Evernote Business: a great tool for preserving institutional knowledge

Credit: IDG News Service Tokyo

A number of consumer-oriented services out there deliver real business functionality and value.  Google Docs/Drive, Dropbox, and Skype are three excellent examples. Evernote, however, is arguably the personal service with the most business and productivity potential thanks to its incredible flexibility.

Evernote gives users a way to collect and archive almost anything imaginable. Personal notes, research and reference materials, literary passages, photos and diagrams, multimedia recordings, web links, to-do list items, shipping lists, and pretty much any other digital object can easily be captured, tagged, and archived. That range of features and versatility combined with ubiquitous access to your information on a desktop computer, mobile device, and through a website makes Evernote an ideal business solution that transcends industries and jobs roles.

While Evernote is an incredible business and productivity tool, it doesn't scale well from a personal solution to a corporate or enterprise one. Its sharing capabilities are still focused on small groups like family members or a small business at best. Many companies have been asking for something better for years and Evernote finally seems to have taken those pleas seriously and is preparing to launch a business edition of its service.

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The new service, Evernote Business, was announced at the company's Trunk Conference in San Francisco. It will launch sometime in December -- an exact date wasn't mentioned -- and it will cost companies $10 per user each month.

What does that price buy you that the free or premium version of Evernote don't? A range of key enterprise features.

• A streamlined setup and on-boarding process to get everyone in a company or workgroup up and running quickly and easily
• User account management that includes the ability to set access and privacy restrictions on business information
• A company-wide directory that can be used to publish content for the entire organization
• Dedicated customer success managers to provide support and suggestions about how to best use Evernote Business
• A focus on business continuity that ensures that when users leave the company access to their notebooks and collected data doesn't leave with them

While data sharing is the obvious value of the individual free and premium Evernote subscriptions, the focus on business continuity shows how Evernote Business will really shine.

Evernote can archive virtually any data or content used by a company or department - contacts, messages, documents, meeting minutes, organization charts and engineering diagrams, photos from company events, PowerPoint Presentations, videos, financial data, brainstorming and mind mapping sessions, project outlines and progress notes, HR data, strategic plans, company policies, and virtually anything else.

That's an amazingly broad range of information and institutional knowledge. In fact, the simplicity of using Evernote to archive that range of information makes it a perfect tool for preserving institutional knowledge -- an important task that often gets overlooked in most organizations because it's time consuming to pull the tips, tricks, and other tidbits that are often passed on person-to-person into a single document or guide. Evernote changes that by making the recording of such details simple and effortless. If a senior accountant gives a new assistant information about why certain transactions are recorded the way they are -- either of them can quickly jot down that information, tag it and store it in Evernote. When that accountant retires, that information will still be there for new employees to find a year or five years later.