< Evernote Video Training Library

Have questions about work chat? You aren't alone. Stacey Harmon and Kristi Willis help clarify Evernote's work chat features. This video walk through the functionality of work chat, show how it impacts sharing in Evernote, and illustrates use cases for collaborating with this new feature. 

Video Highlights

Original Air Date: March 2015
Platform Demos: Mac and PC screen captures

[4:02] Sharing with Evernote
[6:55] Collaborating with Work Chat
[7:54] Pro Tip: Adding your avatar to Work Chat 
[8:32] Sharing a Note with a Non-Evernote User
[10:05] Sharing Notebooks: With an Evernote User
[10:36] Pro Tip: Sharing multiple notebooks in one chat
[11:12] Sharing Notebooks: With a Non-Evernote User
[14:59] Un-sharing a Note 
[18:32] Case Study: Project Feedback with Work Chat 
[23:18] Pro Tip: Share more than just Notes and Notebooks in Work Chat
[24:51] Case Study: Remote real-time collaboration
[28:40] Case Study: Sharing with Non-Evernote Users
[28:51] Public Links
[32:01] Emailing Notes 
[37:31] Next Hangout! Going All In: Upgrading to Evernote Business. 

Transcript

[Stacey] Welcome to our Get Untethered Hangout on Air! I’m here with my co-host Kristi Willis. We are the co-authors of Untethered with Evernote: Tips and Workflows for Independent Entrepreneurs. You are watching our monthly hangout where we expand on the topics in our book as well as the ongoing evolution of Evernote! We're thrilled to have this topic today because this is a new one since we authored the book and it absolutely does evolve the workflows and presents new opportunities and as Kristi eloquently says Work Chat is kind of a “who moved my cheese” moment! We're going to address how Work Chat works and how it can be effectively deployed.

We've got some great case studies as well as some really clear communication from Kristi about how these sharing and collaboration features work. Kristi, do you want to show us your new toy back there?

[Kristi] If you've been watching our hangouts you know that I've been promising myself forever that I would get this! It’s a beautiful ScanSnap scanner. There will be a scan party at my house this weekend.

[Stacey} That is a big milestone and I'm going to have to come over and experience it for myself. Let’s get started. You can reach us on Twitter with the #GetUntethered. As we mentioned, this is our book. You can get it in two spots, lots of versions on the website, GetUntethered.com. It’s also one of three books that are available in the Evernote Market.

Kristi is going to give you the skills and clarification about how sharing works in Evernote today. Then she's going to bring back to me and I'm going to show you how I actually deploying some of these new features and skills in actual workflows to establish efficient collaboration in our day-to-day life.

[Kristi] I’m going to talk about the basics of sharing and how you approach it using different techniques, whether you're sharing a note or a notebook. For me, the big question about sharing always is “are they an Evernote user?” If they are we're going to be sharing through Work Chat, which is the new feature. It is different than the share features that we had before, but the nice thing about Work Chat is that it allows you to have a conversation around what we're sharing and to be able to put context around it and be able to collaborate. I'll show you some examples of that; that's going to let us share by view, edit, or edit AND invite, which means that the other person or sharing with can edit and invite others.

If the person that you're sharing with is not an Evernote user, then we have a couple other different ways that you can share. You could share through “view” which would mean that they can view the now even without having an Evernote account. You can email the note, share a public note link, or a public notebook link.

We'll start with sharing a note with an Evernote user, so when I’m in a note and that top right corner, I have a share button and I can click there to be able to share the note. What they used to do is give you some options about sharing the note, what it does now is take you into Work Chat, where you can enter the name of the person or their email address or enter several items there, and then at the bottom you can select how you want to share it with them: can they view it? Can they edit it? Can they edit and invite others? Then in that bottom text, you can type whatever message you want them to see and you would send it. If they are in Evernote it'll pop up in their Work Chat, if they haven't looked at in a while they will get that by email. 

As you're sharing by default it's going to give you that option to share one note, however this is a great tip, its not something I figured out to someone else told me I think somebody at Evernote shared this with us… when I have that Work Chat window up, if I have a second note I want to share, I can drag that note into the Work Chat window. You can see in this example I shared at two notes with Stacey through this Work Chat, rather than just one. When I send that Work Chat message it's going to show up that I have a Work Chat up in the top left corner of the Evernote screen and I can see who the Work Chat is from and click there and then you can see the history of our conversations. You can tell that Lillian and I have been using this quite a bit, we're actually really enjoying this as we work together since we're rarely in the same place during the week. Work Chat has replaced having a text each other or email each other all the time and allows it to be censured in Evernote. Even when I'm not on Evernote on my desktop I have it set up so that Work Chat is pinging me on my phone so when Lillian or Stacey sends me a new Work Chat, it’s showing up in my notifications on my phone and now I can go in and see that Work Chat there as well which has been really helpful being able to see those messages there.

