Evernote Business allows users to create and have access to business notebooks, which have extra sharing options specifically for the organization. Many Evernote Business users have preexisting personal Evernote accounts with private content. An Administrator (“Admin”) of an Evernote Business account has access to all Notes you create in any Notebook associated with that Evernote Business account. The Admin also can see the Evernote Business Notes or Notebooks you’ve shared and with whom you have shared this Content. (The Admin will see the profile name for other members of. Forward it to your Evernote email address (you’ll find it in your account settings) with a couple of comments. You can even send Evernote a Tweet or a text message (SMS) to create a brief note.
One of the questions I am asked most often by teachers when they start using Evernote is what type of account they need to use the application most efficiently. The choice ends up mainly depending on how much you will use the program and whether you will exhaust the monthly storage capacity that is included in the free Evenote account. I will explain the details of the three types of accounts on offer (Free, Premium and Business for Schools) so that you can evaluate the specific functionality of each one and what they will cost annually.
Evernote Business for Schools
75% of Evernote users use the tool for both personal and professional purposes. With that in mind, Evernote designed Evernote Business, which allows a school to offer its teachers (or students) a group Evernote account, which allows them to work more productively and collaboratively.
The school is the owner of the Evernote Business account and assigns one or more people to be administrators of the account. The school pays for this license, so that each teacher and student that uses the account does not have to pay individually for their own Premium account.
Teachers and students that already have their own personal Evenote account can upgrade to Evernote Business without needing to create a new account, and without infringing upon the privacy of their pesonal data that they already have stored in their existing account.
The account administrator is the only one who has permissions to add or eliminate users from the Evernote Business account, although they can extend automatic pre-authorization to the account for any teacher or student with an email address from a specific domain (for example, @harvard.edu).
Evernote Business is aimed especially for working in teams, and offers a range of specific advantates over Premium or free acocunts:
Business Notebooks
When you open or join an Evernote Business account, the Business notebooks appear in your personal Evernote account.
The Business notebooks and the personal notebooks appear separated into two different sections, which are both visible on the same page. The notebooks are organized by 2 different colors, so that you can clearly see which ones pertain to work and which ones are strictly personal.
In Windows the personal notebooks are white, and the business notebooks are light blue. In Mac, the personal notebooks are brown and the business notebooks are grey. Additionally, the business notebooks are marked with an icon of a building.
1. Each teacher has the option to make any Business notebook visible to colleagues or even students, to be able to share knowledge and projects with them. However, they also can keep a Business notebook private, where no one else is allowed to access it.
However, all of the Business notebooks are always accesible and controllable by the account administrator, from the admin console. Even in the event that a teacher were to erase these notebooks, the administrator can easily restore them from the admin console and the administrator is the only person who can delete them permanently.
On the other hand, the personal notebooks continue to always be private and completely controlled only by the account user. No one else can access them unless they have been shared with that person.
2. The Business notebooks and their content are property of the school, which guarantees the continuity of work and insures that the accumulated knowledge and the educational material created are not lost when a teacher leaves the school.
In this sense, if a teacher leaves their job at a school, the account administrator will deactivate their Business notebooks from the administration console and this section will disappear from that teacher’s personal Evernote account. The other teachers in the school can continue to access these Business notebooks and the administrator can even reassign them to another teacher who replaces them in the school.
The personal notebooks and their content always remain property of the individual user of the account. When a teacher leaves a school, their personal notebooks will of course stay intact within their Evernote account, and they will be able to continue to access them for personal use.
3. A place to centralize all knowledge. Sharing notebooks and working collaboratively really is easier with Evernote Business, compared to the free or Premium versions. This is because of the incorporation of a common space accessable to all the teachers (and/or students), where each one can publish their business notebooks, making them visible to the others.
This central space allows any teacher to share their notebooks and additionally they can look at the profiles of their colleagues, including what contact they have shared and their recent activity. This way, each teacher can freely consult this collection of shared notebooks and join them in order to view their content and contribute their knowledge, without having to have been previously invited by the owner of the notebook, as would be the case in Premium accounts.
This common space serves as a collective knowledge base for the school and allows the teachers from different departments to explore the work done by others and take advantage of it.
Its intelligent search engine is also capable of showing you interesting content created by other colleagues that is directly related with the topics you have included in your notes, allowing you to discover relevant information that could be useful in that moment.
In this sense, imagine that you are preparing a lesson about climate change and that you are introducing multimedia content in a note. Evernote will automatically look in the notes related to this topic that were published by other teachers, and will show them to you for you to inspect and use if you see fit.
Differences between types of Evernote accounts
1. Maximum monthly storage space
Evernote limits you in the amount of information you can upload in a 30 day period. In this sense, Evernote Business has one additional advantage over the other accounts.
Each user has 2GB of memory each month, but Evernote adds up all the available memory amongst all the users of a Business account, and can distribute it unequally amongst the users according to their usage of Evernote. In other words, if our Evernote Business account has a group of 10 teachers then we have a total monthly storage allocatioin of 20GB (2GB x 10), but we would be allowed for one teacher to use 4 GB, and another to only use 1GB as long as the total of 20GB is not exceeded for the month.
