< Evernote Video Training Library

Collaboration with employees, vendors, clients and customers can be seamless when you properly structure your Evernote notes, notebooks, tags, and stacks to support the goals of your business workflow. In her presentation from the 2014 Evernote Conference in San Francisco, Evernote Business Certified Consultant Stacey Harmon walks you the Evernote organizational structure of workflows that are most effective in a variety of common business collaboration scenarios. 

Note that the AV team focused the camera on Stacey during the presentation so the slides don't appear in the replay. We have included the slide deck below the video in order to provide the supporting visuals.

Video Highlights

Original Air Date: October 2, 2014
Blog Post About the Presentation

[5:30] Basic sharing rules
[9:00] Meeting agendas
[12:30] Collaborating internally
[17:30] Using templates
[22:00] Process notebooks
[24:30] Collaborating with outsiders
[37:00] Q&A

Transcript

[Josh] Hello everyone my name is Josh Zerkel. I am the Director of Training and Consulting for Evernote. I'm a charge of helping people learn how to use it and that's why I'm so happy to introduce Stacey Harmon. Stacy Harmon is one of our Evernote superstars in our community. She helps people learn how to use Evernote from start to finish along with her great partner Kristi Willis who will be speaking tomorrow.

Stacey Harmon is the founder of Harmon Enterprises based in Austin. She helps business owners deploy effective Evernote workflows through consulting and live training. She's an Evernote Business Certified Consultant, Evernote’s Marketing Ambassador and co-author of Untethered with Evernote. In addition to being an Evernote addict, Stacey is a curious person who spends her downtime seeking adventure and great food. Woman after my own heart.

[Stacey] Thank you. I am thrilled to be doing this. I just love Evernote, and to share with you the things that help me transform my business and my clients’ businesses, is an honor. So hopefully you’ll pick up some things from this, and it's probably the first time that I get to ask how many of you are Evernote users and have the entire room raise their hand!  So before I get started I want to let you know I actually created a handout for this session. I’ve been tweeting it out so that has been going out on Twitter. Also, you can get it from the top of any page on my website. Go to HarmonEnterprises.com from your mobile device or your computer and at the very top of any page you go to is a link. If you want to just save it to Evernote and take notes as we go along please feel free. I’ll update it with the slides, the PDF a the slides, after this is all over see. I’d rather have you guys focus on what I’m saying and figure out your questions as opposed to worrying about capturing it all. And they’re recording it!

Okay so having said that we're gonna talk today about is basically three things: Effortless Teamwork, using Evernote for seamless workflows and how to collaborate better with a very Evernote-centric workflow. This is something that I do in my business a lot, and I’ll show you some of the best practices around different scenarios that are common in this and then also some strategies for kind of keeping up with tasks and project management.

What we're really talking about workflows here, and I'm not here to teach necessarily skills; there are a lot of other resources that can teach you actual skills. I’m gonna show you what structure is that I've seen as effective for people out in the field and out in real life.

Before we get into the actual workflows that I recommend and I see work, I want to talk about the underlying things that impact workflow design. What do you have to understand as an Evernote user in order to make your workflows work, and how to collaborate effectively with your team? The first is your Evernote skill sets. This is a savvy group, but here's the thing, you guys will be working other people who aren’t as savvy as you guys are on Evernote. Y ou're trying to bring people into the fold and have them collaborate with you that might not know your skill set. These are the core skills that you need to really make sure your team and the people that are working with you in Evernote know so that you’re as effective as possible.

This is the list of things I will be referring to in the workflows I discuss today. I'm not going to take the time to actually demonstrate these, but in that note I gave you, there are links to all the Evernote blog posts and tutorials teaching these exact skill sets.

If you're not familiar with that you can go to my note to learn a particular skill set and you can share that with your team in order to kind of bring them up to speed. This is what's gonna fuel the effectiveness and Evernote team collaboration. The other basic foundation that I'm sure this group is very familiar with that your team members might not be, is sync is save. The importance of syncing; keeping everything up-to-date across all platforms especially when you're sharing a workspace. This is a training issue you really need to make sure your team understands and live by. Think sync is save. It's just gonna keep everything compatible across all other devices and all your team.