As you're working with Work Chat, you will notices as you're going in and seeing the different Work Chat messages, sometimes it will have your picture next to it and sometimes it will just be that first letter of your name… you can actually add your picture to your Work Chat through your profile. You do that in your account settings and just set up your profile photo if you want your picture to show up rather than the letter. I have a couple clients that are like “I actually think I like the letter better!” So Work Chat is how we're going to share a note with an Evernote user, but with if the person I'm sharing with doesn't have Evernote, or I don’t know whether they have Evernote or not… well then I’m going to pick a different option and I have a couple. One is to email the note. I actually have several clients that don't use Evernote, trying not to, but I do share things with them, so instead on the Mac I right click on the note or command click on the note, choose “More Sharing” then I email the note to them. On the PC, I can click Share and copy to email. And it copies the content of the email to that person.

The other option is I could create a public link to it and by creating a public link, anybody with that link will be able to see that note. You may not do this very often I do this to my writing; I have a list of my favorite places in town, my Austin restaurant recommendations that I keep throughout the year and I put that in a public note that I can post on my blog, send out on Twitter or Facebook however I want to share that so being able to share a public note can be helpful. Just remember, anybody with that URL can get to that note so you want to be judicious with what you’re sharing that way!

Sometimes I don’t want to just share a note, I want to share the entire contents of a notebook and there are a couple of different ways that you can do that as well. Again, sharing a notebook when I'm in the notebook last, I can click that “Share” icon or the Work Chat icon and then the persons name or email address and the notebook will be listed there. I can change the right and then I can type in the message that I want. Again, you can share two notebooks at once, if you have the Work Chat window open, you can drag the second notebook into that window to share it. That's a nice easy way to be able to do that.

That message is going to show up in Work Chat, that person now has access to that notebook. Again, a little different, but Work Chat allows you to give context and have that continuing conversation around that notebook. What if the person I'm sharing with is not an Evernote user? Then, you can still do that. You can publish the notebook and again this basically creates you a public URL for that notebook and anybody with that URL can see it. There is a limitation; you can only publish a personal notebook. So if you are an Evernote Business user, and we're going to talk a lot about Evernote Business next month, you cannot publish an Evernote Business notebook, you can only publish a personal notebook. You won’t even see that option on the menu for folks with Evernote Business. Once you choose publish, you’ll see this permissions screen pop up and you'll be able to select publish there, and then it will give you link that you can use.

You can copy and paste that out to anybody that you want. So you can change the link if you don't like the way the link looks, you can edit it there with the pencil. This is how you can share a notebook with a non-Evernote user. Lilly asked a great question about notebooks, “If you’re sharing a notebook with Evernote users through Work Chat, that notification is going to pop up in their Work Chat window and they’ll also an e-mail message. They will get an option in their email to see that that's been shared. 

So we do have a couple of other questions. The first is “Is there a way to share without Work Chat? If you want them to be able to do edits and be able to edit fully, you will be doing through Work Chat. That is the new share; Work Chat is the new share. If you're sharing something with non-Evernote users then you can email, share public links to both notes and notebooks and that type of thing. Just remember, Work Chat is the new share. I know it's different but it does give us that ability to be able to have that collaborative conversation around the things that we're sharing. 

The other question that we got out was from Kendall Young, and she asked if you can unshared a note. You can. It is not obvious how you do that. You don't unshared through Work Chat. The way that you unshared is either you could do through the Share menu, on the note or if you are going to the shortcut menu on the note by using your alternate mouse button or the command click on the Mac, then you can choose permissions. So if you shared something previously, this permissions item will show up, if you’re on the PC instead of permissions it says modify sharing, and when you choose that you get to see a list of who you have shared that note with, and what rights they have. From here I can change those rights, or I could delete that user. If I didn't want to share this white paper with Natania anymore, I could click the X there to delete her from those permissions. If you want to change the rights or you want to unshare something, you want to go into the permissions or the settings for that note. Again, you can use the share pop-up menu to modify the sharing or the command click on the Mac and change the permissions for that note. So, a little different view for the PC and Mac.

[Stacey] Some of the questions that I just want to explicitly address are “Can we turn Work Chat off?" 

[Kristi] No we can’t.

[Stacey] It is reall just how Evernote is facilitating more efficient communication. I like to think of it as an enhancement to my dashboard. Evernote is my dashboard for my collaboration and such, so Work Chat is just the way it goes. If I need to share with someone outside the organization. I just have to be aware how I can do that you still have the same options that you at prior to Work Chat, they’ve just been moved. 

