Evernote have recently announced that they have lifted the file type restrictions for free accounts. Previously free users had been limited to putting only text, image, audio and PDF files into their notes. If you wanted to store Microsoft Office files in Evernote for instance you needed to upgrade to a Premium account. That restriction is now gone, so both free and premium service users can attach any type of file they like to a note!

Significant Additional Value

In my opinion this is a significant increase to the value of the free account.  To me it is critical given that as I am choosing Evernote to be my Knowledge/Information/Reference store that I can add productivity application documents that I generate or collect.  So to add this capability to the free account really improves tha capability of the Evernote platform for those users.

There is no additional increase in the upload allowance for free users however.  Attaching a lot of documents to notes will quickly use up the free allowance so be careful.  One tip is to initially store files in a local notebook (one that doesn't get synced with the cloud) unless you are sure you will need access to a document from anywhere.  You can always move a file to a synced notebook later. 

Use Live Update to maintain documents

One really nice Evernote feature, that removing the file restrictions really opens up for free account users, is Live Update!  Using Live Update means that you can reflect any changes made to a file that is attached to a note.  So for instance you might store a draft presentation in Powerpoint, and whenever you do some more work on the presentation, Evernote will always have the latest updated version.  

To use the Live Update feature, all you need to do is right-click on a file within a note and choose "Open With", then choose the application you want to use to view or modify that file. Once you've made the desired changes to the file, just save it using the application's "Save" option and Evernote will automatically be updated with the latest version of the file.

This works for images, PDFs, PowerPoint presentations, Excel spreadsheets - the works - great huh!

What file types do you store in Evernote?

So maybe I should go ahead and get that iMac! What do you think?

Google+ the social network that is Google's latest attempt at creating a serious rival to Facebook has just moved to an open Beta. For the past few months it has been an "by invitation only beta"  but is now open to everyone who wants to sign up.

Anyone using Google+?

Is Evernote well postioned for the future?

I know that this blog seems to be turning into a bit of Evernote specific blog at the moment.  This isn't the intention, but this reality is a result of my growing understanding of the potential of the product to help transform the how we use and percieve the digital cloud in the future. Hence my current interest. 

We are now at a time in history were we are able as individuals to start recording significant portions of our lives into a digital store. Why would we want to? That is a seperate, but very important question that is worthy of lots of thought and discussion. However Evernote has the potential to become that digital store.

thenextweb.com has a very interesting article on the future of Evernote, which provides an overview of the product, its history, its current very rapid growth and where it is going in the near future.  Evernote in my opnion is really beginning to get there as a store, but the challenge will be in eventually providing effective and innovative tools for finding and displaying the captured content.  This is an area that if Evernote is ever going to become the 100 year company that it aspires to be, will need significant investment. 

The good news is that with an effective and profitable business model, partnership model and significant capital it looks well placed to manage this!  What do you think?

Evernote Essentials second edition is out!

Evernote is an extremely powerful and flexable tool that provides the capability for an individual to capture, manage, find and share their personal information.  But just like any software package, power and flexability often comes with a bit of a price tag.  Often there is a steep learning curve to get over before you get to the point where you truly understand how things work and you can start geting the real value from the package.

Evernote Essentials

While Evernote is very easy and intuitive to use, to get to the real power there is still a learning curve hurdle to get over.  So if you are new to Evernote, I strongly recommend that you get Evernote Essentials . Brett Kelly’s excellent ebook is a great way to get started, and will save you a lot of time.  The ebook will help you quickly get to the point where you can really start getting the most out of Evernote

Although I was mostly self taught, this ebook was one of the resources that I used myself when I began to explore the power of the Evernote platform.  As Evernote has developed repidly it was getting time for an updated version which has now duly arrived.  The book will also provide a useful reference once you really start using Evernote, as it describes a number of use cases and provides a lot tips and tricks.

Evernote for students

Evernote have their own excellent blog, which I always read from time to time, as it is an excellent place to pick up tips on using Evernote. This post by high school student Ryan Kessler really caught my eye.  Ryan demonstrates how he uses Evernote as an extremely effective research tool, note taker and organiser for all his school work.

Evernote as a platform

You will note that it is not just the use of the Evernote client that is important to his particular use case. It is how well the client combines via the digital cloud with both the Evernote web client and his Android Evernote app, and how these in turn are used with other useful mobile apps to create a total system. 

This is where the power of Evernote really resides. Evernote is not just a note taking application it is actually a platform for generating effective,  working personal information management systems for all sorts of people, in many different ways.  I plan to explore  this capability more in future posts.

Does Evernote work as a platform for you, or is it just a note taking app?  Add a comment and let me know!

I have been looking for a solution to allow easy scanning while travelling.  Here I am talking about things like receipts,  business cards and the odd document. Obviously I do not want to carry a scanner about, so I was looking for an app for my iPhone.  In addition I was looking for specific functionality that allowed me to easily move any scanned document to Evernote.

After a bit of research I have decided on Docscanner and my experience with it so far is great. It provides good accurate scans either as a pdf document or as a jpeg image and will let me save the resulting scan direct to my Evernote account.   I can also directly email a scan to any of my email accounts or also again to my Evernote email address.

I haven't fully explored all the possibilities of this tool, especially the OCR, but already out of the box it has given me  what I need. The integration with Evernote works really well.

Anyone else use this app?

Today is is a bit about taking action and getting started again, but I have also become really interested in personal information management, and a lot has happened in the tech world in the last year or so, that make this a very interesting area that is worth discussing more.

One piece of technology that I have been using on and off for a long time is Evernote which has recently come of age as a cross platform information store.  It is an extremely useful tool as it stands but what is really driving its potential is the integration with other tools and technologies that are arriving in the digital world. 

This is going to be the main focus over the next coming months.  It feels good to be back!

Fusion tables are also interesting for their approach to creating online public collaborative databases.  With Fusion tables you can merge data with other tables, open and secure parts of your tables and collaborate on data down to the cell level. An interesting potential approach for a lot organisations especially charities or government bodies. Almost a wikki for structured data.  

Google have also recently added an API to allowing one to update and query your dataset in Fusion Tables programmatically.

Below is an example of a animated visualisation of historical production data for a few countries (from the BP statistical review) which I created in about 5 minutes.  Play around with it and I would be interested to hear anyone's thoughts on how visualisations such as this would be applicable to their industry.

Warning! do not select a country and trails when running the animation - this seems to be too much for my browser  

Well that innovation is already happening. SAP have devloped a prototype Wave extension called Gravity that extends the document collaboration paradigm to collaborative Business Process Modelling (BPM). The video below shows it in action.

You could imagine working in a similar way as a cross domain/company virtual team to develop, improve and agree on work processes related to a Lean Six Sigma initiative or as part of the change management for the introduction of new technology for instance. 

Apart from providing an interesting view of BPM capability using the Wave paradigm of being able to have multiple users contibuting at the same time,  the video also does a good job of showing how people come and go during the course of a project. This highlights the importance and value of the playback feature for helping people get up to speed on ongoing work and discussions but also in helping document decisions. 

From a BPM perspective there is potential for Google Wave to be used to handle any activity that involves collaboration amongst people as part of a formal business process, for which it could maintains the complete record of discussion and decisions.

Already there are some interesting applications of Google Wave appearing. Do you know of any?