Evernote, the digital note-taking service that keeps all the bits of your life in order – the receipts, web clippings, recipes, and the title of that book you want to read – wants to organize your work life too.
Friday at the Evernote Trunk Conference, an annual developer event, the company announced Evernote for Business. Without getting the full demo, it seems to take Evernote's paid service, called Premium, a few steps further by adding features designed specifically for business, including company-wide Evernote directories, shared notebooks, and enhanced security.
In Evernote for Business you can still keep selected notes, notebooks, and stacks private or limited to a handful of people, but now you can also share content to an Evernote directory that everyone in your company can access. Evernote for Business users can also designate an administrator to manage the entire company account. Current Evernote users will be able to get the business version as an upgrade to their personal account.
Of all the new features Evernote's engineers designed for the corporate world, security is one that they're really hammering away on. First, Evernote makes it clear that all the content you create and store in a Evernote business account belongs to your company, not Evernote. Everything created in Evernote is private by default, until you choose to share it with others. Finally, all communication between Evernote apps and the Evernote servers that store your data is protected by SSL encryption.
Evernote's move into business accounts is not surprising since Evernote's 40 million rabid users already use it to varying degrees for work. But it's a gutsy once, since with Evernote for Business the four-plus year-old company is making it clear it intends to take on cloud-based services like Google Docs and Microsoft 365. Right now it's strength is taking personal notes and syncing them across multiple computers and devices, but it wants to be the hub around which people share all kinds of document, presentations and images within a company.
Evernote for Business is in beta testing now (the official product launches in December 2012) and carries a $10 per month, per user fee. That's only $5 more per month more than Evernote Premium. Even your cheap boss can spring for that.