The last thing that you really need to understand that’s a foundational element is that note and notebook sharing behavious in Evernote and different versions Evernote has. I would like actually ask, “Which version of Evernote are you guys are using?” How many are using the free version? Okay, a couple of free users. How about premium? Okay, and how about business? Awesome. Let's talk about out how big your teams are that are using Evernote just so I can get a feel… How many of you are in the 0-10 person range? Maybe 10-50? 50 and over? Any big teams collaborating with Evernote? Okay 

That gives me a little bit of information, but just to make sure that we're all on the same page about the note and notebook sharing behavior. The first is that we know that you can share any note with anybody via email. You don't have to be an Evernote user but they can receive an email note. Other sharing options: public links which is what I did for the handout here. I will modify that note by adding a presentation afterwards; you guys still have access to the presentation via same link. Right? Or it refreshes in the same place on my local account.

You can also Tweet and social share to Facebook and LinkedIn directly through the interface of any particular note in the system. That's the basics. When we get into notebook sharing we want to know that between Premium and business there are some differences. We want to know this because it’s going to impact workflow design. On both of them, the sharing feature at the top is how you can create a workspace that you are sharing with another Evernote user. That’s selected by you. You're sharing that notebook with somebody you want to have collaborating in that workspace. In the premium version, you can share that to someone who is not an Evernote or is.  

Under “publish” in the premium version, anybody that you want to access that notebook an can see the contents of it you can do through the publish. When you get into business, the behavior works a little bit differently. You're actually publishing that notebook to what I call a bookshelf in your business home. Think of an attorney where they would have a big bookshelf with all the volumes on it. Think of your notebooks as a volume getting published to the shelf so that anybody using your business with a business account can check most things out by joining notebook at any time or leaving it. They’re not actually deleting it, but they're joining and leaving.  

So the publishing between premium and business is slightly different and it certainly could impact your workflow design. What I’m going to talk about today is mostly collaboration and teamwork Premium and the business environment. It’s more powerful and some of the solutions will give you stronger levels of collaboration. So those were the basic skills that you and your team really need to understand how to collaborate effectively with each other. These are three scenarios that most people in business are facing quite a lot: meeting agendas, internal project management (how do you collaborate internally with your team to get things done) and then how do you pull in an outside vendor or client into your workspace, and again use Evernote at the center of that. 

I’m going to give you some ideas for each of these that hopefully can adapt to your own scenario. The first one is meeting agendas. Obviously there's a big emphasis on having a meeting agenda here at the conference and this all is gonna probably evolve as the platform evolves over the next month or so as we learned this morning. But a very simple way if you’re just working internally, this is an example of how I manage my personal meeting agenda. I have an agenda notebook and I have individual notes for each kep person, client and vendor that I interact with on a regular basis. And I log my items there.

So that when I get back call, or when I'm out at a meeting I can just pull that up on my phone or on my computer and I have all my action items that I need to talk to them about right there. This is gonna be best if you're really collaborating just internally, trying to manage active task lists and kind of centralizing those kinds of things. You can see there are “their items,” my current lists, things that are in their court, or that we discussed already that I want to follow up on. This could be a simple solution but just have it for each individual client or person you interact with. The second option is maybe you’re working with a small team and you want to have a meeting notebook. So if you’re going to have a meeting on a regular basis you could have a note for that meeting or by person. My co-author and I handle this differently, so Kristi actually has a meeting note per meeting that they've got and she uses a reminder pin to pin it to the top and have  a dated reminder and ping around those kinds of things. She and her assistant are collaborating on the same note around a certain meeting.

You can see an example here in this screenshot, I handle it a little bit different. We have it around people. So I have my own note, my assistant has her own note, and anybody else who is collaborating in the meeting space has their own note. And they log their items and you can interact with those notes as you wish. So different options but you have a notebook with notes that are organized around the way you work.

The third option might be with a big team. This is actually an example from a client that I work with they actually have a note per person, and they have a standing weekly meeting. The agenda is always created by one person on a weekly basis before the meeting. They were having difficulty having everybody try to modify the same at the same time so they created one individual note for each person and then they have lots of options now. What they're doing currently, is the person that puts the agenda together is simply merging all of the notes right before the meeting starts and then they use that to kind of go off of.

