Sharing Notes Within Your Organization with Evernote

At Mark & Phil, we’re taking notes all the time. Some are about new marketing or fundraising ideas we have, some are from meetings with clients, some are personal lists for grocery or shopping, some are pictures of architecture and design elements that inspire us, and some are audio notes where we can do a mind dump of whats on our brains (thats how we came up with Instant Oil Spill. In the past we’ve tried using spreadsheets and word docs, we’ve tried using plain text files and mailing them to each other, we’ve even tried using wikis, but none have worked as well into our daily process than the cloud note taking service Evernote. The free service is amazing by itself but we opted to upgrade to the premium service almost immediately when it came out because it gives you some pretty awesome bonus features.

Here are some of the key things we love about Evernote Premium and whats made it so successful for our own use:

• Its available for multiple platforms:
  • Desktop versions for Windows and Mac.
  • Mobile versions for iPhone / iPod Touch, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Palm Pre / Palm Pixi, and Windows Mobile
  • Web version accessible by any browser on any platform.
• All of your notes are private by default. Meaning they are protected behind a username and password.
• Note sharing allows you to share notes with only the folks you want to and not necessarily your whole organization. This truly provides the opportunity for note taking collaboration within your organization. We love using the shared feature for our ideas, it really gives each person the ability to add to the pool while also being able to see what others think.
• Capture everything that you want to. You can snap a photo with your phone and upload it to Evernote to reference later. You could record audio of yourself or even of a meeting you are in. You could clip a webpage for viewing later and even add notes to remind you what you wanted to read more about. Really, the capabilities are pretty fantastic.
• Upload files too! Evernote accepts these file types: JPG, PNG, PDF, DOC, XLS, PPT, Videos, and more.
• Its cheap, Premium accounts are only $5/month or $45/year per account. We’re also thrilled to hear that Evernote is now offering a discount for multiple accounts under one organization with a new service called Sponsored Accounts.

I now realize this sounds like a sales pitch but honestly, we get nothing if you decide to sign-up for Evernote, we just really love their service and wanted to share with all of you in case you’ve been having the same trouble trying to figure out how to share notes internally for your organization.