Evernote

Whilst at EvaluatePharma I was singing the praises of OneNote from the Microsoft Office suite of applications. This, especially on a Tablet PC, is a superb piece of note taking software recording audio along with text or handwritten scrawls if you have the hardware. OneNote can take an image and find text within it (so for example you could photograph a business card, add it to OneNote and later a text search that happens to contain any information on the card will bring it up as one of the results), and being part of the Microsoft Office suite, it links quite nicely with the other apps as you'd expect, and takes web clippings from Internet Explorer too.

Amongst the myriad of other features I also found the collaboration side of OneNote to be excellent, specifically I could open a OneNote notebook from a network drive on my PC, edit it, and it would automatically sync next time I opened it on my laptop. If I was working with a notebook whilst disconnected from my network, when I got home it would sync changes and these would replicate over to other devices. With the advent of Office Web Applications this can now be done over the internet too, and editing can take place within the browser with no need to install or even own a copy of the desktop application.

OneNote is frequently considered the hidden jewel of Office by those who have used it, indeed a while ago it featured as the only Microsoft product in a list of top 10 essential applications that was heavily dominated by open source and free software.

The major downside with OneNote is that the office suite used by many companies is out of date or does not include the app, and I suppose the fact it is not free.

Step-up Evernote (http://www.evernote.com). Evernote is one of the many alternatives to OneNote, and the one I use most regularly. Evernote comes in two flavours, free and paid for. Both use the same client software, both store to the Amazon hosted cloud, the main differences are the amount of traffic you are allowed per month, and the file types you may attach to your notes.

Evernote may be run from a web browser, or clients exist for several of platforms (Windows, MacOs X, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Palm Pre/Pixi). No matter what metods you choose, Evernote can sign into the central repository and synchronise your changes between the various clients. Evernote also implements several pieces of functionality found in OneNote, for example finding text in images (which is scanned on the server; paid users having priority in the queue, but this has never been an issue for me).

There's lots of stuff OneNote does that Evernote doesn't, and a few features in Evernote that I'm not aware of in OneNote (for example I tag notes extensively in Evernote). Best of all, because the clients are free I've installed them at work where I can, and use the web version when this is not possible. And because Evernote isn't well know like, for example SkyDrive where OneNote stores its web shared files, it's not blocked by as many corporate firewalls yet.

The free version has been ample for my needs (I've never used more than 3% of my monthly data allowance, despite using the tool extensively) so it's well worth a try even if you do have access to OneNote.

Of the two, OneNote remaind my favourite, however Evernote is currently used far more often. It's well worth looking at.