There so many options now, especially with special presentation mode. You can put in all the notes related to a particular person and then what I would recommend is a naming convention- and I’m going to talk about naming conventions a lot- for individual notes. Every not should be preceded by say the persons name, say, “Stacey Meeting Tasks” or “Stacey Project Update A,” “Stacey Project Update B”… This way when you sort the notebook, you can use it in your presentation mode and have items group together that make the most sense for a particular discussion. Certainly with presentation we've got a lot of options here. You can also use the reminders feature to pin things up to the top. We use non-dated reminders a lot so that you can actually have it sticky up at the top the middle panel and then you can use table of contents notes to create structure and linking between notes and have a discussion around that.

So that's how I see large teams interacting on meetings and planning meetings with Evernote. The next segment I want to get into is how to collaborate internal projects. So I’m going to give you a couple of use cases; I have three workflows I'm going to recommend. I actually deploy all of these simultaneously in one account. It's really contextual about what you're trying to accomplish and its not right or wrong its what factors do you have going on in your workflows you need to think about and apply to your business.

It’s things like how many notes do you have, how many people do you need to share with? These answers will change the direction to what it is you deploy. Let's go through a couple use cases for project notebooks, inbox/outbox- which I guess inbox is like a bad word now as of this morning- I'll show you what I mean by that and then process notebooks which I again use all in my own account and will deploy them with clients depending on the situation. So workflow A, project notebooks. What would this be good for? This is going to be good for project say, where you’re redesigning a website. You're hiring an employee. Like a nice box around it you know it's got some boundaries and borders, whatever project that is, you all have those kinds of projects.

Let’s talk about the structure of the notebooks. I have three examples here from my own use case that I can show you can have 1 notebook, or a set of notebooks. In scenario A, we just set up an HE Coordination notebook. This is for miscellaneous stuff out one or two notes associated with it, me and my assistant can coordinate there and have a workspace where we're sharing information and we can communicate back and forth. It's kind of a catch-all. We will promote things to multiple sets of notebooks once it reaches a threshold makes more sense segregated out. You can see here like in B, when Kristi and I were writing the book I had a notebook for the PR and Promotion which is what we handled, and then Kristi and I had a notebook for our collaboration as well.

Same project, but it was big enough that we were able to separate it out and the sharing was different so we structured it differently. Sharing is a big reason why you would actually segregate out data into different notebooks. You’ll have to think about that, who do I want to share with? That can be a key consideration.

You can see the third one is another example here, the website, you can work internally, you can have a coordination notebook for your team, and then you could coordinate with outside vendors which is the site styling that was here. So I actually was working with the designer and we collaborated on our marketing ideas and such from there. So set it up as one or a series notebooks. 

My recommendation is depending on what you do here, again, naming conventions. Name your notebooks with the same starting information. So I have a number system, I use the GTD methodology. I have my own system and that's what this “2.PS” you see it. You can see that all start with the same beginning that again is for a sort and find functionality. Now that’s the note structure, let’s look at the notes inside the project space and what they’ll kinda look like when you're collaborating. 

The first thing I recommend is that you have a summary note and you pin it to the top. This right here, that's the key element. That pin makes all the difference in the world; when you have a project with over 40 notes and it's not all visible in the middle pain, you can find information. It gives people an overview about what's going on and note links, which is another key feature that provides structure. It provides the ability to quickly from one note to another note and direct people to detailed information that supports the summary.

So you want to pin the note, you want to use note links to provide structure, naming conventions are great if you've got a project that will always have a project summary, you can always precede the note title with the word summary or project plan. I have a client that has a term pipeline, that's kinda their task list. We’ll go through that a little more later. Templates can also be immensely useful and the table features that have just been released last couple weeks really skyrocket the effectiveness in this. So I highly recommend using the table feature to develop templates and in the handout I gave you guys there are some examples of templates from clients that I’ve worked with and how they use these things and how they deploy these naming conventions and other tips that I'm suggesting.

