Evernote – an IT productivity tool
Lucidica Team
As an IT support company focusing on small businesses in London, we get asked for a lot of advice on the best tools and equipment to increase team productivity. With the increasing market share of Apple devices in the workplace – and now the rise of the Android device – a simple cross-platform application is needed. As we provide a lot of Apple Mac and iPhone support in London to businesses, this tool is very handy for those clients mangling their platforms together (for example having a Windows Phone or Android but use a Mac computer, or have an iPhone but need to work from a Windows PC). Whether you stick to one OS or mix it up a bit – a simple, well-designed cross-platform application for advanced note-taking was void that needed to be filled.
Introducing the wonderful small business productivity tool – Evernote
In 2007, the Evernote Corporation released Evernote onto Android. Flash forward to 2017 and its now available on every OS out there; Blackberry, Windows, Windows Phone Linux (Nixnote) and IOS.
For those of us who use different platforms while we work, or indeed those who stick to one (I’m looking at you, Apple addicts) – Evernote is still an immensely powerful tool.
The crux of this tool is it allows you to store notes, images, audio and video in the applications cloud, across multiple devices. For example, you could sit in a meeting and add notes in Evernote on your iPhone or Android tablet and by the time you have returned to your desk, you can pick these notes up and process them there using the applications sync functionality.
Like many things throughout technology, the power of Evernote is in its simplicity. The developers haven’t tried to make it accomplish mammoth tasks, but have stayed true to the core purpose of helping a worker with keeping their notes and tasks in one central spot. The data synchronizes across the platforms with ease, which means you can spend more time typing and less time stressing.
Although the Premium plan comes with a price tag of £44.99, its feature list has some attractive items. Below is a list of my personal favourites.
Some key features in the app’s Premium plan include:
- Ability to annotate on PDF’s
- Customer support via live chat
- 10GB storage
- Business card recognition
- Extremely fast presentation creation
- Review and revive note history
Tips on getting the most from Evernote in a small to medium sized business
If you’re in a small to medium sized business, you’ll know what I mean when I say we all have a lot of (varied) things to do, depending on our role. But one thing that remains constant across us all is we have “stuff” to do.
So, processing your notes and action items, without dropping any, is crucial – especially in a fast-growing company. Over the years there have been many different apps that organise our lives in different ways – for example, Outlook calendar for events or IOS Notes for quick accessibility. But coming a cut above the rest is (of course), is Evernote with Evernote Scannable as a sister application to mobile devices.
Scannable allows its users to generate PDF documents using images. It allows its user to identify a document using the camera, which then stabilises and processes it as an electronic file. The technology is seamless and remarkable. Both are great on mobile devices because you can integrate the PDFs into Notebooks and Notes on Evernote (bit of a tongue twister there, apologies), meaning you can keep your work speed at an optimum pace.
Evernote and Scannable are both great apps, but still come with limitations-keep in mind, if you are running a large project – like building a house or some software -you of course want specialised project planning software, like Microsoft Project to create your GANTT charts and so on.
Our own CEO, Thomas Jeffs give a piece of key information to those who are sceptical about keeping their data up in the sky.
Evernote is a peer-to-peer system. Your files and data are stored on your devices and shared across them (which is great back-up / redundancy), but you can opt to also have your data stored in ‘the Cloud’ on the Evernote servers, if you wanted some extra assurance your notes are safe.
If you want to read more about Evernote Scannable, you can do just that by clicking here.
