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Editor's note: As the main productivity crazed person at Avelient, Sam Howat will be publishing a series of articles discussing some of the tools and services that Avelient uses every day. Check back often for more useful suggestions.

Evernote is a fantastic tool and service that Avelient uses to keep our business and personal lives organized and accessible from just about anywhere, at any time.

Evernote has been around for quite some time. Even before figuring out how to use it for business, people have been using Evernote to organize their lives -- from storing ideas, photos and contacts to drafting blog posts. In the most basic way, Evernote is just a database that organizes everything into an attractive, easy-to-use application for everyday people.

In late 2012, Avelient made the switch from Backpack to Evernote to organize and store business-related information because Backpack was no longer being developed. We didn't want to store valuable information and invest time into a service that would eventually close down. We made the move to Evernote Business and haven't looked back!

How We Use Evernote

• Meeting Notes - When we have group meetings, we use Evernote to store agenda items prior to the meeting to keep ourselves on task and to be efficient during the meeting -- no one likes meetings.
• Planning - When we have a new product or service that we want to roll out, we use Evernote to brainstorm, plan and flush out the details for the program.
• Articles & Knowledge Base - We have turned Evernote into a knowledge base with guides and training materials that anyone can access easily, even after hundreds have been added. The program allows us to use tags to organize our Notebooks for easy browsing and uses a powerful search to find what we need quickly.
• Storage - We store some universal HR documents and forms in Evernote so that our employees have access in an easy, searchable interface.

Just The Facts

• Cost: $8/mo per user for a business account.
• Ownership: Your data is your own; they don't snoop, and they don't share / sell any of your information
• Deployment: Easy to deploy to a small business, and requires 5-10 minutes of training
• Apps: Windows, Mac, iOS, and Andriod and a full-featured web interface that you can access with any device that has a web-browser and is connected to the internet

Evernote has become the nerve center of our business for collecting and organizing important files and allowing our team to collaborate with ease. We recommend that you explore it for your business.

If you like productivity, GTD, and finding ways to make your business more efficient, you can always get in touch with me through the contact options here in the site, or by connecting with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.