Develop templates that are meaningful for your business; what are the things that you will always need to know about each project? What are they? Put them into these tables and these fields. Use the different colors and table cell features to highlight important data and make sure that everybody's populating that table with what you need. The last thing that's really important to keep in mind about note tips and collaborating in a workspace our project notebook is the attachments feature. One of the things we can do is attach documents into particular notebooks and we can attach any kind of document. There's a key skill that's critical when you get into collaboration, you want to view the attachment verses download. So here's what I mean by that.

This is an essential document collaboration skill and you want to train your team about this. When you have, say, an Excel document embedded and in a note, there's a difference between previewing that Excel document and downloading that excel doc. If you download the Excel document, then it puts a copy onto your local hard drive, and then if you edit it, you have to re-upload it to have everybody on your team have access to it. This is the version control you want to make sure that you open with preview and then open with the native application. Do you see the difference in the workflow here? We had preview, its gonna preview it, and you open it with Excel. Key difference. When you do that, than any changes that are made that Excel document and saved and closed, live right back in the note. Anybody else has access in the work space and can see it. 

Train your team about that. Its key for version control and collaborating in Evernote. Workflow B. The other sort of had a defined border around it… the next is going to be this inbox outbox concept. Where this is really useful, I have actually found, is with users that do not gravitate towards technology solutions. Their technology nervous they don't understand that they don't grasp the value of, say, Evernote. I also found it with executives that have assistants, right? They’re delegating the work to somebody else and they just need a way to get information into Evernote so that it can be processed. 

I work a lot in the real estate industry have worked a lot people who work in the field at locations and they're trying to get photographs or other information into Evernote so that it can be the back office. This is another good solution for that particular scenario. So what i recommend here is you have an inbox that you’ve created, basically a notebook that’s’ communication portal that someone can dump information in, and then you move that note through a workflow as you deal with getting them into the system or getting things processed.

In essence the notebook is tracking the status. A tip about this is you want consider the note with naming conventions, again. They can help you when you sort it. You can look at things either by the date they were updated, the date it was created or the name. I use sort to change the view that the data is in there and you can find what information you need and quickly. You can use reminders to really make sure that people who are looking at what goes into the inbox and what goes out of the inbox are pinged about it or that there’s some timeliness to it.

Workflow C: Process notebooks. So process, this is good for things like lead management or maybe incoming orders. Again all this is internal to the organization, but it's a type of workflow that we want to try to figure out how to appropriately track in Evernote. The structure I recommend is a notebook per status. Now status can be tracked by tags as well, but it's really gonna depend on how many notes are associated with a particular project. For most cases I recommend this notebook movement and you can set up a process that's notebook specific and you have a new book called incoming, pending, declined, approved. And in this particular case what happens is just you want to know what goes into it, then you would move it or one other team members would move the note from one notebook to the next when you have something actionable change.

So I just moved through the workflow. ultimately ending in like an archive or maybe promoted to its own project notebook at some point. A couple of tips on notebooks, is naming conventions are really important. This is a client I worked with; the PRM stands for permission, that's part of their process. They have a couple of processes in their  organization and one of them is approving permissions to use their branding. People inquire about the opportunity to use their brand in conjunction with licensing agreement and they either approve it or decline it or have questions about it.

Here they just named all of them with PRM, permissions, with incoming, pending, declined or approved, and they get moved through the process. Now on notes that are in it we defined some templates that allow the people, as they come in, to capture all the information that's relevant to the workflow process. And you can use tags in addition to this if you want to track other information like maybe a sales rep or something along those lines. You have to think about what kind of information you want and what makes the most sense. I advocate that this is a good solution for tracking status. Then you should always document the process, too. You want to actually log what are the rules about when something moves from you know from incoming to pending and allowed this to be pinned to the top maybe in your process notebook. So that team members can access that or ask questions.  

