Online shared intelligence

Evernote: new collaboration modality emerging or just note taking?

Most users of enterprise social networking / collaboration complain about the chasm between common desktop documents and on-line content; let’s face it, most Rich Text Editors (RTE’s) used by Enterprise Collaboration products are anything but “Rich”, and people who learned everything they know about computers through Office don’t get along with Textile either. As a result, RTE’s and/or Textile irritate the heck out of most users.

From what I hear, most collaboration vendors are trying to tackle this problem, some by making the desktop edition even more proprietary (guess who), others by trying to improve RTE’s. Well, there is another vendor, one that doesn’t have a collaboration platform of its own, whose product (Evernote) is quite relevant to this issue…

What is your workspace vision?

I have been pondering about the competing notions of “workspace” implicit to different collaboration products and companies. Here are a few:

• The ultra-unified collaboration and communications story (i.e., Microsoft’s, Cisco’s, IBM’s) – All of these visions start from the pragmatic assumption that the Microsoft Office apps are around, and will be around, as the standard desktop environment, and then imagine the workspace as this virtual space where people meet to collaborate around the artifacts they have produced in Office. Emphasis: mostly private authoring, with a collaborative icing on the cake. Not surprisingly, Microsoft promotes this vision of the workspace where you and I meet to discuss a PowerPoint deck you produced, and in order to work on that .ppt file, we would use chat, SMS, IM, VoIP, conferencing to bring in Mary’s opinion, and so on. That workspace vision is very natural to people who still spend forty or more hours a week in conservative organizations dominated by Windows, where each PC comes with Office and Explorer (and practically nothing else outside of the occasional VPN), and where most of the work is done individually, by individuals. On the other hand, if you are an occasional user of Office (most SMB’s, small virtual teams, most creatives, and so on), and you have come to dread using it because of its over-featured characteristics, you might found that scenario very limiting. Further, even if you are a frequent Office user, you may (like me) fear the sheer accumulation of synchronous and asynchronous communications modalities (phone, VoIP  phones, IM, SMS, email, voice mail, presence-enabled clients, automated assistants trained to find you, and so on; I don’t know about you, but I already have more interruptions that I can handle, and more communication modalities that are comfortable to keep under control… So, in a nutshell, Office-artifact-centric collaboration workspaces are a natural, possibly more productive, extension of their networked desktops of today for intensive Office users, and somehow convoluted and overwhelming to people who are not, or who have their quota of interruptions already full. SharePoint supports, creates and maintains archetypical Office-artifact-centric workspace. Because SharePoint (both WSS and MOSS) are here to stay, the Office-centric workspace model is sure to get a long list of adopters for years to come (we will discuss in another posting whether that is good, bad or neutral for collaboration progress);
• The collaborative-artifact-centric workspace (Atlassian, WordPress, most open source CMSs), which is harder to find usually because the workspace concept itself is downplayed (but still there in the form of “spaces”), where users collaboratively work on documents they collectively produce, whether the collaboration has an opportunity to start from inception of the document (wikis), following a central thread of postings (blog) or triggered by “questions” or “issues” whose resolution is important to many people (forums). Whatever the publishing model, this workspace model does not put so much emphasis on people talking on the phone, holding conferences or sending and receiving SMS and email, all while they write on the wiki, and therefore adoption patterns for this type of workspace are quite dynamic and persistent. The collaborative content is the center of attention, and users mostly are something close to a second thought. Atlassian’s Confluence, for example, is a great example for this modality of workspaces, as are WordPress MU for enterprise blogs. Before you object, telling me that SharePoint also supports the modalities above, I must preemptively answer that wiki, blog and discussion support in SharePoint is minimal, primitive and barely enough to make that statement of support, and also that despite the accumulation of several servers brought about by MOSS and the layer after layer of functionality (user profiles, SSO management, etc.) it still remains an Office-artifact-centric workspace manager (I have even stronger opinions about the usability of the communication pieces, but that will wait for another occasion). Let’s just agree for now that collaborative-artifact-centric workspaces are characterized by strong focus on collaboratively produced (and immediately auto-published) documents, with users as a somehow secondary-priority object, which is there mostly to