox.

[GrumpyMonkey 4,314]

How practical is it for a small business to use Evernote as a document sharing platform? We're using dropbox now for much of this, but I can see many advantages of using the front end features of the Mac client of Evernote to create documents. What concerns me is what I think is Evernote's limited ability to manage sharing for many notebooks and multiple users.

If your primary purpose is document/file management, then DropBox may be the best solution for you.

See Evernote vs DropBox.

While I think of Evernote as something more than a note-taking system (see JM's link for his view on the two), I agree that there is definitely a place for Dropbox in my workflow, and you might find a combination of the two to work best.

What about Google Drive? I am probably going to take a break from GDrive for a while (wouldn't you know it -- I got charged for the month yesterday), because it is causing me all sorts of headaches ().

Whatever you decide (Evernote, Evernote + Dropbox, Evernote + GDrive), one thing you'll want to do ahead of time is test, test, test. Even after long use, I had no idea until today that GDrive didn't really even have the files it said were in my account. Thank goodness I discovered this now, when I can do something about it.