Alright, that’s internal communication. Now we can use the same skills and we can include outside people that are dealing with our projects, or clients or venders that are supporting our work. So structure, I recommend for this workflow is a 1-3 notebook structure to start. You can see in the green example, I really start by having a client notebook that's an internal workspace I share my organization. We use Evernote business, so we publish it to the business home so that it's a book that people can check out on the shelf, they can access it. There's also a personal workspace, quite often. So we create a second notebook, if you look at the purple example, this is a place where I just have my own workspace. I’m not sharing this with anyone else, this is about making my ideas, or making reports that I haven't finalized. I just want to keep in my own space, not shared with my team and not shared with the client. At some point I do have work that I need to share with a client. We do Evernote workflow deployments, so I'm creating these rules, and I want them to see these rules and finalized and put them into a collaboration or shared notebook with the client that they have access to. So you can see here in the John Wayne Enterprises example I actually have a notebook titled “Shares.” It's clear they were sharing with my client. 

I recommend this personal workspace, shared, internal collaboration workspace, and then a client visible workspace. And again naming conventions to kinda group them together through an alphabetical sort, and then a descriptive definition on the notebook just say what's the point and purpose to say what the collaborative notebook is. So within notes in these notebooks we're gonna rely on some of the same workflows we've already talked about. 

We’re gonna create structure within these collaborative workspace using table of contents notes, which is a great feature- you just select a bunch of notes and it auto-links to them- (by the way, naming conventions are really important for table of contents note creations. Then can sort them the way you want. You can name it by putting you know a number and for another note; or maybe are sorted by name and when you create table of contents they are all in the order that you want. Lots of ways to do it. Think about know how you want to view the information is gonna impact on how to title the information.)

Again links to supporting notes are gonna provide structure, pin notes the top provide easy and quick access particularly as notebooks grow with lots of information. You’re gonna use templates, this is a great example that we use; the template for this one will show a table that’s task, person, due date, notes and then people with fill those for each project that comes up. You could just copy note and put it into the new notebook. Copying notes is one other skills that’s in the initial slide don't forget to you can link to outside sources. You can’t just link to Evernote notes you can link to, in this case, Dropbox or Google Drive. Anywhere that have your data stored not in Evernote, we can use links to create opportunities to easily access all of that.

Again you're gonna want to be cognizant of working with those attached or downloading those documents. A key skill to make sure that your team knows. If you need something that is going to track dependency or something along those lines, the App Center provides solutions that really integrate well with Evernote premium and Evernote business. And will give you advanced task management and planning purposes. They create workspaces that allow for communications; several of them are here: Smartsheet and Azendoo are two that I've heard great things about and all of them have met the standard to be in the App Center. Depending on what your needs are these might be some good solutions for you.

Now that we’ve got different workflows that we can set up depending on different criteria, we have to figure out how we're gonna keep up with all of our to-dos and our tasks. We have the structure in place, now how to project manage this in our team. I’m going to give you 6 strategies: 5 that are Evernote centric that you can use to keep up with your projects and your task plans.

The first is you’re gonna want to stay organized with stacks. The one thing to keep in mind and to teach your users is that stacks are user-specific. Every single user can have their on stack organization. This is why the naming convention on your notebooks is so important, because that's what users have access to. Then at their own level they can organize in the stacks. You really need to do what works well for you and train your team on organizing with stacks around the way they manage their projects.

Some of the questions that are going to impact your stack organizations would be “what is your role in the organization?” If you're the principal or the CEO, you may want to see a lot more projects than somebody who is just working on a portion of your business. How does your mind work? How are you organizing things? Are you doing a GTD organization like I am? Evernote gives you the flexibility to organize it in a way that works for you. That’s the beauty is that it harnesses the ability to adapt to the workflow and mind of each individual user. How do you keep track your tasks? What do you need to do to keep up with projects? How do you need to find things? What types of things are important to your role in the organization?

An example of this is that I worked with a bookkeeping client. She is the principal, and she has about six keepers that work with her on different projects. Each bookkeeper has a stack, and they might have that stack be the client name with maybe 5 notebook that are tracking different things that they do for each client maybe different accounts or maybe accounts receivable for each client. They are displaying and organizing in stacks the ones that are relevant to them. Especially in Evernote Business, they only join notebooks that are relevant.

