Evernote has re-launched Evernote Business and expanded international markets for it. The business versions lets users share access to company notebooks and data and allows administrators to control that access.

Dino Londis, Contributor

February 6, 2013

3 Min Read

Evernote — the cloud based platform to "remember everything" — re-introduced Evernote Business to coincide with the international expansion of the service. Evernote Business has been available in the United States since December 2012, when it was introduced on stage at Le Web in Paris.

Evernote Business adds a business notebook to employees' existing Evernote accounts. Employees' personal and professional notebooks are kept divided with a soft wall mainly for organizational purposes. Data can still copied and pasted in either direction.

Though Evernote Business provides all the features as an Evernote Premium account for individuals, it is different in that it elevates the business above the user. Employees come and go, but the business remains. Evernote business is built on that premise.

Another difference between Evernote Premium and Evernote Business is that the when an employee leaves, they lose access to the company data, even if they are the original person who established the account. No matter who comes or goes the institutional knowledge stays with the company. In premium accounts the notebook owner has master control of the data.

With a click employees can add notebooks to "business libraries," making them sharable across the network.

When an employee leaves the company they keep access to their personal Evernote data, and lose access to the premium features unless of course they've upgraded to premium on their own.

Every Evernote Business user account is automatically upgraded to Evernote Business Premium, which provides access to all the features like advertisement-free service, offline data access on tablets, search access to PDFs in the notebooks, greater upload capacity and versioning, in which Evernote tracks changes to documents in the notebooks.

For individual users, versioning means that they can recover the data lost to changes made. For businesses, versioning is critical because if many people may have access to a spreadsheet it's essential to keep a record of what was changed and by whom.

Another feature the company stresses is search. Trying to search an institution for its collective knowledge is difficult when data is stored in many separate silos, like email, document management, an intranet, etc. Because Evernote Business is essentially a single silo, searching across the enterprise is easier. Even during note-taking Evernote delivers results that relate to the notes you're taking in real time.

This is similar to linking Evernote to your Google search so when you're searching Google, Evernote may deliver related items that you've previously saved.

Evernote Business is crowd-sourced. According to CEO Phil Libin, 2/3 of Evernote users log in at work and many use it for work. Libin says it's been collecting ideas from those users on how it can be best employed in the Enterprise and they've been using it to grow their own business.

Premium accounts are $5 a month and Evernote Business is $10 a month. So why upgrade?

Evernote Business centralizes billing. Accounts are added and removed as the business expands and contracts. An administrator maintains payment on all the accounts.

It also centralizes administration and can globally add or remove access to company data.

Because it's cloud based, Evernote Business lends itself to adoption by companies that are not in a building or a campus, but spread across the globe.

Evernote Business is currently available in the United States, Canada, France, Germany, Switzerland, Japan, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand.

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