Keep in mind that 2GB per month is a huge amount of memory, and that it would be very difficult for a typical teacher to surpass that in a month, but nonetheless Evernote also allows the purchase or up to 25GB of additional memory space for Premium and Business accounts.
2. Maximum number of notebooks and stacks
The synchroized notebooks are what are stored in the Evernote servers and can be accessed from any pc, tablet or mobile device. The local notebooks are saved only on your pc and are not sent to the Evernote servers.
3. Maximum note size
Due to this restriction on note size, you need to keep in mind that regardless of the type of account you have, you can not save files that take up more than 100MB in Evernote, for example high resolution photos or video.
4. Sharing notebooks
- Free account: With the free Evernote account you can share notebooks with other Evernote users, but you can not give them permissions to create and edit the notes. This means that while they can see the notes, they can not add their own information or comments within your notebook. You can, however, join notebooks that other Evernote users share with you. If the notebook owner has a Premium account and gives you the permissions, then you will be able to create and edit notes within this notebook.
- Premium account: With a Premium account you can share notebooks and give permissions to create and modify notes to other users if you wish to do so.
- Evernote Business: In Evernote Business you have the same possibilities to modify notes in shared notebooks but there exists a common space where notebooks are accessible to all the teachers, where each user can publish their notebooks and create a group knowledge base for the school. In this way, each teacher can freely consult this collection of notebooks and join them to view them and if appropriate to contribute their knowledge to them.
5. Two-step account authentification
Given the frequency of hackers attacking technology companies, Evernote offers two-step account authentification. Two-step authentification is used to establish the authenticity of an online identify, and can reduce the risks of a stolen password or of a “phishing” attack.
The majority of users only use one layer of security, their password, to protect their accounts. With two-step authentification, they are protected by something they know (their password) as well as by something they possess (their mobile phone).
If a hacker is able to breach the security of your account password for Evernote, they still need another step, access to the mobile phone associated with your account, to gain entry to the account. Evernote will send a numerical code to your mobile phone, which you need to introduce in order to verify that it is really you that is trying to access the account each time you connect to Evernote from a new pc or mobile device.
6. Advertising
In the free version of Evernote the advertising that you will see is exclusively for products related to the application. You will not see Google Ads, for example, and you will not see invasive banner advertising during your use. Evernote also will not sell your personal contact details to any third party.
7. Security
Evernote guarantees the privacy of the data in your personal and professional accounts, which no one can access without your previous permission. On their website you can consult their Privacy Policy in more detail and you can also learn about the Evernote’s Three Laws of Data Protection: Your Data is Yours, Your Data is Protected and Your Data is Portable.
If you are thinking about using Evernote in your school, if you have any questions or if you want to pass on your experiences with Evenote, or if you are interested in contracting my training services you can contact me at comunicacion@totemguard.com
If you still aren’t using Evernote you can register and get a free one month Premium account here, increasing your storage space to 1GB during the month.
I’ve personally used Evernote for years. It’s one of my favorite note-taking apps.
Even with the difficulties they ran into along the way, I’m still a fan.
However.
And it pains me to say this.
I cannot recommend Evernote Business under any circumstance.
The short story: Evernote Business is fine as a basic document tool. And it’ll help you manage workflows, store documents, and keep your team updated like any other basic document tool out there. But it has a fraction of the product depth at a price that’s much higher than all the other tools on the market.
Evernote Business charges way too much for far too little.
Let’s start by going through the core elements that your Evernote Business account revolves around.
Evernote Business Core Elements
Just like the version of Evernote for personal use, everything is built around Notebooks and Notes.
The notes feature lets you create a simple document that you can easily edit and fill with whatever content you want.
Notebooks organize your notes into groups.
Pretty simple.
Evernote Business also gives you access to Spaces which are the main product difference between the Business and personal Evernote plans. They have a few more UI elements that allow you to organize any notes and notebooks into a new group.
Here’s an example for hiring:
There’s a feed at the top, a place to pin critical notes, and a place to organize notes and notebooks in whatever order you want. This gives your team one place to see everything on a given topic or project.
The good news is that all of this is very easy to understand. But that’s also the bad news, it’s too simple.
Other than some basic notes and organization, there’s not a whole lot there. Evernote Business really is just the personal version of Evernote with access for multiple people for all your company notes and notebooks. That means your business will outgrow the power of Evernote Business before long.
And Evernote doesn’t offer anything that can’t be easily replaced by any other document tool out there.
Managing Workflows with Evernote Business
How well does Evernote Business help manage our workflows?
It’s fine. But it’s not great either.
Let’s take that use case of hiring. You could build a whole workflow in Evernote with different notebooks marking stages of your hiring process. Then keep a note for each candidate, moving the candidate’s note through the workbooks as they complete different stages. All of this would be easy for your team to view in an Evernote Space.
Then your team could track and manage candidates within Evernote Business.