The principal on the other hand, she wants to see the project coordination for each client and she's organizing that around stacked clients and she's got each client under her stack. See the difference? What works for you. This shows you how to create stack obviously. Here's two examples of many. This is an example of what I do; I have a GTD organization of a chronological order stacks and notebooks that collapses down into these eight or 10 stacks. There's a total of about 300 notebooks hidden underneath all of this, but I like that it collapses down and I kinda move things around based on the functionality that works for me. 

There's other ways to use these same stacks; this is like a real estate example. For an active client, you would move from that stack into an active transaction or into a archive. Again its totally user-specific, if I was using a GTD approach I could put this buyer,  Johnson Steward, in my to project support materials because it’s an active client. But this person here might view it as an active transactions. The key is flexibility; teach stack organization around each user. You can recommend stack organization to kinda get started. That’s something you would put in your documentation system.  

The second strategy that I recommend is be familiar with the visual indicators that are in Evernote. The first is the activity feed. When you have a small team, this will be very functional for you, you can actually see when somebody's made a change to a notebook or note and you can click through to those changes. And note counts are really, really helpful. You may underestimate the importance of being able to see this and one of the things I want you to do is check your settings. If you’re not seeing how many notes are in each notebook (I think it's turned off on the Mac by default) and you need to turn it, it's a settings check. Look back to the workflow we had with the inbox/outbox. You see at the top it's got note counts off versus note counts on… you’ll have a lot more information about how much work there is to do when you see that there’s stuff in the inbox to be processed.

It's really helpful to turn that on, I always turn that on when I'm working with clients. You really get a feel for how much work is in there. It tells you a lot if there’s 0 versus 300. Strategy 3, I want to use the reminders feature. You can subscribe to reminders, date reminders, and you can have it ping you or active users through email or just through the interface. You can set reminders in upper right hand corner, if you date them it will do that, it'll actually promote it and you can organize them by date. 

If you want to take it a step further, you can use a third-party app. Sunrise does a brilliant job of actually bringing this into a visual calendar for you so that you can actually see your note in the context of a visual calendar. For some of you that could be really functional and really useful.

You can actually use the info button on the note to designate like the time frame so that you can control where it appears in the calendar, or you can have it just appear just at the top of the note you’re working on.

I use this strategy a lot, strategy four, which is email notes. I use this strategy with people that I have collaborative workspaces with. So here's the thing, my assistant and I have a lot of notes in a notebook and I might ask her to go in and update something. At some point the activity feed gets overwhelming and I get lost in the activity. So what I ask her to do is simply email me that note, so that I know she did work, and tell me what notebook it’s in so that I can go and look at it. For me, email is still a part of my workflow, I can just delete that and then go into Evernote and look and review what she's done and make any notes or edits to it at that point.

So I found that really helpful a lot even when I’m dealing with outside vendors. I worked with a designer that will have a shared workspaces with me in Evernote, and if she puts in a new comp or a new design for me to look, I’ll have her actually email it to me so that I know that it's into Evernote and I can go in there and work on it. That’s a little detailed tip, but it's really helpful in making sure things get seen and keeping on top of it.

Templates, I’ve talked quite a bit about templates today. I gave you some samples that are specific and can be adapted for your environment. You can see here you can create a task list that lists who is responsible for it and link out other places. You can have people edit those and put in checkboxes. I find that helpful, too. Create a column that’s called “Done.” Put the check box in the table; it’s a simple thing, but it really works.

The sixth strategy is you can use the Evernote app center solutions. There are some really powerful project management and task management features in some of these. The thing about this is is that I spent most today talking about is project and team collaboration inside Evernote where Evernote is really the hub. When you go to some of these solutions, it moves your project management out of Evernote and Evernote becomes a supporting feature for you. That is important for some workflows; you have to decide. Again you need to be cognizant of which channel you're going with and how you want to structure your workflow and how the order of the notebooks, stacks, and notes interplay with your solution.

There's some great vendors you can check out; Smartsheet is right out there. Again, dependencies are really well handle by some of these outside solutions. Then workspaces that allow you to collaborate even more seamlessly with non-Evernote users are another really great strength some of these solutions offer. Certainly check them out, but I hope I shown you that you can do a lot within the native Evernote app in terms of collaborating internally and with your team and with other vendors as well.

