Along similar lines to the Dropbox and Sugarsync, I started looking at a product called
Evernote, simply because the invites were getting thrown so I figured it was worth checking into to see whether it was something worthwhile. I think when I started reviewing them I expected something similar but in the end it was something completely different. Incidentally, it's just gone from private beta to public beta so you don't need invites to test it out anymore.
In essence, its difficult to explain what Evernote actually is. Evernote themselves explain it as follows: "Evernote is a Web Service that helps users manage all the digital information most relevant to them. The Service can be accessed through free, user-friendly Evernote software running on a personal computer or mobile device, or any Web browser." From my perspective, its difficult to place it, its not quite a document management system and not quite a search engine, it seems to be a whole lot of things, but also not quite. Its partially document management, but doesn't allow versionng. Its partially file management and storage but it doesn't allow all files and its partially OCR but doesn't OCR or index all files. It manages images and PDF's but not word. You start to get the idea of what I am talking about.
So, how does it work? Well, if have different notebooks (shown here) and you add files or messages to the notebooks, add tags and you have the ability to retrieve them. Now I'm sure most people think there are a 100 products out there that can do that, and this is where it gets interesting, when you store files in Evernote, it uploads them to a website where they are indexed using advanced technologies (OCR and all that good stuff) and then sends the indexes back to you.
If it doesn't sound that amazing, the technology behind Evernote is amazing, trust me on this. These guys have spent a lot of time putting together a system that is extremely capable, particularly in the OCR/ICR area where it excels to such a degree, it can pick up the text on a person's t-shirt in a photo and let you search on it. I.e. you can upload a photo of you and a mate and if you search for Pepsi and you mate happens to be wearing a Pepsi shirt, it will pick it up. Not believable? Its possible and these guys can do it. That's not the end of it, you can even go as far as taking snapshots with your built in webcam of things like business cards and the system will pick up the text off the card. The whole thing about this product is a lot of what sells you is the technology they are making so commercially available to the average person, where typically this type of technology would cost a fortune for a company to implement in a corporate environment. The OCR technology they are using here is on a par with some of the best engines I have seen, and the only things missing are things like is the image cleanup offered by products like Kofax with its VRS (Virtual Rescan) which uses colour dropout instead of grayscale to remove colour from the images and improve the OCR results. Its one of these products that really has to be seen to be believed.
Here is a sample on how well the OCR works on a pretty bad quality scan
Another sample of the picking up a skybus ticket
It even picks up text sideways so you can scan in an assortment of directions without worrying about scan accuracy.
So, does it actually work in reality?
As far as functionality goes, Evernote does actually cover it all. It gives you different views to the information, list, thumbnails, etc. You can add tags to make files easier to locate and the full text searching of images is unbelievable although I didn't have much time to test it as much as I would have liked because I hit the freeware limit pretty quickly. Responses on indexing are actually pretty good considering it has to upload them to the web and index them there. It has nice addin's like the ability to email directly out of Evernote although I picked up a particular annoyance where the mails I wanted to send out wouldn't show until I closed mail, not exactly the appropriate time for them to appear, but it is a Beta after all so problems are not really surprising. They even allow adding co-ordinates (for photos I assume)
Maybe I fall into a category that doesn't quite match Evernote's ideal client, but there are a couple of things that make Evernote fail for me. The first part for me is the fact that Evernote doesn't allow you to select drives to be added and rather wants you to add files to Evernote to manage, there are a lot of other products like that and although I understand what they are trying to do, it doesn't work as well as the Google concept of leave the files where they are and index them for me particularly when you have a lot of files.
Its all fine and well for a corporate to handle data migration when they have a data migration team but when you have limited time on your hands for personal use, it just doesn't work for me and in a lot of cases, people want to make files searchable that are still working files, and this product locks them down so its only really final copies that can be put here. As I mentioned before, not being able to put all your files there is also a serious failure as far as I am concerned.
I also don't like handing my files over to any system if I know is going to be difficult to get them out and this is one of those systems. They aren't that difficult, they are stored somewhere down the tree structure in a database, but the reality is copying as pasting out one file at a time is not easy when you have to do it for a couple of thousand documents, never mind ten or twenty thousand. Sure Google has its pro's and con's but at the end of the day, its easy to work with. This becomes particularly prevalent when you realize that Evernote cannot handle all file formats so you're now sitting with half your files in Evernote and half in Google desktop or whatever your "other" preferred system is. Selective files are fine when you are talking about only managing photos but when you are talking about putting half your documents in one system and half in another, it starts to create issues for me, because at the end of the day, scanned files are documents too. Although the documents are all found in spotlight (spotlight can search evernote) it still puts you in a position where your documents are located in too many different places.
I think in principle, the problem I have with Evernote, is its technology that is brilliant but doesn't quite work in practicality in the way they have applied it. As I said before, maybe its just me, but that's one of the issues I see with it.
Personally, Evernote doesn't quite meet my requirements, its just not workable enough for the amount of documents I have and how I use them (I have about 180,000) and right now Google and spotlight are my only alternatives, but what I'd ideally like to see is Google buy Evernote and have Evernote's functionality included in Google Desktop, now that would I'd be sold on.
For others however it may work out to be a perfect solution so I'd suggest you give it a go to see how it works for you, you may find it meets all your requirements.
