Can DEVONthink coexist with Evernote?

I know that DTP supports migration from Evernote as a one-time event. In fact, I did this a few years ago. We are a Mac-centric family where both my wife and I have a MacBook, iPad, and iPhone. I have an old Mac Mini running DTP Server and use WebDAV to host the sync store for all the DTP and DTTG clients.

Today I am exploring options for DTP to coexist with Evernote, specifically a remote Windows-based Evernote installation. My wife has a potential business partner (call her Jill) who wants us to use Evernote Shared Notebooks to collaborate on raw material for a potential book publication. The raw material is mostly PDF files and scanned photos that will have various annotations (notes, highlights, tags). There will likely be 100’s of such files. I don’t think we will be able to convince Jill to migrate from her existing Windows & Evernote ecosystem for this collaboration.

Is there any experience in this forum with such a scenario? Here are some of my random thoughts:

  1. Goodnotes has Mac and Windows versions. Could Goodnotes be the sync conduit between our Mac-based DTP and Jill’s Evernote, at least for the various annotated PDF files?
  2. Dropbox or Google Drive. If we and Jill used Dropbox or Google Drive as a shared location, rather than Evernote, I think DTP could index the shared documents on our side. Not sure if Evernote on Jill’s side could then see any changes to the files in the cloud folder, though.
  3. Use Evernote subscription (which is > $100/yr) just for this collaboration. We would then have a local copy of the latest documents in the shared Evernote notebook. Would there be any way to have DTP dynamically see changes to PDFs in this shared Evernote notebook?
  4. Worst case: my wife moves back to Evernote (at least for this collaboration). I fear this may be the only viable solution.

I am a fairly technical user of DTP but it is frankly waaaaay overkill for my wife. She still fondly remembers our years with Evernote (“I could have found this much easier with Evernote!”) which had a very simple layout with much fewer menu options, toolbars, panels, etc. We ditched Evernote a few years ago due to the continual price increases coupled with reduction of features and sketchy security practices (however, the indexing of scanned PDFs and subsequent searching was always pretty good). One of the main reasons I won’t go back to Evernote myself is their refusal to support Markdown for years. My wife doesn’t care about MD and so this potential business collaboration may be the reason we “part ways” on document management.

DEVONthink doesn’t include any Evernote integration, only importing is supported but even this is now more cumbersome unfortunately as the latest Evernote.app isn’t scriptable anymore.

True- but Evernote has a cloud API and - even more easily -it can be automated with Zapier or make.com

We don’t have any plans to integrate Evernote in the foreseeable future, the current support just simplifies the migration.

Understood - my point is that given a combination of Zapier, make.com, and Dropbox indexing, Evernote integration is fairly easily achieved for those who want to do so.

For example I have such an automation set up so that any items I add to Evernote automatically are added to Devonthink using a template that I set up. This lets me benefit from the excellent Evernote web clipper but still use all of the features of Devonthink.

What I do is once finished with the 3rd party app, get a PDF of that, and then put in DT/DTTG.

E.g., my scraps scrapbook is a 10-page PDF put in my Synology Drive and I add/edit with any PDF tool does not matter if it is in Windows, macOS, iOS, Android, and at the end of the month, remove unused pages, OCR it (with Abbyy 15 Pro in Windows), and put in DT/DTTG.

Same with 1.0 World: I have some paper notebooks. Once I finish one (or finish the task I’m doing with it), photo it, OCR it (normally returning nothing as my handwriting is, well, a beautiful group of lines) and put in DT/DTTG.

This is intriguing! Is this a one-way sync from Evernote to DTP, or can you round-trip a PDF from Evernote into DTP, make some changes/annotations, and send back into Evernote using your clever combination of Zapier, make.com, and Dropbox?

Thanks

@nathan

It’s a 1-way manual integration from Evernote to DT3

Going from DT3 to Evernote can be done without any custom automation needed. Right-click on a document inside DT3 and choose Share - Evernote

This sounds like a classic case of “do what the client wants and bill accordingly.”

Attempting to persuade the client to change is a losing battle. Even if they’re superficially willing to do it (unlikely), you will now get blamed for every difficulty that they might have with the new approach.

If, on the other hand, you’re doing it their way, you can either roll any costs into the project fee or write them off as tax deductions, they’re more likely to be sympathetic to any difficulties you might have figuring out their system, etc.

And since presumably the client materials can/should be isolated from all your/your wife’s other business data anyway, there’s no need to worry about integration with your own existing system at all. This is just a parallel system for a distinct purpose.

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Appreciate your input kewms. Perhaps I exaggerated the “business partner” and “publishing” aspect of the arrangement. This is initially a non-profit service opportunity among friends; not sure there will ever be a formal business arrangement with project fees and tax deductions. My wife would ideally want to NOT isolate her files in a separate system. Evernote Personal is $10/mo and Professional version is $15/mo USD but paid annually. The free version has a stupid limit of 50 notes max in just one notebook. So we would likely need to pay for the upgraded Evernote for the duration of the collaboration whether I get DTP sync working or not. I think Zapier wants some money also.

Actually, this gives me an idea. I’m going to ask my wife how long she could get by with the 50 note limitation of the free Evernote version. Even if they have 100’s of raw material items, perhaps their “active working set” might fit in one 50 note notebook.

Well, if it’s a business opportunity, you do what the client wants. If it’s a favor for a friend you figure out how accommodating you can be without destroying the friendship. Big difference.

Personally, I don’t think friendship requires me to pay for software that I wouldn’t otherwise use. YMMV.

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Just my 2c worth here, but I would caution against using Evernote. It is not what it used to be and in my experience performance and reliability has been very significantly downgraded.
You say your wife “… still fondly remembers our years with Evernote” and I do too, before it all fell apart. I was an Evernote premium user and advocate for many years until they rebuilt it and crippled it.

I eventually moved everything to Devonthink (tens of thousands of notes, as I was using it professionally) and got rid of it altogether once they finally canned the “legacy” version.

The new Evernote’s 50 note limit was a deal-breaker, among other things, as it hampers you in several places, such as exporting notes (no more than 50 at a time). I SO wanted it to get better but it never did.

But in your case, I suspect the answer might be Dropbox - especially Dropbox Paper, which is cross platform and designed for collaboration (check out Collaborate, Share Content, and Edit Documents - Dropbox). Check out the FAQ on that page.

Of course, Dropbox has it’s own costs, but you mentioned it in point 2 and I don’t know but you and the client may already have a sub?

For my own needs, Devonthink is a far better tool than either Evernote or Dropbox (and I have now dropped both but I’m not doing that sort of collaboration any more.

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That is true to an extent

But it still has the best web clipper in the universe. And its API is very sophisticated and thus allows for integrating it with just about any other application you wish.