Sharing notebooks: At the beginning of a long journey

All of last year, we worked mainly to make Evernote an indispensable individual assistant, a sort of memory expansion, and left less priority to the possibilities of working together. This is quite atypical for our time, so that we have even been called “anti-social application” in some places. Probably, there is some truth in this.

At the same time, users more and more insistently asked to expand the sharing functionality. And since it’s impossible to keep you waiting any longer, we decided not to delay the full implementation of all our ideas, but to release new functions as they become ready. So we present to your court the results of the first stage of work in this direction.

Now, using the Evernote web interface , you can allow individual users access to read or edit entries in their notebooks.
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Small instruction

In the navigation pane of your account on the Evernote website, you will see a new blue “Sharing” section. Click on “Sharing Settings” to open one or more of your notebooks. Select the notebook that you want to make available to others, and then determine whether it will be open to all or only to a limited number of people.

In the second case, there are two additional options:

• open notebook for viewing only
• open notepad to view and edit. Please note that this feature is only available to owners of premium Evernote accounts.

For greater security, you can require mandatory authorization from users wishing to open a notebook. They will receive an invitation letter in the mail containing a unique link that everyone can use only once. Before showing your notes, they will be asked for a login and password at the entrance.

Editing notes (for premium accounts )

All users got the opportunity to open their notes to others, and in addition to this, Evernote Premium Subscribers can now give their colleagues and friends additional privileges to add, edit and delete notes in their notebooks.

I will explain a little. You do not need a premium account to make changes to a notebook open by someone, but you will need it if you want to allow other people to do this in your notebook. It is also important to note that any additions to your notebook will be made at the expense of your monthly note creation limit.

Snapping to notebooks

We also tried to simplify access to shared notebooks that interest you. If you enter such a notebook, you will see the button “Link to my account” in the upper right corner. By clicking you add a notepad to the sharing section in your account.

New interface

If you have previously published your notebooks, you will notice that the interface has changed. Now the view of an open shared notebook looks more like our standard web interface, which should simplify navigation through the records. And for beginners, it is now easier to master a unified application interface.

What's next

As already mentioned, we are only at the beginning. Now most of the sharing options available only through a web interface. Soon you will be able to open notebooks for other users directly from Evernote mobile and desktop clients. So sharing, like other features of our service, will eventually become available from anywhere, no matter where you are.

By the way, the API for developers has already been updated and supports the corresponding functionality, so we hope to see support for collaboration with Evernote in other projects soon.