Going Beyond Personal Productivity, Evernote Launches App for Businesses

Less than a week after closing $85 million in funding, Evernote is all business — small business, that is.

The company just announced that it will launch a premium, business-oriented version of its popular personal-productivity app, which claims more than 45 million worldwide users to date.

The new business app offers users the ability to create notes, spreadsheets, task lists, presentations and mock-ups, all of which can be shared with colleagues. Users can share Business Notebooks with colleagues, and can still maintain Personal Notebooks, which are private.

The service costs $10 per user per month, and includes two gigabytes per month of content storage in Personal Notebooks, while co-workers get the same amount of content storage in Business Notebooks.

Evernote Business apps for Android and Windows desktop went live this morning. The Mac desktop app is coming “shortly,” and Evernote is still waiting on approval from Apple for the iOS app. A representative for the company says a Windows 8-compatible app is also forthcoming, but declined to say exactly when. (The original Evernote app for Metro launched with a pared-down features list, and for some users, syncing it with Windows 8 has proved challenging.)

Given Evernote’s focus on organization and productivity, an official business app seems to be a natural offshoot of the free consumer app — one that competes more and more with Microsoft’s OneNote app for Office users.

During the announcement made today at the LeWeb tech conference in Paris, Evernote CEO Phil Libin said that two-thirds of the app’s users already rely on Evernote for business. Fifteen percent of those users get it issued to them from work, while 85 percent bring it into a professional environment without it being official work software.

He also noted that a large number of users come from Japan, where 40 books have been written about the application.