create, serve and maintain those collaborative documents. To make justice to Confluence, I must say that there seems to be a recognition in Atlassian’s part that users and their own personal experiences should be more relevant, but the transformation has not yet completely taken place. In any case, this type of workspaces are specially attractive and productive for technical users (whether technical means computer-savvy or some other specialty); that is the case for many reasons, prime between them that collaborative documents are usually much more complex structurally than flat Office documents because of hyperlinking (Office supports links but it doesn’t make sense to put links to files that are in your private disk, or have to go to SharePoint to find the URL of something else – not for now), macros and plugins that allow the representation of many types of objects in the content (from workflow, to relational data, to media, to…), and also the fact t hat many people together think much better than a single one, and therefore the collectively produced documents they originate are much richer and interesting. On the other hand, this type of workspaces tend to irritate Office-only users (a large percentage of today’s users), for whom bold is control-B, tables are (a) a menu on the top right and (b) indispensably finely tuned and precisely colored, titles and other styles are carefully crafted by font, size, font style, etc. It would be unfair to say that those things cannot be done in this type of workspaces: the problem is that those things are done differently, and asking people to use a browser-based Rich Text Editor or textile (*bold*) is already asking too much. I am amazed when I talk to collaboration experts and some minimize the importance and size of this population, as if it were made of sick people, and I remind them that (a) at least 4 out of 5 CEO’s fall in the category, as well as an even higher percentage of white collar personnel and (b) many people learn to use a computer by using Office applications… and never need to go any further;
• The user-centric workspace, where the focus is carefully kept in the user itself, by “personal workspaces” containing artifacts related to anything that that user has going on at the time. Those artifacts may include blog posting, discussions, Office documents, and any other type of document and/or media, as well as tokens and avatars of other users, brought into the personal workspace by their participation on any of these things going on for that user. A very popular representative of this vision is JIVE Software’s Clearspace, as well as IBM’s Connections (when put together with other IBM products).  A typical landing page for a user-centric workspace is the personal workspace, where the user finds notifications about updates to documents she may be working on, articles published on areas she has interest on, users she is friend with who may have new contributions, and so on; as the user follows any of those links, she will enter other people’s workspaces, as well as group projects, and in the process land on content documents, either privately or collaboratively produced. User-centric workspaces have the attraction of focusing (by definition and architecture) on the things that matter to each user. It is not uncommon for any two different users to have totally, radically different views of the same collaboration hub, because each one of them configured his/her private space to show precisely what they wanted to see and do. Even when the notion of workspace is radically different, social networking collaboration hubs complement document-centric ones quite well. Except for issues of Single Sign On, Unified Search and simplified access to content across environments, there is usually no procedural or process-oriented regimentation to maintain, because the content-centric and the user-centric workspaces serve the same user at different times, for different purposes; I may use my social networking site first thing in the day, to plan my day and update my knowledge about things I care, just to continue one of the threads in it into a content-centric collaboration where I may work for hours in MS Office, or vice-versa, and my interest will drive me naturally to the correct workspace hub. The characteristic of a user-centric workspace is, then, that the focus of attention for the user is her own state of work and collaborations, as well as other users that are actively participating in them; only from there do users usually access documents to work on them. Another strong typifier of such products is that other users, as well as the networks they define (networks, team, buddies, etc.) are at least equally visible, and finally, that such user visibility brings with it a corresponding highlight on user interactions themselves (and in most cases even more) than content objects (there are other technical differentiations of such products, but I am concentrating on Workspaces for the moment).

Of course, the abstractions above are separated by thin and ambiguous lines, and you can expect to see them crossed constantly by products. But they are also good tools of analysis: I have found that most requirements documents for collaboration products quickly zero into these variables.

