(Archived) REQUEST: Feature parity for users (non-owners) of shared notebooks

[joeymum 0]

I have recently opened a group sponsored account and have everything related to my company moved to this account and then shared the notebooks to colleagues.

Then, we found out the tag function is not working. The list of tags are totally segregated between individual shared notebooks which means if you click in the tag, only those notes with the same tag in the same notebooks are shown. THERE IS NO WHERE TO SEE ALL TAGS AND NO WAY TO BRING ALL NOTES WITH THE SAME TAG TOGETHER IF THEY ARE IN DIFFERENT SHARED NOTEBOOKS. What's the point of tagging? We cannot believe Evernote have not thought about this when rolling out the coporate account idea!!

Moreover, some basic functions available at Evernote Web are not applicable to the desktop app. So basic that I'm just talking about deleting a note or moving it to another notebook! This is causing so much more work to the admin staff of the company!

These flaws must be fixed NOW!!!!

[jbenson2 2,147]

I have recently opened a group sponsored account and have everything related to my company moved to this account and then shared the notebooks to colleagues.

This is a good example of why corporate users should thoroughly test the software before rolling it out to their employees.

[peterfmartin 221]

Sorry, this is working, and it isn't flaw by the current design. The idea is that users can't populate other users' accounts with tags. This might change in the future. I'm sure the company will note your demand as a feature request.

Also, deleting notes and moving them to other notebooks are quite easy in the Mac client:

• Delete: There's a delete button with a trash icon. If you don't see it, go to Preferences and customize your dashboard so you see it.
  
• Move: Right click the note, click "Move to Notebook," and select the target notebook you desire.
  

How long did you look for these features before determining they don't exist on the desktop client?

[joeymum 0]

For Group Sponsored Account, only the owner of the account can create tags so in some way it has prevented the issue of populating others' account. On a separate note, the whole purpose of tagging is for users to see notes with similar elements, right?

I have spent hours chatting with the CS staff before posting here. The functions you mentioned for Delete and Move are prohibited for Desktop App users when they access the shared notebooks of sponsored group account.

I wish I can find simple solution to this.

[peterfmartin 221]

For Group Sponsored Account, only the owner of the account can create tags so in some way it has prevented the issue of populating others' account. On a separate note, the whole purpose of tagging is for users to see notes with similar elements, right?

I have spent hours chatting with the CS staff before posting here. The functions you mentioned for Delete and Move are prohibited for Desktop App users when they access the shared notebooks of sponsored group account.

Sorry to hear that. Since I don't have a sponsored account, and since they're still fairly new, I hadn't experienced or heard anything about those restrictions. If they're true (and, though I have no reason to doubt your word, I have a hard time believing they are, since they're so different from what I know about Evernote), they're quite surprising to me, since I can see how they hobble the program a lot. And if they're true, it sounds like sponsored accounts are a pretty bad deal.

Then again, I don't know what to think about them, since what you're describing about the respective capabilities of the sponsor and the individual users is very different from what Evernote employees have explained on the forums, such as CEO Phil Libin here (emphasis mine):

If anything, sponsored accounts are our rejection of the typical enterprise software market. Instead of making any changes to the core service (and, believe me, we get a ton of requests) all we did is make it easy for people to buy accounts for more than one person at a time and (next step) to use that as a shortcut for specifying who they want to share with. This is functionality that's probably better suited to a 4 person family, a 10 person startup or a 40 person classroom than a 20,000 employee corporation.

On the other hand, if some Fortune 500 company wants to give Evernote Premium accounts to all its people and is fine with having no additional control over ownership, versions or content than they already do when their folks use Evernote unofficially today... well, that's an enlightened company that we're happy to work with. We don't expect to see much of that right away, but we think eventually more and more corporate folk will realize that their normal enterprise software is crappy and unappealing and, as these people get into senior management positions, things like Evernote will gain some official traction. We're not going to make an "enterprise" version of Evernote. We're going to wait until enterprises are ready for the "human" version. About 80% of Evernote users says they use Evernote at work and at home, so the lines are blurring already.

Our goal is to be the permanent, trusted and ubiquitous place for all your lifetime memories. We're committed to making Evernote fit into every part of that life - school, work, family, hobbies, etc. The focus will always be on you, the person experiencing that life, not on your friends, or your teachers, or your boss. There's already enough stuff that focuses on those.

---

Phil Libin

CEO, Evernote

I wish I can find simple solution to this.

What did support tell you? That there's simply no way for users to delete notes on their desktop apps and that's just the way it is?

[EdH 1,670]

here is what i have discovered with sharing notebooks:

1. You cannot create tags in other users accounts
   
2. You cannot assign existing tags from a user in a folder unless that tag has already been used in that folder by the user. The workaround is to create one note with every tag selected and put it in that folder.
   
3. you cannot move notes between shared folders
   
4. you cannot see the tag list because right-clicking on a note is missing the "Assign tags" menu item is missing on the menu.
   

There may be more, but you have to understand, EN in a shared environment definitely works differently than it does on your own desktop.

[heather 604]

We're actually going to have some changes to sharing coming in the future (sooner than later), but Group accounts are not functionally different than any other account.

If in the OP's setup, only the Group Account owner is sharing notebooks, then yes, only the Group Account owner's tags can be used.

Otherwise, any member of the group, when sharing their notebook to anyone else in the group with Modify access, will be allowing the tags for that notebook to be shared.

[EdH 1,670]

Thanks Heather. Can you be more specific about what is coming, or it is top secret?

[JMichaelTX 4,117]

Thanks Heather. Can you be more specific about what is coming, or it is top secret?

Not "Top Secret". Above that: "Need to Know"

Sorry. Couldn't resist that. Been watching too many spy movies lately. Carry on.

[Truffles 0]

I too find this restriction surprising, unintuitive, and counter to the emerging paradigm of tag based filing. I have a research group, and have just bought premium membership for our members, so that we can collectively gather, analyse and tag literature and other artefacts relating to the research project. Having setup and shared a notebook with the team, I discover that other team members cannot create their own tags. It's certainly not what I expected, and will probably result in us abandoning Evernote.

I guess the workarounds are either

(1) Each team member has a personal folder which they share with every other member, and must restrict themselves to that user's tags when annotating documents.

(2) Team members email me with tags they would like to use, and I add them.

Frankly that seems like a pain to me, I think we may be better off with annotated pdf's in Dropbox, or shared libraries in Sente or Zotero. To claim that it "isn't flaw by the current design" is, I think, to misunderstand the nature of a flaw. Designs can be flawed, and in this case I think that not only is the design itself flawed, but also the implementation does not live up to the design philosophy espoused by Phillip. Where Phillip champions an egalitarian approach to data management, rather than the standard corporate philosophy of locking everything down, Evernote is in fact promulgating hierarchical power-centric data "sharing".

I understand the need for careful tag management, indeed the value of the whole system seems to rely on it, particularly given that stacks cannot be nested. However, I would suggest that this calls for a vastly improved tagging-architecture. For a start some sort of similarity measure to conflate semantically equivalent but orthographically different tags (such as capitalisation, underscore instead of space, Mr. vs Mister). Also the ability to see who did the tagging would not only circumvent the issue (of spamming other's tag list with your own), it would be a useful feature in it's own right.