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##Evernote at the office Chapter 1, the history

Since 5 years, I try to promote a "paperless & sharing" attitude at work. In several posts, I will detail which problems I faced, how I try to overcome them and which success I had.

###The context My company is historically a small sized one, in which everyone knows everyone.
So finding information is quite simple:

• either by asking to the right colleague.
• either by firing an global email and waiting for the answer.

Except for documents to send to customers, there was no need (or a so few) to exchange technical data with external people.
That's why on our intranet, technical data are stored in several external drives, using a classical folders architecture.
Each department has its own folders structure, its own naming rules, ...
No CMS (SharePoints, ...), no search tools, no browsable folders index.

###The redundancy So, even if I have a precise idea of the content I am looking for, in most cases, I have either:

• to browse folders to discover the related files.
• to call the right colleague who can give me the data.
• or fires an email to several departments to receive the data.

In all the cases, when I receive the document, I immediately copy them locally: it was so hard to find them than I do not want to repeat the same search in the future !

So clearly because the information is not shared and not searchable, a content is duplicated at several places.
If the original document is modified, there is no mechanism to warn that the document had changed and that their local copies are outdated.
This can even lead to troubles, if you start a project using outdated documentation !

###Evangelizing paperless starts with promoting the sharing attitude It was clear that I could not directly promote the paperless attitude in an environment where people do not want to spend too much time to structure the information to be stored, an environment where time to search the data was never counted and where one finds normal to email several times a year the same information.

So before going paperless, I have to teach my colleagues the benefits to share information... instead of duplicating it !