 

Workspace patterns

So, we can see that several patterns emerge as we differentiate philosophies of workspaces:

I have productively worked with (and in most cases deployed across an enterprise) most of the modalities above, and several combinations thereof, and found them all attractive and productive, each one on its own capabilities and special applications. I have also found that any product exhibiting any combination of the parameters above can be a productivity sinkhole when used in the wrong manner; that is the case because all of the products I mentioned above as archetypical of one modality or the other also manage to “almost do” what makes the others archetypical as well: using them in that “almost as good as” manner is an almost certain disaster and waste of time.

The gray zone between private and public content work

I have also found that  there is a corner of my way of working (with emphasis on my, just because I don’t know if its yours as well) that is not covered by any of the modalities outlined above, and that is the corner where private note-taking overlaps with online collaboration. When I tally the time I spend working on the computer, I realize that a major chunk of my time is spent clipping, gathering, writing, annotating, organizing content by myself, on my desktop, privately, even when the content I clip, gather, write, annotate and organize comes from the web, email, wikis, etc. and is, in most cases destined to become part of a collaboration.

The problem is, when the moment comes to use that content in a collaborative fashion, a major usability fracture emerges: that of re-purposing the “private”, carefully integrated multi-source content into on-line collaborations I may be working on. I call this corner “the moment of taking my brain store public”, and if you have attempted it, you hate it as well:

That’s why I have been an avid user of OnFolio, until Microsoft bought the company and killed the product, then OneNote  (until I settled on Evernote for Windows), then Notebook, Omnioutliner, Caboodle and about ten other apps in the Mac (until I settled on Webstractor, a fantastic app that proceeded to become unsupported when the vendor died and immediately proceeded to bomb while saving in OS X 10.5), then several notetakers on my S60 phones, and so on… All of them imposed the heavy price of making the private notes public that I described above…

Well, NO MORE! Now there is a new Evernote for Mac, combined with a new hosted synchronization model, that I believe will shock the world, and in the process help solve a significant part of the pain caused by one of the discontinuities that has most troubled collaboration products (and a big hush-hush for those products, except for IBM who has a relatively slim advantage in the area): the chasm between offline and online content. Whether because you travel on site and have no access to the VPN from your customer’s network, or because you spend two hours working on the train getting to and from the office and home, or spend too much time in airport, the fact is, your private knowledge and your collaborative knowledge are sitting in different places, one on your machine, the other online… and you are always bound to need the one you have no access to!

Evernote to the rescue, rocking the world

I hope you tried or used Evernote at some point on Windows. Talk about a neat, clean, superbly designed product. It basically sat in the status bar, ready to be invoked at any time, and ready to receive web clips, copy/pastes, selected chunks of graphics and/or text, hand-written notes (switching to hand-writing if you were using a tablet),and so on. You never needed to save, if you clipped it or wrote it or annotated it, it was permanent. Then, you could highlight, add to it, delete, edit, etc., and still love it more.

If that wasn’t enough, Evernote had something that looked almost science fiction, even for OCR-savvy users: it would process your handwritten notes, or pictures of signs, or whatever pixel-based, and turn them into searchable text! Did I mention that the search in Evernote was lightning fast already? I am sure you are logving it by now… No? Ok, consider this: tagging of notes, categories, a ticker-tape metaphor for chronological display, templates, c’mon, you’ve GOT to love it! OK, OK, you could buy it for $39, do you love it now? No?

If no, it maybe because there were a couple of problems with the Windows version:

1. Did not run on Mac (Ouch!)
2. DId not do much (actually, ANYTHING) to solve the private/public thing…

So, it was still by far the best note taking app in the world, but it fell short…

Until I found out about the Mac Evernote beta. The mac version is, as anything Mac, sexier and neater than its Windows counterpart (albeit a little less functional yet). But hey, it solves the multi-computer thing (because there is also a version for Linux and phones –sort of). That is quite nice, but the private-public thing…

YES, IT SOLVES THAT PROBLEM TOO! And it does it through a feature that makes it infinitely more powerful than it was before: a hosted model through which notes can be synchronized between an online store and different computers, accessed online at any time, and SHARED with other users online as well.

