Sharing and Collaboration with Evernote

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One of my long time favorite services—Evernote—has just implemented the first phase of its collaboration strategy. Until the last week of June, Evernote was solely a personal information management service, offering both a rich client for full online-offline access on various operating systems and devices, as well as a Web-accessible service. Even before the release of the new collaboration capabilities, Evernote was pretty fantastic:

the ability to have multiple synchronized notebooks
note items that could be tagged, for search and find
various smartphone clients, enabling auto-geotagging of photos and text comments…along with geographic-based searches of notes that were generated in proximity to a certain location.
text recognition in photos and pictures, so that you can search for a name or number in text and photos. Full-text search meet full-text-in-image search.

Phase 1: Shared Notebooks in Evernote Web

The June 25th update of Evernote added notebook sharing through the Web client. If you are paying customer (and therefore have a premium account) you can enable others to view and edit items in your notebooks; if you are not a paying customer, you can allow others to view but not modify your notes. In this first phase, all sharing is initiated and enacted within Evernote Web, not from any of the rich clients.

Here’s the Evernote video about the new sharing capabilities:

There are three ways that an Evernote notebook can be shared. It can be published to the world, and therefore accessible via a public URL that the user can define. It can be shared with a group of individuals, where each is required to log into their Evernote account. Or it can be shared with individuals, with no log in required. In this latter case, the notebook could be accessed by anyone knowing the address, but its security by obscurity. If you can find it, you can get in.

In phase 1 of shared Evernote notebooks, you can only initiate sharing and access a shared notebook through Evernote Web. Sharing cannot be started from one of the Evernote desktop or mobile clients, and after someone else has shared one of their notebooks with you, it the shared notebook will not synchronize into your desktop or mobile client.

Phase 2:

Although specific details, features and timings have not been released by Evernote, it appears likely that sharing will be baked into the desktop and mobile clients in phase 2. This would mean that a user will be able to designate a notebook for sharing from one of the Evernote rich clients, and also that any shared notebooks will be synchronized into their Evernote clients.

Analysis

Why am I writing about Evernote? Aren’t they merely a niche player in a crowded market? Here’s my reasoning, about why I find them interesting.

First, Evernote have played the “software plus services” strategy very well. The service is seamless—it works on the Web, it works on my Mac, it works on my PC, it works on my iPhone, it works on my HP iPAQ, and it can work on a BlackBerry. Regardless of what device you have at a particular moment, you can access all of your information from anywhere, and create new information that’s captured into your Evernote notebooks. The Evernote team have done an exemplary job.

Second, the introduction of sharing and collaboration is a natural extension for Evernote. What works so well on or at a personal level—the metaphor around notebooks and pages essentially—should extend up to a shared notebook and shared pages.

Third, while the extension into sharing and collaboration is natural, it is also fraught with some major challenges that Evernote will have to deal with. For example, you can currently only share a entire notebook, not a subset of the items therein. Will Evernote take the 37signals Backpack approach and enable sharing on a note-by-note basis? Equally, the power of Evernote as a personal information management tool is in its ability to segregate items into notebooks, but to permit a second approach to the re-aggregation of them based on metadata tags. Thus at a personal level, Evernote enables you to put the information into a note in a particular notebook, but then assign meaning to that note based on tags, which can then be linked in with items in other notebooks. The sharing and collaboration challenge is whether Evernote will permit the sharing of a tag, not a notebook. If a tag was shared, then an assemblage of items from multiple notebooks would be shared, not a notebook as such.

Fourth, and finally for this blog post, will Evernote embrace real-time joint editing and review of Evernote items? Today I can make changes in a note that are then synchronized to you. Will Evernote extend their offering so that you and I can share a notebook (or tag), and then work together on a note—simultaneously editing the same item, and seeing each other’s changes in real-time?

In conclusion, Evernote is already a must-have application in my tool kit. This first step of sharing has made it even more attractive, and future steps will only increase its attractiveness.

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