I see two problems with this. First, it’s using documents and folders to create a basic workflow. This will work in any document tool out there. So there’s no added benefit from using Evernote.
Deleting Evernote Account
While there’s nothing inherently wrong about using Evernote Business for managing workflows with basic documents, what’s the point? Use whatever document tool that you already have. G Suite and Office 365 are the main options. And if you’re looking for something more hip and fresh, try Notion or Quip which have both pushed usability in the document space forward. If nothing else, there’s always an old-school wiki like Confluence.
Second, by the time you need a dedicated workflow for something like hiring, you should be looking at real tools for hiring like JazzHR or BambooHR. Basic notebooks aren’t going to cut it at that point.
Evernote also offers an example workflow for managing customer relationships:
That’s a CRM.
If you need a CRM, go get a CRM. Some of the largest and fastest-growing software businesses are CRMs because of how important CRM workflows are to any business. As soon as you can no longer manage your customer relationships with a basic spreadsheet, get a CRM. Most companies completely depend on their CRM for their day-to-day operations, it’s not an area to skimp on.
Trying to build a CRM workflow within Evernote Business would be a waste of your time when you could be setting up a real CRM. Even in the super early days of any business, setting up a real CRM has a lot of advantages.
Whatever workflow you’re trying to manage, you can use any document tool in the early days. Then look for a workflow-specific tool when you outgrow basic documents and folders. Either way, Evernote Business doesn’t offer a compelling solution at either stage. G Suite and Office 365 work just as well and you’re probably already paying for one of them. No reason to double up and pay for Evernote Business too.
Using Evernote as a Knowledge Base
Think of a knowledge base as your company handbook. It’s a collection of all the information that you want to share with employees and make sure they have easy access to.
My knowledge bases usually end up as an organized collection of standard operating procedures (SOPs), postmortems, and overview documents.
One other way to think of knowledge bases: they include all the finished documents that you want to organize.
Like other use cases, Evernote Business is fine as a knowledge base but doesn’t do anything that other tools can’t. I can get all the same functionality by creating a bunch of Google Docs and throwing them into a Google Drive folder. When I want to build a real knowledge base for a company, Confluence is my preferred choice.
Evernote Business runs into the same problem as the workflow management use case. I can use any document tool for the same results in the early days and there are much better options as soon as I want a dedicated tool.
Managing Projects with Evernote
What about managing a standard project?
Does Evernote Business help manage all the notes, brainstorms, drafts, deliverables, and to-dos for a standard project?
It’s the same story here too, Evernote Business does just as well as any standard document tool. And not nearly as well as the dedicated project management tools out there.
Trello, Basecamp, Jira, and Asana all run circles around Evernote Business. And Trello has an amazing free plan so budget won’t limit you here.
For those of you that want to keep the number of tools to a minimum, Notion has much better document and project management features compared to Evernote Business at about half the price.
All of these tools give you a much stronger command of projects by helping you:
- Assign tasks to people
- Keep track of all tasks across a project
- Stay on top of deadlines
- Prioritize tasks
- Communicate updates across the team
- Give everyone constant visibility
Evernote helps you with these items as much as a standard Word document would help. Yes, it’s totally possible to manage projects with a basic Word doc (or Evernote). I know world-class project managers that have managed insanely complicated projects with just sticky notes to prove a point. But why make it harder than it needs to be? I’d rather get a tool that was built specifically for project management.
Collecting Research with Evernote Business
Evernote Business Accounts
Notes and research are probably the use cases that Evernote performs best. When doing a ton of research, having a stripped-down tool to collect all your notes does make things faster.
This is the one use case that Evernote out-performs other document products since Evernote is simpler than any other tool on the market.
But it doesn’t improve the research process enough to justify paying $15/month per user. That’s higher than G Suite’s most expensive plan. I also have a hard time justifying an entire line-item in my budget just for note-taking across the team. People have such divergent preferences on note-taking anyway, it’s a fool’s errand trying to get them all using the same tool.
For me, I do all of my business related note-taking and research in Google Docs these days. They’re still streamlined enough that I never find them getting in my way. I don’t see any major cost by using another document tool for note-taking.
Evernote Sign In
Evernote Business = Too Expensive for Too Little
Ultimately, nothing in Evernote Business is bad. It’s fine. And for research and note-taking, Evernote does pretty well.
But with a price point of $15/month per user, Evernote Business doesn’t come close to other products on the market. Even G Suite’s most expensive plan is $12.50/month per user. And that includes a full product suite (Docs, Sheets, and Slides), Google Drive storage, company access to Gmail, and a full admin toolset to manage everything. Notion also has a deep product suite starting at $8/month per user. Both include much stronger products at lower prices.
And when part of your business outgrows basic documents, you’ll be better served by getting a dedicated tool for that workflow. Like a full-fledged CRM or project management tool. There’s no reason to stick with Evernote for the long-term or try to customize it too deeply.
Evernote Business simply doesn’t come close to offering the same value to businesses that other products do. Even though I personally love using Evernote for note-taking, I’d never move an entire team to it.