[Kristi] When I think about it, if I was going to share something with you in the physical world, I wouldn’t just dump it on your desk or your doorstep… I would talk to you about why I am sharing it with you and why that's important. So Work Chat gives us us that place to do it without having to email each other constantly. The fact that I have Work Chats waiting on me will show up in my email, but not all of them will show up. I like it as a way to get that context that we need around what we're sharing with one another.

[Stacey] For users who are in Evernote a lot, it's a real asset when you're collaborating with the team that is all utilizing Evernote. It becomes really powerful. Hopefully that helps clarify some of the parameters around sharing and collaboration. We’re going to move into some cases for how we’re actually deploying these items and I’m going to start with one that is representative of how Kristi and I are using collaborate.

Many of you probably need get feedback on a project and have multiple people contribute to the conversation or the project in order to move your work forward. So in one use case, this would fall under the parameters that everybody that your collaborating is part of your internal team that is all using Evernote. In this case, I'm going to use the blog post that Kristi and I do for the GetUntethered website. Just a little bit of background to bring you up to speed on what we are doing, we're using an Evernote partner app called Postach.io which allows us to create a note in Evernote and put it into a particular notebook. When we tag that note with the word published, it automatically appears live on the website. Obviously Kristi and I are partners in this endeavor and we like to proof each other's work and collaborate on the content for the blog posts and we work on that between us as well as with Lillian, our assistant.

What happens is when we do a post, which is the note that is in Evernote on the left, and we publish its automatically appearing on the website. Now before Work Chat, what we were doing to manage this process is we would put a draft blog post into Evernote, into the folder and we wouldn't tag it. We would make changes or compose our first draft of the blog post. Kristi would have to rely on the notifications, which I don't know if you can see my cursor, but on the screen here there's a little notifications indicator in the interface… and she would have gotten the notification that there was a new note and modifications the note in that shared notebook. We found that hard to stand out, because the reality is all the changes that happen in Evernote end up in that notifications window. As a power user, you miss those notifications.

I would actually have to take the step of emailing the note to Kristi, with some comment and pushing the note to her to make sure that she saw it in her email. It worked fine; we were able to obviously effectively collaborate and that was what we were doing. Now what we do is different. What was really happening is that our project communication and management was happening on the outside. If we wanted to actually maintain this communication history with the project we would have to forward the email into that not e in Evernote, and file it in the project notebook.

Now we're shifting that into Evernote. So using Work Chat, you can see here same process, on the right I am sharing my draft of my blog posts and we are having a conversation about that all right here within Evernote. When they click on the link they're taken directly to the note so that they don't have to ever leave Evernote and we're generating fewer emails and having a history of the conversation amongst the group of us right here in Evernote.

[Kristi] This became so important to me because I got my notification from Google of how many emails I was getting a month. Getting to cut down on email was huge.

[Stacey] It keeps everything in one spot and gives you an easier access to the history of a conversation also. I agree. Again pointing out it puts the link in, and they can just click straight through to the link in Evernote. Here's a variation on that, this is a pro tip. We are sharing notes and notebooks, but don’t forget that you can share any kind of hyperlink. This is a link a to a Dropbox link. This morning, I sent a link to a Facebook post. You can include a web addres, these kinds of things can happen directly within Work Chat and helps again to reduce the amount of emails. I mean I should ask, how many of you are happy with how many emails you get?

Lilly is asking that she has multiple notes in her Work Chat window… why is that? 

[Kristi] I feel like that’s a bug, and I'm wondering if refreshing the install would fix that.

[Stacey] That would be my recommendation as well and then possibly sending a support ticket to Evernote that is not the behavior that we experience. Sounds like a hiccup. Then let me move on to the reality of how I collaborate on a daily basis with my assistant. This is how my assistant and I don't always work in the same place you know but we will use Skype to have video chatting with each other and video chat via Skype with clients all the time. We have a shared notebook; you can see here we’re actually discussing a note we have the video through Skype, we both have the note pulled up, and notice the little presence icon (as Evernote calls it).

You can see that she and I are both looking at the same note, or that she is involved in that note. This is also a featured that Evernote has launched since the conference in October. The note is actually locked so that only one person can be editing it at a time so that’s an enhancement that keeps us from having conflicting changes. This indicator will tell me if the note is locked or not, based on the collaboration as she moves out of the note, then I have the opportunity to edit the note and she can see my presence icon there as well.

This is really how we get work done collaborative using Work Chat and supplement it with Skype. Kristi, how does this work for you?

[Kristi] Lillian and I are typically not necessarily editing notes at the same time, but when we do… sometimes we’ll be in our weekly check list or working from a note, it is nice to see that presence there. I did just have a thought, but I don’t have the answer. There are multiple people in a note, if there were three or four at a time, can you see who has it locked?

[Stacey] You can. Say there are three of us. I would see two presence icons, and the icon of the person who has the control has a little moving circle around the perimeter of their icon.

