Stewartdesign

I'm an OG Evernote users and evangelist (I was subscriber number 800-something) so I've been using it personally daily nearly since its inception, and recommended it to dozens of clients. I've also bought a few premium accounts and implemented it as a mission-critical tool in our family business, used to gather and organize incoming orders, invoices, and all paperwork. We scan all incoming papers into it for processing; we route all incoming faxes and orders to it. We have a whole system for Accounts Payable set up around evernote. Each of our databases is in the 30-50gb range, with many thousands of notes going back to 2013. One thing that Evernote does that no other note-gathering tool can is allow us to combine multiple notes (each with a PDF attachment) into a single note with multiple attachments. In our process, we scan paperwork to PDF into a watched folder on the network*, create a note for it, and label the note by PO number with a designation for which type of paperwork it is (-I for invoice, -R for receiver, -P for purchase order, -S for statement, etc.). We then hire someone (remotely!) to match up all the matching-numbered notes and combine them into one note to prepare for review and payment. It works better than any tool we've ever had. We rely mostly on a notebook structure to track the flow of paperwork, rather than tags. We have several notebooks shared between departments. Evernote has been transformative for our document-heavy business: it allows us to instantly locate any order, any contract, any invoice within seconds. All our Customer Service people and Accounting people rely on it. It complements our accounting/inventory system (Sage 300) very well. We've eliminated an entire wall of paper-filled file cabinets. We no longer have a "file clerk"- that person has been replaced with a part-time "note combiner." I always tell vendors and suppliers about how useful Evernote is. What Evernote does really has no equivalent. Even Sage's own document management system pales by comparison and costs many thousands of dollars more. It's criminal how cheap Evernote is for the value it brings. My complaints with Evernote are mostly recent, as of this year-- lots of sync/server issues, recent unstable releases on Windows (seem to be mostly fixed now, but really killed our productivity when it was down), and a support department that is essentially worthless and never resolves my problem, even if they do respond. I want NOTHING MORE than to see Evernote fix its funding/management/direction problems and keep on going. Selfishly, I'd be happy to see them eliminate the free version altogether, focus exclusively on enterprise, and charge us whatever it takes to keep them afloat and able to provide a stable and supported product. I've investigated dozens of other notetaking apps but nothing has the same utility of Evernote for our specific needs. We use Onenote heavily, and I've been moving files up to SharePoint (better than Onedrive), but there is no tool organized quite like Evernote that works as easily as evernote for document organization and retrieval. I'm toying with this tool combo as a Plan B: Joplin (https://joplin.cozic.net/ - opensource evernote clone) - installed on each user's machine. Able to sync with network drives and various cloud services. (I did a test export of some notes, and they came in, attachments and all.) Egnyte (https://www.egnyte.com/ ) - enterprise level file sharing tool which we currently use (very stable, we like it) that is going to have inbuilt OCR capabilities soon (https://www.egnyte.com/blog/2018/03/streamline-your-workflow-and-increase-productivity-with-document-creation/ ) The plan: scan in PDFS, place in network drive, let Joplin watch the network folder. Somehow use Egnyte's OCR tool (no idea how it will be implemented) to try to replicate the OCR capabilities of Evernote so we can locate text within scanned documents. No idea exactly how that will work and what processes we may need to change to make this new system work for us. ------------------------------------ Evernote tips I've discovered along the way: * tip #1: watched network folders: As you may know, evernote doesn't do watched folders on a network drive. So create a local symbolic link to the watched network folder, then ANOTHER symbolic link to the first symbolic link, and then, tell Evernote to watch that *second* symbolic link. Voila: any documents that get dropped in the network folder will now be imported automatically into Evernote! ** tip #2: we use inQloud (inqloud.com) to route gmail, using mail rules, to specific notebooks in Evernote. Works great.