So with that, I have a couple minutes for questions and our book will be available in the Evernoet market in a couple weeks. Or you can come and see Kristi and I right here if you’re interested in talking to us further about it. I will answer questions if you’ve got them right now. 

[Guest] How do you use reminders? 

[Stacey] I'm personally not a big user of reminders. I don't use dated reminders, for example. My personal system, with GTD, makes the calendar like gold. If it's on my calendar it is my dated reminder. And everything that’s in Evernote is supporting material for that. I do use pinned notes, non-dated reminders, as Josh said often. I try to keep them one to five per notebook. It may get overwhelming if I have more than that. We will put summary or hot action items right at the top. Naming conventions become very important there too because the interface even though its scalable and can slide that metal panel, you can’t see a full note title there so having a note titled specific to be the content can really help you there.

[Guest] Can you talk about the importance of naming conventions in the context of a directory structure versus using tags to find things are you looking for?

[Stacey] So naming conventions in the context of finding versus tags? Here’s the thing, if you want to find something in Evernote, you just need to make sure that that word is in the note. So I often tell people that when they’re first designing systems I say don't use tags, because people want to use tag in order to retrieve and find. The search is so powerful and using tags can make a system complex off the bat. As you get savvier with it, and you start to do real workflow design, there are use cases for tags that are very meaningful and helpful. You can track status, it’s an alternative to that movement that I was talking about. I did that with a client who has client project who is a PR firm, and they have notebook for each client and in it there's a summary note pinned to the top with the reminder. They have a saved search that they put a tag, a process which we documented that is in your handout actually, and is assigned a tag called “pipeline.” We have saved search that is “pipeline” and that allows them to pull the pipeline documents from each notebook and look at them all in one interface. So they use it that way and retrieve information have a discussion about it.

[Guest] In the premium edition, when you publish a note or notebook, do we have any time period so that they can have access up to a certain period?

[Josh] The answer is no; you have to manually decide that you don’t want it published anymore.  

[Stacey] Yeah, you can revoke privileges and assign different modification rights people, but you would have to actually as Josh mentioned, go in there and turn them off. 

[Guest] My question is about losing an employee in Evernote business, and now I need to stop them from having access. Is there anything I can do about what's on their phone and their laptop?

[Stacey] This is a great question, so what she’s saying is that I have Evernote business and clients come and go, so what do I do about that information? So the key value that is brilliant about Evernote business is that the company has data ownership and you control access to that company account through the admin panel. So when an employee leaves, you just remove them from your account and all those notebooks that our business notebooks are no longer appearing in their account whether it's on their computer on their mobile device or on their phone. That is huge and it's a key reason to be using Evernote business. You retain the intellectual property when the notebook ends and by the way that's true even if they don't publish it as workspace. If they keep private workspaces like what I was advocating there with the three where you have the personal, the collaboration and the client… even if they create personal workspace in your business account and they leave the company, you can then transfer ownership over to another employee and gain access to that work.

[Guest] What if those employees don't have a seat in the business and you shared notebooks with them through an email? They have their own Evernote account, but you shared, say, an employee handbook with them, can you rebuke that? 

[Stacey] If you shared a notebook through the share feature, you can revoke permission but you want to go in and revoke that permission. If they're not on your business account you're gonna want to go through and look. By the way there are more visual indicators particularly- I’m much more particular to the Mac side- there are these little people that are really helpful indicators that the notebook is shared. To scan through the notebook list through right-hand pane, where you can see them all and look for that little icon can be helpful.

[Josh] Just a couple more notes. Stacey is an Evernote Business Certified Consultant; you'll hear about these guys throughout the course of the next couple days. Stacey has been trained by us; she's authorized to go train other businesses on how to use Evernote business. If you have questions about working with Stacey all of the EBCC’s have the same green buttons on. You can also be with them tomorrow at lunch. There will be tables set up where we have the same sign. Again you can chat with them also at the Evernote Business booth. Thank you to Stacey Harmon. Stacey will see you at the Evernote business booth.