Evernote Updates Its Business Product With Social Features And Salesforce.com Integration

Evernote today announced version 2.0 of its business product, appropriately called Evernote Business 2.0.

CEO Phil Libin introduced the product on-stage at Evernote’s EC3 conference and said it will be released next week. In its first nine months, 7,900 companies have signed up for Evernote Business (which was announced at last year’s conference).

Libin emphasized that at its core, Evernote Business is just the consumer Evernote app, but with additional features like shared notebooks that allows teams to work together. That’s still true in version 2.0, but the company has added some additional features on top of the app, many of them social.

For example, he said that Evernote can now suggest other users in the company who may have the expertise to help answer specific questions. Those recommendations are based on the information in users’ Evernote notebooks — not their private notebooks, but the ones that they’ve chosen to share. Libin added that his team made a point of only recommending five people per topic: “Regardless of the size of the company, most likely that’s all you need. If the top five people can’t help you, showing you 20 isn’t going to make the situation any better.”

Evernote Business users can also upload profile pictures now. If they haven’t uploaded a photo, they’ll be represented by an image of a single letter (it looks like it’s the first letter in their name). Libin sounded particularly proud of those letters, saying the company spent months working on them with multiple designers, resulting in what he described in “the world’s most beautiful” alphabet.

“This is the kind of thing you would expect from a great consumer product,” Libin said. (People’s desire to get the same great experience they’ve had on the consumer side in their work as well was a recurring theme in Libin’s presentation.)

The new features also include things that IT people have been asking for, such as directory management and LDAP, Libin added. And, as hinted at by Salesforce.com CEO Marc Benioff’s presence at the conference, Evernote Business will integrate with Salesforce, so users can see relevant Evernote data when they’re in using Salesforce’s sales software, and relevant Salesforce data when they’re in Evernote.

Libin actually addressed these announcements when I spoke to him at the conference yesterday (after Evernote unveiled the Evernote Market for physical products and partnerships). He said that even though Evernote is adding more social features, it remains a fundamentally “introspective” product, and that these features are designed to “make your interactions as efficient as possible so that you can just get on with being productive.”