[Kristi] I feel like there should be a crown or something. 

[Stacey] Yeah, Evernote didn’t really consult us on what icon to use!

[Kristi] I am the king of this note right now.

[Stacey] To Lilly’s question, so you only have one chat between yourself and my assistant? I have one chat window per conversation I’m having with people. If all of the notes that I go to share with my assistant Emma are going to you well sequentially into that one-on-one conversation or if I pull in another person into the conversation, it will start a new chat window. So the chat windows are specific to the number of users that are involved in that particular chat. If you repeat that group, it will continue the conversation in the same chat window. 

What I’m going to do then is move onto the other side of the coin which is how do we share with non-Evernote users? I’m going to give you case studies under the two features that Kristi illustrated for you. The first is public links. These are real, practical examples of how I'm using and my clients are using public links to communicate with people. I have a client that I'm working on some social strategy, and what I do is I reiterate and take notes during the meeting, and embed documents in that note and  I created a task list and a summary of our meeting, and then, my client, because this is a social media discussion that we’re having, she’s not an avid Evernote user – never will be - but I want to communicate with her, I create a public link to the notes from a meeting and I compose an email. In this email, I actually insert a hyperlink text. When I use this copy link, it puts a link to the note in Evernote to the clipboard, and I’m pulling it over to the email. Then I’m inserting that into some text in the email. Now that says here's a link that you can bookmark, then you can reference it as we work together. When she clicks on that link, it will take her into a browser, and she’ll be able to see that document that I’ve been working on in Evernote. It has in embedded Excel document and also discusses some of the content that we had discussed during our meeting.

Public links will reflect those notes as you update the note. I'll post the purposes, you could do checklists, status reports, etc with non-Evernote users. All they have to do is bookmark or refresh and check the current status.

[Kristi] The strategy there for using the link instead of emailing is that that is a dynamic note that the content will change over time and you want them to be able to go and see the new content versus email is a snapshot of that moment.

[Stacey] Another thing that's really helpful, for all of my handouts, I will use hyperlinks or graphics that brand to me and my company and contact information… again it's like building a web page that’s dynamic. So Evernote feature two: e-mailing notes. Sometimes we want to actually send them a note via email, because it’s going to be more assured that they’re going to see it. This is a example with a PR client that I work with so. They have a process where they are actually sending their clientele links to all of the PR that they secured for them over the course of a week. They send this to them on a weekly basis. What we did is we created a note in Evernote with some branding. We created some Web Clippings, we merged them, that's all advanced stuff, for those of you.

Then, on a weekly basis that client will email the note to their client. They’ll go to note> more sharing> email a copy. What it does is it comes in via G-mail or whatever client the person has, and you can see here that the entire content is right there in a note. The beautiful part about this process is the hyperlinks in that email are active. So the clients can just link on the link to the PR, and it will take the PR clients directly to the article. Again there's branding, there's functionality, there's all kinds of great things that reflect well on the PR company servicing their client. They simply is this email link feature in order to bring that to their clients.

[Kristi] I love those two examples because the first one is something dynamic that's going to change that link makes more sense and the second one is that weekly snapshot that is not going to change that will be static and so emailing it makes more sense.

[Stacey] Those are our case studies and hopefully you have a much clearer idea up how work chat is working, how you would share within the system and you’ve seen some case studies that give you some ideas of how and why you might choose one or the other. We have a little bit more time for questions. “You can’t start a new chat window with a new topic?

[Kristi] I thought it might be helpful to share my screen and show what my Work Chat window looks like. This is my Evernote installation and Lilly, what you should see here in this example is that each of my chats is with a different person or group of people. You can see the example as we are preparing for last month's Google hangout, the chat was me, Stacey, Chris, and Lillian. So we had a different window for that. But for this week, it was just Lillian, Stacey, and I. We have this continuing conversation that's actually been going on for a long time because we work together so much so you can see how if it's just between Stacey and me that's a separate window… it’s about the audience, not what you’re sharing. It’s who you’re having the conversation with verses what the content of that conversation is.

[Stacey] I don't see any other questions let me just move on to telling you guys a little bit about how you can stay involved in the conversation. As your questions come up, you can get in touch with us in a few places. We have a really active discussion that goes on on Facebook in the GetUntethered group. The book’s page on Google + is a great way to reach us. Lots of training about how to really utilize Evernote and how we expand on the concepts in the book.

We’re very excited about next month’s topic. This is a great primer for because we’re gong to talk about upgrading to Evernote Business, how that changes collaboration, sharing, notebook visibility, etc.

I see one last question about deleting old chats. I would love that feature, and I have not seen that feature. Kristi? 

[Kristi] Yes, you can right click on it, and delete it. You can also block someone from chatting with you.

[Stacey] Now I’ve learned something!