Wow, are you starting to see the possibilities? And… did I mention that the online version of a note you see on your browser is identical to that in your computer, the one where graphics, tables and other niceties looked so well? Or that you can also edit it ONLINE? Or that the client version runs on Windows, Macs, phones and Linux? Or that you can send a quick email with notes from your phone and they will become notes? What about pics in online-synchronized notes being automatically tagged with their contained, searchable text?

The possibilities for this product are UNBELIEVABLE, and I hope you see what I see… Let me outline possible scenarios:

• Evernote decides to sell the server as an enterprise collaboration server, where people share some of their notebooks (Evernote’s personal workspace metaphor), and enable collaborative content (all that lays in the way is a simple authentication and granular access control mechanism);
• Remember that notebooks can contain ANY KIND of media, including voice annotations (directly from your phone), videos, etc, each one of them procured in the device that makes sense to you in the moment. This is intrinsically more UNIFIED than anything in the mega-monolithic UCC vision by Microsoft… with one millionth of the footprint, and leveraging personal devices without heavy weight IT budgets!
• Now that your ultra-flexibly produced private notes are online, with nice formatting, graphics, and such, why would you use convoluted mechanisms for attaching documents, then referring to them? Yes, there will still be Office content, but I can guarantee you that many, like me, will get rid of most needs for Office and STILL share nicely organized and formatted content online. I will spend a large amount of time taking light-weight but rich-enough notes, knowing that if I am online my content is synchronized as often as I want, and if I am not it will when I get back on line (and that I carry a fairly actualized copy in the meanwhile).
• Evernote notebooks will keep adding richer and richer mechanisms for clipping, annotating, etc. I can see a point coming where it can match the mind-boggling fidelity of clipping that Webstractor used to have, and the PDF-to-RTF correctness that other Mac products have, and the intra-page linking beauty of Voodoo Pro, etc. The richer the desktop mechanism, the richer the online verison will become, without additional pain of any sort. All of it automatically synchronized…

The perfect condiment

I realize that my excitement may come as out of place to most of my audience. Unless you have worked, and DO work, with several collaboration platforms, on a couple of computers or more, you may think I am exaggerating: even if you have experience note taking you have not experienced the pain of transferring to online collaboration platforms. Yes, if you use .Mac you will share the excitement for good synchronization (which is not a trivial problem to address any way), but still… only if you have experienced the pain of sharing your private notes in a collaboration platform you will sympathize.

Now, if you DO use at least one workspace-based collaboration product, and you DO take notes, clippings, cut-paste, etc., try it and stick to it until it starts synchronizing. Once it does that, try installing the client on another computer. Now share your notes… YOU ARE HOOKED, this is an awesome thing.

Now, there is a possible company play I don’t care much about, which is Evernote trying to become the world center for all notes (As you read above, what excites me is the possibility of a server you can acquire for internal collaboration). Well, not less than a week ago the company posted user quotas (limits) of 40 MB per month. For a company that (presumably) wants to be the Google of notes, the number is a real joke… but the potential for an enterprise collaboration move is still there, and that is still cool…

Getting a beta for Mac

You can go to the Evernote website and request the beta. The problem is, it took me a couple days for me to receive the user ID I need for the hosted component. That tells me beta subscription is quite limited… but I have 18 invitations left from my membership, drop me a comment if you want one, and I will send it out until I run out of them. You’ll love Evernote, and you’ll like me for it.  :)

Nota Bene: [Correction] When I wrote the original article above, I blamed Evernote for leaving previous users of the stand-alone Windows note-taking app hanging dry… Well, it turns out that I was wrong, and I am happy to report it (See Phil Libin’s comment). My apologies for the short-lived slander  :)

This entry was posted on Wednesday, June 18th, 2008 at 2:51 pm and is filed under UC, desktop tools, enterprise collaboration, wikis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Responses are currently closed, but you can trackback from your own site.